We went on a site visit today with our coworker, Guy, the coordinator of RELUFA's micro loan program. It has its own name; there are many names here, of RELUFA member organizations, of their programs, of other organizations somehow connected with RELUFA, of the many other NGOs and government agencies, national and foreign, whose signs are all along the road. The micro loan program is called CAP. It stands for Credit Against Poverty, which is interesting, since RELUFA is a French acronym, but CAP doesn't work in French. It would be CCP, for Credit Contre le Pauverte, or similar.
I didn't find out too much about this place before we came, other than the essentials. It took long enough to get those worked out -- where to volunteer, where to live, how to get visas, how to get here, who to talk to, what to bring -- that there wasn't room for much more information. I also held off asking our contacts here too many questions before we came because I wanted to get here with a minimum of expectations. But now that we've been here for over a month and a half, there are some things I would have brought with me had I known more about what our life would be like here. A lot of them have to do with how we spend our spare time. Our time was pretty full back in San Francisco, but we have a lot of quiet evenings at home here, a combination of the realities of personal security in Yaoundé , and the time it takes to get established in any new town.
What I would have brought, had I known more:
1. Travel Scrabble. We both enjoy it. Fortunately, there is a Boggle game at the house we are living in til January. Boggle is a good time; it's a word search game on a 4x4 grid of dice covered with letters. I am curious to write down the letters on each die and see whether they actually correspond to the frequencies of letter usage in English, but haven't bothered yet. I suspect they do. The more French we learn, though, the more French words I see in there, when I'm looking for English. We should probably play a round of French word searches.
2. Netflix. They don't have it here, and in fact the houses don't have street addresses. Our micro loan applications at RELUFA include a "plan de localisation," which is a map to the place the project will take place, usually someone's house. People use a PO Box for their mail and go pick it up periodically. I love movies, but we usually had something more urgent or more interesting to do back in San Francisco. I regret not systematically backing up my Netflix movies onto a hard drive and bringing them with me. I had a queue of a couple of hundred movies I wanted to see, usually something I'd read about online and then pop onto the Netflix queue for later. My queue disappeared when I cancelled my account. It would be fun to watch those movies now. We have worked our way through most of the DVDs here at the house, and are down to watching the family TV drama "7th Heaven," of which we have the first three seasons on DVD. Happily, you can play the audio in French, which improves it immeasurably.
3. More bug repellent. We get bit a lot. There isn't much malaria in Yaoundé, but what there is can kill you dead. We itch and remain in excellent health.
4. A good French textbook. Ann and I both accumulate vocabulary lists related to work and to articles we read, and we have some good French resources with us -- a few dictionaries, and a great book of grammar essentials. But I should have sprung the eighty bucks for Tresors du Temps, the high-school text my mom the French teacher recommended. I had a look at her copy the last time I was in Michigan, and it was great, and loaded with French history too. We do plan to join the Centre Culturel Francois Villion de Yaoundé (French cultural center) downtown, where we can pay a little less than twenty dollars a year to check out French-language books. I hope to find a good history of Cameroon in French, and maybe one of France too.
6. I would have taken the time to find a Windows XP laptop. We decided to get a second laptop before the trip, so we'd each have one for work. I found a dual-core Sony Vaio with 1GB of RAM and a 120 GB hard drive on sale for about six hundred bucks. It has Windows Vista on it, but I got it anyway because time was short, and Sony laptops are beautiful. Plus I planned to put Linux on it for work, and just use Vista for gaming. I run Ubuntu Linux on it for work and it indeed runs great. But I brought a few games with me, and managed to get Civilization 4 (a fantastic game) running after downloading some drivers, but the other game I
brought doesn't run. Bummer. They sell software here, so maybe I'll break down and buy a copy of XP on the street. It would be French XP, too, which would be fun.
7. Maybe a little more underwear.
8. My copy of African Friends and Money Matters, a book I found and ordered online but ran out of time to read. Ann read it before the trip and said it's great, and was written by people with experience in Cameroon. Culture here, and in many parts of Africa, is very different around money than it is at home. Someone in the missionary community we occasionally come into contact with here through Ann and Ray might have a copy, but we haven't run across one yet.
9. Those two big novels I thought I'd save to read when I got home, but could have squeezed into my duffel: Europe Central, by William T. Vollman; and Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon. Started both, finished neither, and found each of them utterly engrossing. They do weigh a ton in hardcover though, so it's probably just as well. We have access to a lot of English-language books here, because of all the Anglophones (English-speakers) we know. I had not planned to do much English-language reading on this trip, but find it's a nice way to unwind after a busy day at work that has already included lots of French. Who wants to lie in bed and read a book with a dictionary on their lap? You need some downtime too.
10. A backup pair of sunglasses, since mine have disappeared. They sell them here, but I have a few pair at home I could have brought along.
Ann says her list of would-have-broughts includes:
1. CD's. We have a stereo here at the house, and only brought our music
on a portable hard drive.
2. Some DVDs.
3. Some nice vanilla extract.
4. Her $3 red running dress from Salvation Army, for bumming around the house.
5. Agree on the "more insect repellent."
We're fine without all this, of course, but it's interesting to compare our assumptions with how things have worked out.
1 comment:
A man can never have too much underwear! :-)
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