I am going home from the center of town after scrounging around for some dinner on the night after the “Fête de Jeunesse” or Youth Day. Youth day usually consists of a march of all the local schools and youth organizations mid morning (replete with salutes in a style probably illegal in Germany) followed by a night of general debauchery. Alcohol abuse is already a problem here (the education volunteer just caught her 7th graders doing a brisk business selling whisky in her class), but any lingering inhibitions against inebriation or tossed to the wind on youth day. I’ve been told this is the day for the youth, who are so sexually repressed normally (haha I can’t even type that with a straight face- that could not be farther from the truth) to really let loose and unwind a bit. Needles to say it’s not a pretty site.

Tonight I wonder down the row of “bars” between the meat stand where I usually buy from and the motto stand. The street is loud tonight, choked with all the kids I had seen marching in the parade this morning spilling and stumbling out of the bars clutching whisky sachets or beers that cost a day’s salary. I usually don’t get bothered too much anymore now that more people know me (or at least ‘of’ me) but tonight I get plenty of drunken ‘oooh le blanc!” and “ooooooo bwhee!” and so fourth. Getting to the motto taxi stand I search first for a Muslim driver, then failing that I spot a driver that isn’t laughing and surrounded by friends, one sitting by himself looking lonely. I figure that if I had to make a guess he would be the one least likely to be drunk and thus the best ride home for me. Of course as I get closer I see a half empty whisky sachets dangling out the corner of his mouth, just as he sees me and starts beseeching me to buy him another because, after all, its youth day and he’s a youth (he does look about 15)! I figure this might be one of the only places you’ll hear people asking you to buy them alcohol to celebrate them being a kid. Moving on the to next guy, he wants to charge me 50% more for the motto ride because it had just rained today and the road to my house always turns into a big mud whole, especially now that they had just “leveled” it. Finally the third guy agrees to take me for the proper price (20c) so I hop on and hang on as the noise, the bustle, the deranging of downtown Batouri thankfully drops away behind me to be replaced by the peaceful croaking of frogs and chirping of insects in the swamp near my neighborhood. On the way back we pass for the “police car” of our district. I noticed that he must be sober tonight as he wasn’t driving around with his lights flashing.

I don’t mean paint the whole country with one brush and call them all alcoholics, but it is defiantly a huge problem among the non-Muslim populations (generally the southern half of the country). I’ve walked by people at 9am sitting around getting drunk on palm wine asking me for money to take the sick infant in their arms to the hospital because they can’t afford it. The incredible absurdity of such situations used to make me livid, especially when the wrong people pay for it (the child died). I’ve tried reasoning with them before but their doublespeak and specious logic would make even a Bush administration spin doctor blush. I just have to keep in mind that for every 7th grader selling whisky in class there’s another walking 4 miles to class after getting up to work the fields, just to learn algebra. For every drunken father there’s one working twice as hard to pay for his children’s education. Unfortunately it’s the drunken fathers that make the most noise while the one toiling in his field does so quietly and unnoticed, and all to often unrewarded.