Wednesday, November 19, 2003

A very strange thing happened yesterday afternoon, and I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was...

Around closing time, three o'clock, my housekeeper Marie, met me at the office, as we had previously arranged. We had to go to the new house together so she could get through security and I could give them a letter stating that she is, in fact, my 'ménagere'. As soon as we got to the house, I got a call from my friend Gabriel who, upon learning that I was home, said he had something to discuss and that he was sending a driver over to get me. I quickly showed Marie around the new house, including the washing room- a separate room from the inside of the house with two large tub sinks and her own bathroom, and gave her copies of the keys to that room and to the kitchen, from which she can enter the house. It really is a great set-up. I told her that I would pay her a bit more since the house is further away and a little larger, at which time the driver arrived. He was the same guy who drove us to Douala on Saturday for a little shopping trip to buy Christmas items for Gabriel's store.

We arrived at the bar where Gabriel was talking with two other men, I greeted them appropriately, sat down and ordered a soda since I was a little tired and didn't feel like a beer. Gabriel has just about given up fighting when I order a 'jus' instead of a beer. The man sitting at the power position of the table was introduced as a very rich man who owns a road construction company with contracts throughout the country. He had come to Edéa to find someone to manage his in-process hotel that he is virtually finished building in town. It should be noted that he is building the hotel entirely with cash-on-hand, a completely foreign notion in the US. We began talking and I told him that I was not familiar with his hotel at which point he demanded that the driver take me over to tour it before we continued the discussion. I went over and the driver and the guardian of the site showed me around. The hotel has forty rooms, parking in the rear, an in-process "conference center" with two decent-sized rooms. The ceiling on the entrance level is low, but nicely paneled in stained wood. There are two sizes of rooms. One has a standard double bed with a small verranda and small bathroom. It is quite small, but serves its purpose. There is no room really for an armoire or television. The other is basically two of those rooms connected to each other with a slightly larger bathroom, and one of the rooms meant for sitting. This is the only one with an air-conditioner.

When I got back to the bar, the 'patron' decided that I was the one to make his business run well. He told me that Cameroonians only work hard for whites and that he would tell everyone that I had bought the place had was the real owner. He would give me a car and office and anything else I needed such that it appeared to all as if I ran the place. He would also, obviously, let me have a percentage of the profits. All this, just for giving him advice on how to operate the business and for showing my white face (and presumably introducing him to my white friends). I had a hard time taking him seriously, but he was in fact quite serious. Gabriel was to run the day-to-day operations, his new wife to run accounting-apparently she has some training in that field- and I would be the PATRON- while only the four of us would know that he was the one who actually owned the place and received a majority of the profits. I didn't know what to say other than I appreciated his offer and that I was a very busy person. I didn't want to ruin it for Gabriel, so I told him (Gabriel) that we would have to work through the numbers so I could advise him whether or not to become involved himself (there is a backstory there...), and then we parted ways with a promise to talk again later this week.

Gabriel's story-which becomes clearer and clearer each week: Gabriel was hired two years ago by the Greeks who own the supermarket to run it for them and send them the profits while they left town (I don't know where they are yet). In the two years since, Gabriel has steadily run the business into the ground, to the point that he has trouble covering both inventory purchases and salaries when they occur within a couple weeks of each other. As nice as he his, he is not a very good manager of a retail business or of employees (he treats them all with contempt-as if they are all stupid and trying to cheat/steal from him). As a result of this and his barely competitive prices, his customers have found other places (including driving to Douala) to get what they need. The nail in the proverbial coffin may come in a couple of months when his chief competitor here, Petit Jean, opens a true supermarché on the main road in a brand new building.