Cameroon, or More Adventures in Miscommunication

We drove for about a mile and tried a Walgreen’s, which of course had sold out of all it’s Tupperware.  Everyplace else that might have sold containers appeared to be closed.  Finally, the Nomad had the ingenious idea of going into a take-out joint and asking if we could give them a couple of bucks for some containers.  We pulled into a Jamaican take-out place and offered the guy at the counter two bucks for five foam containers, a generous offer by any measure.  He gave us a cockeyed look and asked us what we needed them for.  We explained that someone had cooked for us and we needed to get the food home. His logical follow up was, “Who cooked for you? White people cooked for you?”  No, not white people, African people.  “Oh, African people? I’ll give you five containers for five dollars.”  When I asked how much they paid for the containers, he asked the owner, who said 250 for around $10.  Clearly, I hadn’t learned my lesson from the week before.  I somehow assumed that they would consider a 1000% return on a foam container to be reasonable and not try to squeeze me.  In the end, they fucked with us good-naturedly for a few more minutes then gave us the containers for three bucks.

We headed back to pick up our food.  When we got there, a house that had previously seemed to be bustling with activity, seemed empty.  The windows were dark and no one was answering the door.  I called our would-be host’s number and it went to voicemail.  I kept trying until she finally answered, clearly irritated, and told me that the door was unlocked.  We followed her into her modest apartment and tried to make the best of what to me was a decidedly awkward situation.  We tried some small talk as she ladled the stew into the containers.  For the most part, she didn’t offer more than curt replies, and even admonished me for not telling her beforehand that we weren’t staying.  The Nomad thought that she was just disappointed that she couldn’t serve the dish the way she had planned.  I’m not so sure. I the more I thought about it, the more I was left with the impression that she was barely tolerating us.

As she filled the containers, she explained that she wasn’t able to prepare the ndolé with seafood because she had just returned from D.C. that afternoon and hadn’t had time to prepare it. She had used cheap beef instead.  The $90 beef and bitter leaf stew was to be served with boiled cassava and fried onions swimming in vegetable oil.  In the end, we left the Bronx with enough of this stuff to feed three people for a week.  We finally got it back to Brooklyn at around 9:30.  The Nomad and Noquar seemed to enjoy theirs, but I couldn’t finish mine.  It turns out that my repulsion had nothing to do with the stew itself.  Although I didn’t know it at the time, I had been afflicted with a weird taste disturbance caused by eating too many pine nuts the night before.  It made everything I ate for the next week taste almost unbearably bitter.  Seriously, look it up. It’s awful.  Still, I can’t help but associate that bitterness with that ndolé. How poetic.

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