The Mbveh

Mbveh ( not Mwe sorry)

If you want to get food fresh on the market or want to stroll through small wooden stalls full of African cloth, natural medicine, second hand clothes from Europe, get your hair braided or want to get closer to the locals, the market Mbveh is the best place to go.
You just tell the bush taxi driver in making a zzzzzs sound and the hand signal “ come “ the other way around that you want to go to Mbveh. “I go Mbveh” if you prefer to talk Pidgin.
The Mbveh is the central place of Kumbo where all the different people sell their goods ;especially now in the rainy season it is a real adventure to go through the market stalls, as the lines through the stalls are barely covered and so the path is very muddy. The paths are only about 1 metre wide so you always have to be careful not bumping into someone while looking on the ground for puddles.
Going through the lines nearly everyone greets the “ white man” as they call you and wants you to buy something (you should not do that of course).This has been a good opportunity to get to know people and a bit of Lamnso ( the language of the locals).
The good thing for us is that the volunteers of last year are still here and can explain where you can buy things and how expensive they are as often people want you to pay more as a foreigner as you normally do not know the prices.
Through Ann Christin and Maria ( the former volunteers)we have got to know a good tailor, who is going to sow us real African dresses for about 3000 franc which is about 5 euro. My skirt and top will be in greenish blue colours with African patterns on it.
The prices for food are very cheap for an European : 5 tomatoes are about 10 cents , 1.5 litre palm wine for 100 franc. Palm wine is very delicious and produced from the raffia palm, we had the sweet one today with some locals.
Then the food market: you will find stalls with various fruits, vegetables and corn.
Often you will see pineapples, bananas, peanuts , manioc, Irish potatoes, rice, garry, dried fish, tomatoes, alive chicken in baskets…
And of course you will find a butcher there: slaughtered goats, a head of a cow, intestines , feet of goats… the smell can be quite strong especially when the meat lies there for hours on end. Meat in general is not eaten that often as it is very expensive., which I am quite happy of.
Yet at least you now what you buy and nothing is wasted.
The food market took us nearly half an hour the first day as all the women started talking in lamnso or better trying to teach us lamnso on the market, welcomed us friendly and asked us questions. One woman seemed so old and weak and yet still she came up and shook our hands while carrying bananas on her head.
Carrying food or even tables on heads is a very typical thing here in Cameroon especially for women and children. They do it with such elegance and pride you really have to look up to.
Often you see children selling small things like poff poff ( very nice similar to Kreppel) which they carry in buckets and baskets on their head.

As the Nso calendar has 8 days every eight days their will be a huge market day where you can find nearly everything as for example Nollywood films…
The Nso people are the people around Kumbo, the Bamilike I talked of first around Bamenda.
The Nso are very rich in tradition and culture and their society is build up in chefferies with the highest leader called the fon.
The fon lives in a huge palace with beautiful grassland sculptures and pillars. Ethnologists believe that the fons palace is one of the most interesting architectural and cultural building and concept in the whole of Africa.

On Monday we took a trip around Kumbo and its nearby villages with Obama ( his real name is Emanuelle),a guy we are quite friendly with and he explained us a lot about the hierarchy in the Fon palace and the different traditions they keep while drinking a Malta trench and export ( Cameroonian beer 0.65 litre a bottle) in a small local restaurant.
But I think I will write about the Nso people and the fon palace another day as it is to much you can write about and at the moment I only know a bit of their tradition so I do not want to give you wrong information.

As we are going to start gardening with the help of a gardener we got to know (he comes to our door every morning at seven as well as Abdel Alex who I am teaching how to juggle ) I want to go to Mbveh to get some things and to Horizon, an internet café, to post this.

By the way I always get up so early here and you really start getting tired at 6 pm …

A berne ( Lamnso)
Bri