the day to day

We are back safely from our village trip. Ann will post something about that soon, with pictures, so I won't right now. We have five weeks left in our year in Cameroon, which is a bit less than a full year due to the vagaries of visa extensions, but we left San Francisco in mid-October 2007, and intend to return mid-October 2008. I have website and database work to complete before then, and Ann is working on a photo book about some of our NGO's clients and some translating and editing work, and we have both been asked to put together an assessment of our year volunteering at RELUFA. That last one should also lead to an interesting blog post, although we probably can't publish it verbatim.

Life here continues to pick up speed. We socialize with our neighbors, and had Gretchen and Nancy, our hosts for our village trip in the west, over to dinner tonight. Ann made her Thai peanut sauce; we served it over vegetables and rice, with chocolate chip cookies I made for dessert. Our friends the Kapteyns are back in Cameroon; today Ray and I had a couple of beers and talked about life here while he worked on a plumbing project. I had no idea that you seal galvanized steel pipe joints with jute, did you? Just wind it around the threading and dip in water. We'll see if it holds; Ray was apprehensive.

I've been helping out the computer department at Rain Forest school a bit, because they have lost some staff and are buried with work right now, so I'll do that tomorrow. I'm also a volunteer librarian at a reading room here, which amounts to shelving books once a week. Lots of good reading in there, too -- many of the books on our list at right come from that reading room, and I just brought home a copy of City of Joy, about life in Calcutta. I also picked up an interesting-looking book in the Rain Forest school library about the German presence in Cameroon, roughly from the 1880s through the first World War, written by someone from Yale in the 1930s.

We have no plans for further travel in Cameroon, at least not extensive travel outside of Yaounde. It looks like we'll spend our remaining weeks here winding down our projects, spending time with our friends, and preparing for three weeks in Europe. A break between Africa and home in San Francisco seems like a good idea. Our first stop is Brussels, when we leave here at the end of September.

And here are a few pictures from a get-together for Christy's birthday, a few nights ago, at Lois and Julia's apartment downstairs.

The birthday girl. With lasagna!



Me and our next-door neighbor Beth.




Zone and Raf ham it up for the camera.


Friend and neighbor Liz, making ice cream.


Ann shot this of the moon out the window.


Us at the party. Ann buzzed my hair a couple of weeks ago.



Finally, one not from the party; Ray decided to put a new window in the house when they got back to Cameroon. He's a whirlwind of home improvement.