The one break in the weekly routine was my Friday afternoon visit to town. Its justification was that I had to collect my mail which arrived from Garoua every Friday. This was a blatant falsehood: the mail only arrived in theory on Friday. The Fulani chief of Poli held the contract to deliver the post in his truck but when he did so, or whether he did so at all, depended entirely on personal whim. Should he decide that he wanted to spend a few days in the city, he would do so and the mail would not arrive for another week. It was a matter of supreme indifference to him that none of the schoolteachers or other functionaries received their pay, that drugs for the hospital would be held up, that the entire town would be inconvenienced.

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