new home at Cabtal

We moved to the Cabtal apartment complex on Sunday night. The Kapteyns were due back on Wednesday, last night, to reclaim their house after seven months of furlough in the US, but have been delayed a week or more in Paris by an African air-traffic-controller strike. So we're stopping by their house regularly to say hello to the people who work there and check on the dog, and generally keep an eye on things. The SIL community watches out for its own; I received a couple of emails today just checking with me that I had heard about their flight delay.

Cabtal is a Cameroonian Bible-translation organization, a sister organization to SIL. In addition to its offices, Cabtal rents a block of apartments, mostly to ex-pat teachers at nearby Rain Forest International School. Here, the building at right is the apartments, and at left is the offices:

Here's a closer view of the apartments:

We had actually planned to spend the last two months of our stay in the Kapteyns' dependence (in-law unit) at their house, attached to their garage, but our friend Karen had to go home for knee surgery, and sublet us her place. She returns to Cameroon a couple of days before we leave. We were sorry to see her go, and glad she's coming back before we leave, but we're happy to have a chance to live at Cabtal. It's just up the road from the Kapteyn house, and we've become friends with several of the teachers who live here. It's a sociable building; we played cards with some friends and made ice cream last night, for example.

The apartment is a better size for us, too. The house we were in is usually home to a family of five, and often felt cavernous, although it was fun for entertaining. The apartment is a one-bedroom, but open and airy. Here's the kitchen end of the main space:

Here's the living-room end of it, facing the other way:

(Just for the record, the fact that Ann is doing something useful in the kitchen area while I am planted in the papasan chair is pure coincidence. I made the quesadillas tonight.)

There's a lanai just outside that window; the door is just to the right out of frame. The cat likes to sleep out there during the day:

Here's the view off the deck, towards our previous house, which you can't quite see from here. We're pretty high up now:

The bedroom is separated from the rest of the place by a door. It's roomy enough that we just left Karen's twin bed set up for her return, and installed our borrowed double on the other end of the room. Of course, we sleep under a net, although some of our friends don't bother:

(Karen's curtains were gauzy, so for now we've clipped up a couple of towels, til we can get some darker curtains. The sun is up everyday at 6, and we're usually not.)

I have mentioned a few times that I volunteer over at the reading room at CTC, the same location that houses Rain Forest School. We wandered over there today, so here's a picture of the place:

CTC is up a hill, so you can get a nice view north towards most of Yaounde:

We brought a few acquisitions back to Cabtal. Ann's are the top row, mine the bottom:

Since Karen is coming back to Yaounde in a couple of months, she left some of her things here, including a stained-glass window her mother made. It's officially a dragonfly, but it looks more like a river of pinballs to me:

This is our water filter. A few people have something more fancy, but we inherited this from Karen, and it works well. Just a dish tub, a filter, some surgical tubing, and a jug:

That red and white box to the right of the filter tub is a voltage regulator, something you want for any appliances here because of the uneven level of the electrical current.


So that's the new place. We'll live here until we leave Cameroon at the end of September. We've grown steadily less socially isolated the longer we've lived here. When we arrived last October, we lived near the office and didn't know anyone in the neighborhood. Sternly warned about the dangers of Yaounde after dark, we locked the door and spent 14 hours at home every night. When we moved across town into the Kapteyn house in January, we met neighbors, discovered that it was safe to walk around this neighborhood a bit at night, did more entertaining and visiting, and walked up to CTC to use the reading room and the computer lab. Now we live in an apartment complex with some of our friends, with generators, wireless internet, and a social life. We continue to settle in.

Valery at REFLUA, Julia at the Kapteyns, our neighbor Shirley and others have started to tease us about staying longer, whether to volunteer at Rain Forest (their IT department is shorthanded), to continue at RELUFA, or just to spend more time in Cameroon. We're still leaving at the end of September, but it's great to be appreciated. We'll miss our friends here when we leave.