November has been a full month. We celebrated Caitlin’s birthday several times.
Caitlin, Amanda and Sarah have been visiting a school two blocks from the house. They go every Tuesday and Thursday for about an hour and have been teaching English classes. The teachers in the school do not speak English. Their lesson plans have included the alphabet, numbers, colors, days of the week and, parts of the body, and seasons.
The students are quite young. The students in the youngest group are about three. There are also some very young children in that class, around a year old, who may be children of the teachers. Many times the youngest group’s lesson becomes a game. The other two
classes are for students who are slightly older four and five year olds and six and seven year olds.
Sometimes the students have no teacher but still sit in their classroom during the time they
are supposed to be in class. One day the teachers all had to go to a meeting off school grounds. They left the oldest students, probably nine-year-olds, in charge of the class. The older students maintained classroom discipline by hitting students who moved with sticks.
The school has very few resources. The students don’t get much practice writing because while there are blackboards in the classroom, there is little chalk. There is no paper. There
are no pencils. Caitlin and Amanda have started working on a plan to get regular donations of school supplies from the US to the school.
The students had a 12 page paper due at the end of the second week of November for Natural Resource Economics. They worked really hard and everyone finished on time. We went to several barbeques.
On the 15th of November we went to the opening game of CAN Feminina, the African Women’s Cup. We arrived well before the start of the game and saw over an hour of opening ceremonies. The opening ceremony included traditional dancers, a rap artists named Tu Face, a marching band, and children presenting both the soccer players and the flags of their countires.
Equatorial Guinea won the opening match against Cameroon. Equatorial Guinea has several new players on their team from Brazil. The stands were not full at the beginning of the game but
were packed by the time the game was over. The president opened the gates for free after the game started. We had already bought tickets.
At half time, Cait and I tried to go to the bathroom. The mens’ bathrooms had all been closed. There were two toilets in the women’s bathroom. One had a long line of men waiting at it and one had a line of women.
The second game of the day, between Mali and Congo, was not as exciting and included a lot of injury time. Between the two games the on field entertainment was school kids jumping through a hoop while doing a flip and landing on a mat on the other side. The crowd was excited and cheered when the kids made it and booed when they missed. We left in the middle of the second half, during the only goal of the game.
There is a machine gun strapped to the back of the man on the left side of the picture. The police on the field were also armed. Later in the month we went to the final between Equatorial Guinea and South Africa. We arrived after the game had started but half an hour before the time published on our ticket for the start of the game. The President was rumored to be at the final and there were many armored cars with guns mounted on their roofs outside the stadium.
To get in with our tickets we had to ask the armed police man outside to help us make a path through all the people trying to get in with out tickets. He raised his billy club and looked like he was going to start hitting people, hard. The crowd backed away and we were allowed to enter. Because of the unpredictable nature of crowds we agreed that if EG was loosing with 20 minutes to go, we were going to leave and that if EG won we would leave shortly after the end of the game, which we did. On the way from the game to UNGE, we stopped to eat at the restaurant across from the school. We watched huge numbers of people and cars (with and without guns, one probably carrying the President) parade down the street. Many of the official vehicles were occupied by men in black suits with guns. People were shouting and dancing and celebrating all the way down the street. While we were eating dinner a huge group of dancing, celebrating, soccer fans came into the restaurant to eat and bought us a round of Fanta. We returned the favor by buying them a round of San Miguel.
On the 16th we drove up Pico Basile. It was a cold cloudy day so we couldn’t see much
from the top. We did visit the statue of the Virgin of Bioko (Bisila). We also visited the mark for
the highest point and looked around the radio tower. The change in vegitation from Malabo
where the plants are large with large leaves to more scrub-type plants was apparent, even
through the cloud. It was cold up there so we ate lunch when we came back.
We had two guest lectures this month. Noelle Kumpel spoke to us about the bushmeat
market in Bata. Alexandra Gilles spoke to us about the effect of natural resource extraction on
developing economies.
On the 24th we went to Bata. It was a shorter trip than we had planned. . We wanted to spend a whole weekend on the mainland but were unable to make that happen this time around.
