Ngoundere, Cameroon
November 15, 2004

You cannot see the moon through the gap between the wall and roof and of my Ngoundere homestay family's compound.

I know because I look before bed each night and again before preparing Ramadan breakfast with my home-stay mother, Mariamou. For 10 minutes at 3:30am, before settling down to make couscous, we stand together and look at the stars, but not the moon. For Mariamou, who only leaves the compound a few times a week and never at night, this means she will not see the moon until she goes to her husband's village next month, or maybe the month after. I always notice the lack of moon because it is the moon that starts the Ramadan fast, the reason we get up so early.

Muslim women in northern Cameroon generally marry young and rarely leave their compounds or attend school. Mariamou, at 22, is more sister and friend than mother. It is easy to forget that she married at 14 and is a mother until 2 year-old Yasmine runs into the kitchen followed by 6 year-old Abdou. In the kitchen we speak a combination of broken Fulfulde and French. Because she never went to school, Mariamou began learning French just a few years ago from her husband's university-student brother.

Cameroon's gender divisions are frustrating sometimes. I never really felt hemmed in by my gender in the United States, but there are things and places that my combination of skin color and gender forbid here. I often envy the ability of male students in our group to go to Ngoundere's omnipresent meat-and-tea spots without heckling. They invariably return raving about the Fulani men they met and the conversations they had about politics, commerce, and cows.

Fortunately, I'm not only coming to terms with my limitations but also realizing that I have enviable experiences, too. No man could ever sit with the women here, talking about pagnes (cloth) or hair or the effects of water and wood shortages on a family. For every man met at meat-and-tea, I have an hour cooking or peeling in the kitchen; a story from the old Mboum woman in the next compound who holds my hands tightly and speaks a language I don’t understand; or a 4 a.m. confidence about Mariamou's hopes for Yasmine: school, literacy, and a good marriage to a kind man.  Coming from America where success is often so tangible and money-driven, it has taken time to begin understanding the importance of these experiences and the lives of women of Cameroon.