I wrote, a few weeks ago, about the joy of discovering the television of a foreign place. Back then I was in Rotterdam, watching a Dutch variation of the popular UK Saturday night dating show, Take Me Out. I was grateful to see if not a familiar face, then a familiar format: something that made sense to me when the language did not.
On a work trip to northwest Cameroon a week ago, I had the reverse: a common language (half the time their official languages are French and English) but largely unknown setups. That is how I came to be watching a pastor on a stage in what looked like a megachurch, delivering a family of witches from the eternal damnation that surely awaited them if they continued down their dangerous and destructive path. The screen was grainy and the sound was poor, but the subtitles and the overly animated gestures of everyone onscreen involved kept me going.
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