Despite the short length of our stay, Hess hosted us wonderfully. They aranged transportation to and from the airport in Malabo and helped with the flight details.
Freddy, Lucia, Mary and Demetrio joined us at the student house at 5:15 am. The Hess bus picked us up at 5:45 am for a 7am departure from the airport in Malabo. We were asked for proof of our yellow fever vaccination upon entering customs in Bata. Several of us had only brought our passports but we were able to convince them to let us in anyway. We were picked up at the airport in Bata by the Hess bus. The driver identified him self and knew to look for us.
The drive to the compound was about an hour long and we passed through part of Bata and some surrounding countryside. We had a safety orientation first and discussed our plans for the day with the head of the drivers. We got a tour of the Hess compound on golf carts.
By this time it was around 10:30 in the morning. We spent some time on the beach.
The water was warm and Cait and I went sea kayaking.
Hess provided a wonderful meal in their employee cafeteria. After lunch we played some foosball and watched rugby on television. The driver took us to the market around 2pm. We also saw the church and the soccer stadium. We tried to visit Freddy’s father, who lives in Bata but he was away. We got to the airport around 5pm for a 6pm departure back to Malabo. Freddy’s sister and her daughter joined us while we waited for our flight.
We got a tour of the palace that is under construction across the street from our
house. We toured the side with the offices, courtesy of one of the architects and were on
our way to tour the residential side (closer to our house) when we were politely asked to
leave by the other architect. We did not take any pictures inside the palace. The floors are
entirely made of marble with intricate designs in black, brown and white. The doors are
huge and dark with large brass knockers. There is a conference room for all the ministers
with approximately 60 large dark leather chairs. There were paintings sitting stacked
against all the walls on the upper floors. There is a huge shower between the conference room and what is probably the president’s office.
After the palace tour we saw some locals cross-dressing and being unaware of the Bubi
wedding tradition, were curious. We followed them to the cathedral where we asked about their dress and posed for a picture. The men dressed as women give the bride away, while the women dressed as men give the groom away.
On the 27th we hosted about thirty people for Thanksgiving. When we made the plan back in September we were going to host the UNGE students for Thanksgiving as a cultural experience. However, as we got into the planning process, we realized that we could thank some
of the people who have generously helped us out through out the quarter. Our guest list soon
grew to around thirty people. Many people brought food or drinks and Mary cooked the
turkey at her house. We cooked two chickens, 5 or 6 kilos of potatos, several pumpkin pies,
homemade soda, huge pots of rice (two kinds), and about 4 kilos of eggplant. We saved
money out of our communal fund to pay for the food. We even decorated the walls with
turkeys.
On the 28th we had our poster exhibition at UNGE. Clearly we were short on time,
despite having had many meetings with Esara about logistics for the exhibition. We had
to buy an adapter for the speakers again this year. Demetrio and I hung a sheet for the
projector to project our slide show on. I had bought it in the market earlier in the week.
Once we hung it I learned that it was not a sheet I was supposed to be procuring, as I had
been told, but a projector screen that I assume is somewhere at UNGE. Also when I
bought the sheet I did not see the width. It was too narrow so we had to use some
creativity to make an area on the wall suitable for projection.
The exhibition went well. We had some leftover food at the end of the day but could have
used more variety of food. We had no soda left over but people were asking for juice and
water, which we were sure to buy for the next poster exhibition.
On Saturday the 29th we left for Moka so we could start hiking early in the
morning on the 30th and arrive at Moaba at a reasonable hour. Although the porters had
been arranged for 6:30am we did not find them until 10:00 am. We sent the students on
ahead with Moritz and Bosco, but not early enough.
The slower group stopped for lunch at the larger river at about 1400. The first group to arrive at the beach arrived after dark. The last group to arrived did so just before midnight. Heidi made sure there was spaghetti waiting for Amanda, Bosco and me when we finally got to camp. Bosco came back down the trail to lead us in. He encountered us about three kilometers from the beach. It took us four hours to cover the remaining distance to the beach. Bosco’s arrival allowed the porters who were still with us to borrow my headlamp and run to the beach. They found Cait along the way and made the journey in about half an hour.
The southern beaches were gorgeous.
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