RELUFA General Assembly, day one

Phew. It's 730pm, and we're still at work. We've been here since 830am
at the annual General Assembly meeting of RELUFA, the network of NGOs
for which we're volunteering this year. And people are still having
side conversations now that the official program is done. Five feet to
my left, Ann is having a complicated conversation in French with Guy,
the administrator of the CAP microfinance program for which I'm writing
a database. Guy had the last presentation of the day, about CAP, and
we're still in the process of determining how best to analyze the
long-term financial trends in the program. I got tasked today to
develop a technology questionnaire to be handed out tomorrow, in order
to start addressing some of RELUFA's communication needs with
technology. We figured beforehand that today would go late, so Christi
and Jeff are putting us up tonight at their place, just around the
corner, since otherwise we would have had to leave by 530 or so to get a
taxi home before dark. Riding around in taxis in the dark is a bad idea
in Yaounde; even the taxi drivers don't much care for it.

I'm also taking photos of the event, for distribution to attendees and
for use in the Joining Hands newsletter, the Presbyterian aid agency
periodical that Christi edits. So I'll post a few of those soon.

It's really nice to be doing this kind of administrative work in the
service of some beneficial social ends. I used to work at a bank a few
years ago. The people I worked with were very nice, most of them, and I
even keep in touch with a few to this day (hi, Ned!). But the meetings,
oh the meetings; it was like being dragged naked through an acre of
brambles and then thrown over the lip of a live volcano, some of those
meetings with suits at the bank. But I enjoyed today, although it was
almost entirely in French and therefore tiring. The difference seems to
be that this is actually for socially constructive ends, and that the
people in charge really know what they're doing and care about the
people they work with. It's good to be here, trying to make ourselves
useful. There are companies that are this positive to work in as well,
but they're rare, in my experience.

They also fed us. A cross-cultural experience traditionally involves
eating a lot of disgusting food and bravely making the best of it.
Well, friends, I've rarely eaten better than I am in Cameroon. Lunch
was catered from a restaurant up the road at the Faculte' de Theologie.
It consisted of roast chicken, roast pork, rice, fried potatoes, tomato
sauce, bread, hot sauce, and semicircular hunks of delicious acid-free
Cameroonian pineapple fully two inches thick. And sodas. I chatted in
my stumbling French with one of the caterers, named Felix, and found out
the restaurant is open weekdays til about 3pm and sells lunch for around
two bucks a plate (CF700). Have to check that out.