Sociable Weekend

Written Sunday, 21 Oct 2007, 837am, kitchen table, Yaounde, Cameroon

Ahh, I’m listening to a little Neil Young as I write this. We found a little 2.5” external USB hard drive on sale at Best Buy right before we left. It’s tiny, and all our music fits on it, so we brought most of our CD collection with us.

It’s Sunday morning, and we’ve had a fun weekend of socializing already, even thought we haven’t been here even 2 weeks. On Friday night, the RELUFA coordinator Valery invited us over to meet his family. He also invited Gilles from RELUFA, French journalist Fanny, and his little brother Romeo, who is a grad student here in town, and another friend of his. Valery and his wife Terry both work for NGOs here, and they have a 10-month old baby who goes by Boo-Boo. They have a nice place, a townhouse about 10 minutes from the RELUFA office, and they declared it declared an English-only evening (or at least a mostly-English evening) since Terry is from Seattle. So our brains had a chance to cool off after a week of doggedly speaking French even as we continue to learn it. And, although around us Fanny always insists she doesn’t know any English, we heard her speaking English to Terry, so now we know the truth. It was nice to unwind with some of the people we’ll be working with for the next year. The food was great, and included a traditional dish of leaves stuffed with manioc. They looked like eight-inch wax beans, and the flavor and texture were a lot like the sesame balls made out of rice flour you get at Chinese restaurants back in San Francisco.

Terry made a half-hour film about the oil pipeline that three oil companies (2 American, 1 Indonesian) have just completed, which runs from Chad (Cameroon’s neighbor to the north) down to an Atlantic port in Cameroon. We have on the computer that a copy Fanny gave us. It’s in English, and it’s interesting, with lots of interviews with affected Cameroonians, NGO workers and journalists, and background on the project and the fallout from similar projects in Nigeria and elsewhere. I asked Terry about putting it up on YouTube or Google Video, but she’s more interested in creating a website for the film, and shooting a 5-minute update for it, bringing it up to the present-day situation. This is tied in to the work RELUFA does, although Terry actually works for a different NGO, because one of RELUFA’s initiatives is fair compensation for those displaced or affected by having the pipeline run through their lands. If she gets the film online, I’ll post a link here for the curious.

Yesterday, Saturday, Ray and Ann picked us up after lunch to hang out at their place and go out for dinner. Their junior-high daughter had a basketball game, so we ended up going to Rainforest International School here in Yaounde to watch the JV girls’ basketball team put up a good fight and lose to a local club team. Then out to a tasty dinner and conversation at La Plaza, without the kids, for whom Ann K made spaghetti before we left. Their kids are hilarious; before we left, they were chasing each other around the house and singing along with the digital piano’s built-in music.

I had a long talk with Ray about the possibility of living in their place; they have a nice house with all the amenities we’d have to find or install ourselves once we move out of Jeff and Christi’s place here: potable water, dishes, cooking utensils, pots and pans, furniture, security guard, plus hot water and possibly Internet as well. And the timing is perfect, since we’re done house-sitting when Jeff and Christi and their family get back at the end of December, and Ray and Ann K head out on furlough for 6 months in December. For the last 2 months our stay next year, we could live in their in-law unit (a studio apartment on the garage, called a dépendence in French here), or move to a nearby apartment complex where lots of SIL workers live. The only downside of their place is that it’s maybe 20 minutes by taxi from our offices over here in the Djongolo neighborhood, which seems to make our coworkers nervous. I’ll sound them out on this a little more; maybe they’re simply concerned that we just fell off the first-world turnip truck and don’t know the realities of big-city life in Cameroon yet.

Ann made French toast this morning (see pic above). Mmm. She wants to figure out how to buy phone cards today, since we have pay-as-you-go cel phones, and take a walk, and maybe figure out how to use the taxis here.. So maybe we’ll chat about all this with Fanny when she gets back from yet another apartment viewing. I’m content to spend a day holed up with a laptop and couple of good books, but I’m happy to go out with Ann too.