Features

Nightmares, day jobs, and dignity

BY RICHARD JAEGGI

What kind of despair would a man have to bear to drive him to sacrifice everything for a breath of freedom? What kind of terror would a woman have to endure to compel her to trade in twenty years of achievement to gain a moment's respite from fear?

How about you? What would it take to convince you to leave your home and your family to start life anew in a strange country? How bad would things have to get to make you quit your professional job and spend your life savings to start all over again? And what if you did this knowing full well that you would never find work in your profession, but would instead have to eke out a dirt-poor existence as a day laborer?

If you have ever driven University Boulevard between Silver Spring and Takoma Park, then you have passed by CASA of Maryland's Day Labor Hiring Center. Every morning starting at 4:30, scores of men and a few women arrive in hope of just one thing: a day's work. Not a job, mind you, just a day's work.

CASA's staff organizes the hiring system as equitably as they can; there is a kind of rotating lottery system so that everyone has at least a chance of getting a day's work. The number of people eager for work far exceeds the work available; most go home at the end of the day without earning a dollar. CASA helps the employers by identifying job skills and the laborers by going after deadbeat employers who short their workers and sometimes refuse to pay them at all.

It had been several years since I had last visited the day labor center, so I was still under the impression that workers there were almost entirely from Central America, with a handful of North Americans thrown into the mix. I was intrigued to see a circle of black men and a few women seated apart chatting and laughing in large francophone voices.

It was pretty easy to deduce that they were from Africa. I introduced myself as a Voice reporter (I always feel like an imposter when I say this) and began to ask questions, mostly about where they come from and what they are doing here.

Alexander is from Cameroon. He is 46. He has been in this country 15 months. He is looking for almost any work: landscaping, cleaning, painting. He was an accountant in Cameroon but because he has no work papers, day labor is his only option. I neglect to ask the obvious question of why an accountant would leave his own country to be a laborer in a foreign country. He comes every morning and gets work about 2 days a week. He has a wife and six children that live with him in Takoma Park.

Janice is 41. She is also from Cameroon and is hoping to find work as a babysitter or some kind of cleaning. It is harder for women to get work here than it is for the men. The men around all agree. She dreams of a good life for her kids. The key, she says, is education. She is well-educated herself. Her business in Cameroon involved import and export. She says that Cameroon is well known for wood sculpture and coffee. Alexander reminds me that it is soccer that Cameroon is really known for. It still doesn't dawn on me to ask Janice why she would leave a job in international trade in Cameroon for day labor in America. I just assume it is all about economic opportunity.

John has been in America for six months. In Cameroon he was also an accountant. It is hard to go from being an accountant to being a day laborer, but he didn't come here for the moneyÑhe came for freedom.

Wait a minute. That's three for three Cameroonians. Is everybody here from Cameroon? Eight or ten heads nod in agreement. You mean there is nobody from any other African country here? Well, no, there is a Nigerian over there, and sometimes a fellow from Zaire shows up.

Now I am really curious. Out of 12 or 15 Africans, all but two are from Cameroon. And these all seem to be middle class professionals. I am puzzled but the pattern is unmistakable. What's going on in Cameroon?

Janice tells me there are political problems. They have no democracy. The government is totally corrupt, says John. Good jobs and money are nothing if you have no freedom. As if a single body they all nod their heads and agree: we didn't come here for economic reasons. I mention the invasion of Iraq, expecting the expected "we like Americans, but we don't like your government." But the answer is unexpected: we wish George Bush would invade Cameroon just like he invaded Iraq.

Roger, 45, formerly an archivist and businessman, says that the French colonial legacy and the corruption of President Biya are to blame. The CIA Factbook describes the government as a multiparty presidential regime (don't we have one of those, too?); Biya has been president for the last 25 years and won the last election with 92 percent of the vote.

Godwill has been in this country for four months. He lost his job as an engineer on the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline because of the government corruption. The government controls everything and nobody holds a job without the approval of Biya's ruling elite.

Jane has been here for 8 months. She got a degree in geography but could never get a job in her field because the government branded her a dissident. So she opened her own restaurant in Yaound near the university. She was arrested on several occasions and put in jail. Although she was never charged with a crime, the gendarmerie accused her of conspiring against the government. The last straw was in October last year, when the government bulldozed her restaurant because it was a gathering place for radical students. That is when she decided she had to come to America.

Sonny shows me a photograph of his supermarket. It looks like it was destroyed by a tornado. The government had bulldozed it.

Frederick was a marketing supervisor for a cosmetics firm in Cameroon. He held up the nub of his little finger for me to see. The police smashed it repeatedly with a hammer. They wanted him to accuse another man, a member of the political opposition, of conspiring to murder the president. After two weeks they released him and he left for America shortly afterward. He would like to return to Cameroon someday, but doesn't have much hope. The police still come to his home and beat his wife; they want to find out where he is now.

Roger seems to be more focused on helping the young Cameroonian exiles than he does on his own situation. The young people need education and training, he says. Most of all, they need work permits. He has a huge, gnarled scar on his arm that he got when the gendarmes dragged him across the pavement. He is politically very astute.

"We all prayed that Mr. Van Hollen would get elected, he says, refering to the District 8 congressman. "But now he forgets us. Tell Mr. Van Hollen that we cannot survive without work permits. The Salvadorans can get work permits because fifteen years ago they were political refugees. But we Cameroonians are political refugees even now, but nobody will help us.