As summer folds into fall, I am pleasantly nagged by memories of Project Troubador’s last trip to Cameroon, which took place one year ago. Last October, a team of five (two dancers, two musicians, and a clown) met at JFK airport, boarded the plane with a mountain of luggage (guitars, mandolins, props, cameras, gifts, extra bedding and meds, 5, 000 condoms…), endured an interminable flight, and were met at the airport by Mary Nafti and Mary Maimo, our Kongadzem hosts and two of the sweetest ladies you will ever meet. For the next three weeks, we danced and sang our way across the hills and flat lands of beautiful Cameroon. This was my fist trip to West Africa and all expectations were blown. This is a place where everyday life is still inundated with song and dance. This is a place where most people still walk to work, grow their own food, live with extended family; and where people are gracious, resourceful and laughing a lot of the time.
Our program was intense: nineteen shows in nineteen days, sometimes performing two or three times a day. Each show was in a different village for either townspeople or school children. Each village was miles and hours apart from the next, which we traveled to on unpaved, mud- slippery roads in a small, old red van. We were eleven in the van—the five of us, three Kongadzem ladies, Joe-the-camera-man, Brenda (our narrator, a 21 yr.old from the youth group in Bamenda), and Cyprian, our gentle driver. Although the travel was cramped, bumpy and hot, the Africans would offer songs every few miles and our singing carried us along. And then, as we would pull up into a village square and be met with hundreds of smiling, luminous faces, running with the van until it stopped, the kinks and cramps of the journey would evaporate in seconds. What energy! The Troubador show that we were touring (about two girlfriends, Linda and Mercy, who are care-free and inseparable until one of them contracts the AIDS virus), surely made an impression on our audiences, but it was their performances, elaborate songs and dances, which they offered back to us in gratitude, that will be with me forever. After each dance, we were handed gifts to take on the road with us: corn, carrots, cabbage, cola nuts, chickens, a goat! All of which was packed and stacked on top of our van, creating a mountain indeed. Billy, the bleating goat, barely survived the bumby ride.
Other impressions that have stayed with me: expansive, delicious feasts; sprawling fields of green plantain and coffee fields; fresh slices of papaya, mango, and pineapple every morning; red earth; dignified women dressed in bright colors like queens; babies in wraps on backs; crosses of Jesus; Cameroonians doing Playback Theatre!; Eliot and Louise, husband and wife team, harmonizing for the crowd; kwak-kwaks constantly in motion, keeping our rhythm…
Thank you Project Troubador for taking me under the rainbow! Thank you for an experience that will never be matched and never be forgotten. Sing on!

Hannah Fox is a teaching artist in the NYC public schools and teaches theater at Manhattanville College. She is a trainer with the International School of Playback Theater, and artistic director of the Big Apple Playback Theater( www.bigappleplayback.com ). In addition, Hannah runs the 92 St. Youth Theater and is the editor of Akimbo: An Anthology of Scenes and Monologues by the Young Women’s Theater Collective.