pics from General Assembly meeting last weekend

Ann and Christi got out their finest African couture for the meeting.

Ann and Ruben, who works for one of the RELUFA member NGOs.

Valery (with 7up) talking with Mateo and Christi on a break. Valery works for RELUFA as coordinator.

The guys from the restaurant up the street, who catered the lunches.

Two representatives from CEJARC, a RELUFA member NGO. The man on the left, Coco, is a cofounder of CEJARC, which works with blind people, and is himself blind.

The fellow on the right, named Martin Luther, is the other CEJARC cofounder, and is likewise blind. Their office is actually near our new house, and since Ann has visited them and I have not, we plan to go by sometime soon.

Delphine chats with Ann.

Elias, who runs the food bank operations in the north. He made an annual report about them during the meeting.

Lunch on day 1. From bottom, tomato sauce, roast pork, rice, roast chicken, fried plantains, pineapple (almost gone), and rolls.

Gilles and Guy-Roland. We work with these guys at the RELUFA offices, and they are two of the friendliest people we have met in Cameroon. Gilles is the office manager or something similar, and Guy is the coordinator of CAP, the microfinance program for which I am writing a database. They are both always smiling and laughing, but Cameroonians like to look very serious in photographs. I teased them about this, asking Valery to tell them to smile, telling them I was going to buy a big zoom lens to catch them smiling, and they laughed at me, but I still couldn't catch it in a picture.

Mateo, presenting a report from Publish What You Pay, the initiative to get extractive industries (mining, logging, oil) to make public the amounts they give to governments who don't publish that information. The notion is that this transparency, as it's called, will get more of this money to the people affected by the industries and to the population in general, and will bring more accountability into their dealings.

Meg, who works for another RELUFA partner organization called CHAMEG. (Hope I spelled that right). She's Anglophone, and lives in Bueua, where Ann and I plan to visit soon. I think this is her annual report as RELUFA board chairperson.

Meg again, day 2.

Samuel, who works for CED, a RELUFA member NGO that works on environmental issues. Like Valery, he is trained as a lawyer. I brought some folks I met socially to meet him, since they do similar work, and got to hear him present CED's work for an hour. I hope to write more about this; CED has a lot of interesting projects and is doing some amazing things.

Lunch, day 2.

The whole conference table.

This is Valentin, the guard at the RELUFA offices.