“Words of Wisdom”
Erika Fitzpatrick
“Hello my fat friend!”
I gradually awake as I hear the words come drifting down the hall of the apartment. Late the night before, I had arrived at the Douala International Airport in Cameroon with the three other students I would be studying with for the next three months, and after waiting two hours for our luggage, which never showed, we spent yet another hour speeding along the dark road between Douala and Buea in a bright red minibus plastered in Jesus-themed bumper stickers before we finally reached our apartment and all promptly collapsed into our beds. Now, I pull myself out of bed and check the time–just past 9am. I remember that a local woman was supposed to be coming to cook for us, and hope someone else remembered to set their alarm.
As I open my bedroom door, I see her marching her way over to me. Her hair is pulled up in dozens of little braids that all flop around her head with each step, framing her beaming smile, which shines bright white against her deep brown skin. She moves with surprising speed considering that she looks to be about seven months pregnant. She greets me with a bright “Hello, I am Hilda,” then spins around, looking back over the two girls she’d already met.
“That’s three, where’s four?” she asks. I point out that Deborah is probably still sleeping.
She snorts. “Go wake her,” One of the girls knocks softly on her door.
“Hey, are you awake?” We hear an irritated groan, but Hilda just pushes everyone aside, and raps on the door again, her large frame blocking most of the door from view.
“Good morning! Come out and greet me!” She puts her hands on her hips and taps her foot impatiently as we listen to Deborah shuffling around in her room. As soon as the door begins to open, Hilda’s smile comes back. “Hello my fat friend!” she says again, and this time, fully awake, I’m quite sure I’m hearing her correctly. I exchange glances with the other girls, unsure how sensitive Deborah is about her weight, but she seems delighted and laughing, she swings the door open.
# # #
Hilda comes back every other morning for the duration of our month-long stay in Buea. We hear her singing to herself as she climbs the stairs to our apartment. Some days one of her two daughters tags along, but most days she comes alone. She laughs at our general incompetence when it comes to matters like keeping stores of water ready for when the tap stops running, or using the propane tank and matches to light the stove top, and doesn’t believe us when we say we know how to sweep and wash dishes. When she finishes cooking, she tells us to come eat, and sits with us, occasionally taking a bite or two, but usually refusing to eat, choosing instead to sit and talk.
One afternoon, Hilda calls us over for lunch, but Deborah says she isn’t hungry. She tells us her boyfriend called her just to tell her he wanted to cheat on her, at which Hilda scoffs.
“Stupid boy,” she comments, “You just do it, don’t call and tell, just do it. Easy.”
Deborah laughs half-heartedly. but retreats into her room.
“White men,” Hilda sighs, shaking her head, her braids bouncing back and forth, “they are heartbreakers. I will get you a black man,” she calls after her. “You tell Deb, I will find her a good Cameroonian man.”
# # #
Some days, Buea gets quite cold. The sky fills with gray and a chilly mist settles in the air. We all make ourselves tea to keep warm. Hilda has pulled a chair from the dining room into the kitchen and sits in the corner peeling potatoes. There is a growing mound of skins on the floor, but the sack of potatoes never seems to become any less full. Her hands keep peeling, but her eyes raise and she watches us for a minute without saying anything, but as we begin sipping our tea, she sucks her teeth in disapproval.
“That is not for you. Tea makes you skinny, you are already too tiny, just like my Dorothy.” Dorothy is Hilda’s four-year-old daughter. “Tea is good for fat people but skinny people need Ovaltine.”
# # #
“When is the baby due, Hilda?” Deborah asked.
“One month or two,” she replies.
“So this will be your third baby!”
“Yes I wanted two but my husband, he said three, so I give him three. You will have five babies.” Hilda was matter-of-fact.
“What, me? I’m not having any babies any time soon,” Deborah replied.
“No, yes, you will have five. Five is a good number for you.”
“No! Maybe two, like you, you said you wanted two right?”
“Yes, but for you five is good. Or six. Do you want six? Yes, you can have six.”
# # #
Hilda, like many of our Cameroonian acquaintances, does not base her schedule on the time displayed on a clock. She comes at some point in the morning and leaves whenever she has finished. We, on the other hand, left the house each weekday morning at 7:50 like clockwork to walk to the French school down the street for our 8 a.m. class. Sometimes Hilda arrives well before then. Other days we leave head off to our French class without seeing her, but we know that by the time we return home, the smell of her cooking–fried chicken and fries maybe, or rice with stewed beans and tomatoes–will come wafting down from the kitchen window.
“In Canada, feminism has spread like the HIV virus,” Francois, one of our French instructors, informed us one morning, midway through class. No one in the class was quite sure how that related to the day’s lesson, but, to be fair to Francois, we’d also been confused the day before when one of our other teachers, Pierre, spent half of our French speaking class having us prepare five minute presentations in English about why the Cameroonian taxi system was far superior to any other form of transit worldwide. And the day before that when he’d simply walked out five minutes into class and only returned for the last two minutes. When we returned home, we lazed around, complaining about the staggering amount of French we still needed to learn in the two weeks we had left in Buea. While in Buea, we were able to speak to everyone in English, but, as a result of French and British colonization of the country prior to its independence and reunification, Cameroon is lingually divided. Buea falls within the smaller Anglophone region, but the rest of our travels were to be in Francophone cities, where few people would be able to speak or understand English.
“They are not teaching you at that school?” Hilda had overheard our conversation. Oh no, we reassured her, it was just a couple of the teachers–Celia was great and we all loved Sarah’s classes. It was mostly just Pierre, and occasionally Francois when he got sidetracked.
Hilda nodded seriously. “Man… He is a like a book. To comprehend it, you must read it and learn it.” And with that she marched back into the kitchen and, tossing a broom towards the couches she called back at us, “You people need to sweep more often.”
# # #
On our last day in Buea, Hilda blew through the apartment like a whirlwind. We weren’t expecting her at all, but she came nonetheless. She checked in on everyone’s progress with packing. Someone had left 500 CFA, the equivalent of 1 USD, out on the table. She quickly tucked it away into a nearby box.
“You do not leave money like this. Me, I like to ask before I take things. But the black man is a strange creature,” Hilda warned us, “he takes what he wants and he does not ask.”
Hilda swept through the apartment again, braids bobbing up and down. When she saw Deborah, she sang a little song at her, consisting entirely of the phrase “you are fat.” And with that, she strutted back out the door and down the stairs, her song fading from range.
