Friday morning, kitchen table

(written Friday, 2007-10-19, 750am)
Yaounde, Cameroon
chez Jeff and Christi
kitchen table

Ann is fiddling with the cel phones. We just got them. Unfortunately, service is not good at the office, because of its location in the hilly Yaounde topography. Gilles, housemate and RELUFA staffer, is coming by to help with the phones, and then we're going for a walk through the neighborhood to look around a little, if the roads arent' too muddy. We'll probably swing by Select Bakery, since we're almost out of bread.

Hey, she got the phones working! We'll get to tell Gilles we figured them out on our own. It looks like maybe things were just down when I called; she dialled 155 like I did, per the setup instructions, but this time everything worked.

The phones here are smaller. Like most of the world, Cameroon is ahead of the US on phone technology. Ray actually bought a tri-band one while in Europe that he can use here or in the US. We went out with Gilles a couple of days ago and got the cheapest pay-as-you-go phones we could find, Chinese ones (of course) with service a South African company called MTN. The other service here is a French one called Orange. Neither work very well from the office, and just a bit better from the house.

We are headed back to RELUFA today to work. We haven't met a couple of our EPC contacts yet for our work there; we stopped by yesterday, and found out one of them has been delayed coming back to Yaounde after being out of the country, and the other has been very ill and is recovering in the hospital in Duala, the big industrial city on the coast. We left the number of the cel Ray and Ann K. loaned us, and they'll call us when we can come by to meet. So it's back to RELUFA. Taking the bull by the horns, I proposed to the microfinance administrator that we chat about the program today; his French is tough for us, so the sooner we can get more familiar with it, the better. But my brain sure tires out by the end of the day.

I'm sitting in the kitchen writing this on the laptop. The house is bigger than our apartment back home, and the stove is gas, which is a nice improvement. All the floors are tile or cement, perfect in this warm humid climate where a carpet would be, as Ray put it, disgusting. Fanny, a French journalist who works in the RELUFA offices, is living here for now, til she moves to the apartment she found. The food here is good, and comparable in price to San Francisco. Christi has lots of cookbooks, including Mennonite favorites "More with Less" and "Extending the Table". We made a great chicken vegetable soup out of the first of those a few days ago. We've always liked cooking together, so it's great to have our own kitchen. Next on the agenda: black bean and vegetable soup, substituting whichever dry beans they sell up the road at the Mahima grocery store.

The RELUFA offices where we work are about a ten-minute walk away. Again, all the floors are concrete or tile, which seems to be a constant here. There's lots of space; right now, Ann works in a conference room, and I'm next door in the kitchen, which has a sink, coffeemaker and water filter (another constant here; the tap water is not potable) but is otherwise empty. Each room has a network jack and an electrical outlet. The office has broadband, but it runs at about 56k. Christi, who works at the RELUFA offices, says she uses Skype, so we hope it works well enough at that speed to chat with our families back home. But it seems that brief cel phone calls to the US may be affordable too. Skype may be a little cumbersome for some family members.

Marie is here. She comes in three days a week, washes dishes, does laundry and cleans the house. She also does some shopping, and got us a pile of fresh fruits and vegetables from the market, which are great: avacadoes, oranges, mandarin oranges, bananas, lettuce, celery, papayas, etc. It's really odd to have someone working in our house; she is part of the household staff, along with the 24-hour guard service. Not used to that at home. Fanny (housemate for the moment, and AFP correspondent working at RELUFA offices) found an apartment she's moving to soon, which has one guard for the building; we'd be more comfortable with this arrangement, so maybe we'll get an apartment when we need to move. On the other hand, it's a contribution to the local economy to employ someone, since jobs are hard to come by here, so it's a complicated issue.

I've started doing some database design for RELUFA, based on their application forms. It's just preliminary work, pending some long conversations about their requirements, but I like having something to work on for part of the day that actually seems familiar. I did a lot of database work before getting into Java development. I have a lot of questions to ask, but if it meets their requirements I'd like to use java6 and its built-in Apache Derby database to build their system. One key question is whether they want to run it on a web server and share that, or run it on each separate computer in the office and maybe in the field; it might be interesting to combine the two approaches (centralized and local), perhaps via some mechanism to guarantee unique key generation on each machine, combined with a last-update-wins approach to edits and an automated merge. Will probably use HTML for the interface, but not sure which GUI library yet. (Sorry if this is gibberish to you; I wanted to throw in a few technical notes for a couple of coworkers and my brother Paul, also a software developer).