The headmaster

Pa Ndongo,as Mr. Ndumbe was affectionately called was the headmaster of government school Ndongo throughout my time there.He was married to Mrs Ndumbe who everybody called Madame.The nicest lady on earth if there ever was one.The children were mostly girls.Pat, the first,ended up being an airline hostess.There was Iyo, the second, who attended National comprehensive school Kumba.There was Emmanuel, who everybody called "Mukala",Dora who was Agbor's first girlfriend,she attended National comprehensive school Victoria(now Limbe),there was Lydia,but we all called her Endaley, and lastly Victorine,who was my friend.The Ndumbe's lived to the right of our house and we had a lot of interaction with them.Pa Ndumbe had a reputation for chasing skirts and I believe he had one of the single members of the staff impregnated.He did not owned up to it at first, but later on picked up on his responsibilities.He went after ladies like Miss Lefang(a fiery lady who dealt only with the big shots)and it was even rumoured that he had affairs with married women.Mr Urum's wife come to mine.That was not the only blemish in Pa's character.He was rumoured to misappropriate school funds also.We had a lot of fun making a mockery of the guy because he would die his hair black to try and stay younger.He did at one time buy a plot around the railway route leading to Tiko town, were he attended to build a block house.Building a so called block house was a very big deal at that time.Anyway we nicknamed him "big fish", because he would go to Tiko market and buy such large fishes for consumption.Despite his many flaws, Pa did love children and you could see it in the way that he managed to sponsor all his children through expensive secondary schools.At one time there was an outbreak of cholera in Cameroon(the early 1970s) and Pa lost a lot of his relatives back in his native Douala.I remember the period vividly because you could not drink water coming from the tap anymore.All drinking water had to be boiled.The cholera outbreak took a lot of lives and left some children very deformed.The signs of cholera infection were easy to see.Massive loss of weight.Constant rushing to the restroom.People that stayed alive during this period where very lucky.The disease took people indiscriminately.At one period it was like one bad news after the other.Madame was a staunch member of the Presbyterian church and she and my mother were members of the christian women fellowship(CWF).She would help them win in a lot of rallies and she was like everybody's mother in the whole Ndongo camp.Emmanual was very technically inclined and he was very vest in activities taking place over the Mungo bridge,that is in the littoral province.He would feed us stories about Oryx Club of Douala,a team that would be the first African club champions(in 1964), with Mbappe Leppe as their star player and team captain(There is a soccer stadium in Akwa,Douala that bears his name).Emmanuel used to dismantle and rebuild bicycles and he played a lot with Lydien, who was my elder sister.He was to be the only one in the family that never attended secondary school,choosing to pursue money using his technical know how.He spend his time between Ndongo, where his parents lived and Douala,were most of the family relatives resided.There was Robert,a soccer playing wize who lived with the family as a maid and attended primary school.This guy could practically carry the team for a whole season.He attended church services also and was one of our YP mentors.My mother liked him a lot and kept in touch with him way after we had left Ndongo camp.Robert was also a lady's man in every sense of the word.Women would go after him like crazy.We attended YP studies together so I know a lot about his numerous affairs.Beautiful women just could not resist the guy.There was a girl that we used to stop bye to visit in Clerk Quarters on our way back from church service.The girl had a twin sister and one day on our way back he made his usual stop.I stayed outside and waited for him.I was to find out later that the lady he was with that day was his regular's twin sister.She did not hesitate a minute going for him.He did help spiritually and pushed me towards aspiring for better grades in school.He himself was not the best of pupils, but he could motivate others.