Deux semaines! Que petit Eseka est
devenu tristement celebre. You'd been writing about a classic Rond point
traffic jam monster and the train passes in the scene. Your friend reads it and
starts evocations about his youthful days in Douala, when the train used to
halt to transport people to different neighbourhoods. Your lawyer classmate
reads the scene and tells you, describe the train some more, the type, colour,
how it looks etc. Another reader classmate feeds you pics and googled info of
all types of the CAMRAIL locomotives. When you just finish reworking the scene,
last Friday happened. A few graphic pics of the dead sends you fleeing FB for
one week. You can't stand the sight, you pray nobody tags you. You scratch your
head and wonder if you should have even included the train in your traffic jam
piece. You cannot imagine the pain the affected families are going through. You
also try not to focus on the rubbish your country's authorities said on the
media. Worst of all, you live in a Douala neighourhood where trains pass
through to Ndokoti everyday. You now observe them pass with a weird feeling.
You remember how Gabriel Garcia Marquez described the old locomotive in
"One hundred years of Solitude...It's like a kitchen, pulling a village
behind it". Ours mistakenly dropped its "village" into the
village of Eseka and left it there.
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