With almost nothing about our lives in common, we shared these two things. We were both lodging on the university campus in this unusual quarter of Douala, Cameroon, in the dry season 2024. And the ability, if dropped like the Google Maps icon into a city anywhere on earth, cross the street without provoking either rage or panic from drivers nor fear in our hearts.
It’s a humble skill, relatively low on my list of optimal survival skills, but I’ll take what I can get.
I suppose I had learned it instinctively as a kid, traversing the streets of New York City. The first time I noticed it as a specific orientation was my first year out of New York, in Providence, Rhode Island for college, when my preparatory habit of stepping off the curb a car or two before you’ll actually cross almost gave a heart attack to the older woman driving said car. I felt awful, and also for the first time noticed something that was otherwise automatic.*
Now here in Douala, my colleague’s fearlessness and eye for distance surely exceeded mine— Dhaka is about three times as dense as New York, its streets as he described them a cacophony of brightly painted rickshaws and scooters in addition to buses, trucks, and cars. But Douala’s traffic was not so frenetic, so my more humble abilities were more than enough to get by. Everytime, he and I would find ourselves at the other end of the street, while the local students and visiting instructors from Italy were still awaiting a break in traffic.
Actually, with every crossing, I felt an excited hum somewhere in my body. It’s a subconscious way of interacting with the world I can only presume I share with hundreds of millions of other bodies around the planet if not more. And perhaps a banal test of skill that the cities I’ve since ended up living in give no opportunity to practice.
In Douala, this strange bond surfaced to mind another question:
