Ann&Chris in Cameroon

Just a Glimpse

2008-11-28T23:09:00.003+01:00

I didn't feel right about putting that last post up with no pictures, so here is just a glimpse of what I summarized in the previous post. Plus a little bonus from this very evening.

The funeral in the West...

Eating fried fish heads with Magy at Nancy & Gretchen's place...

With the proud parents and baby after the dedication service...

And here's your bonus photo!

Too Busy to Blog

2008-11-28T13:13:00.002+01:00

In a week I'll be back in San Francisco, transitioning my life from Cameroon back to the Bay Area. It's starting to seem real, which means there's a lot I'd like to do before going! So I'm getting right on it, selling off a few last items, packing every nook of my suitcases, figuring out logistics, saying goodbyes. It will be a full week.

The past few weeks have also been full, so let me offer my explanation for not posting in quite a while: my final Cameroonian Travel Odyssey! I left Yaounde on Friday 14 November with my friend Thierry, and spent that weekend attending the burial and funeral celebration of his maternal grandmother in the village of Bafou. After that, I spent a few days with Nancy and Gretchen in their part of Bafou, reading and going for walks and eating delicious healthy food. Then I bussed up to Bamenda for the dedication of baby Grace, and we finally made our way back to Yaounde on Tuesday 25 November. It was a wonderful journey, and also the longest period I've been away from running water. Nothing like that first shower after getting back.

So there will certainly be a few more posts on this blog, but perhaps not until after I'm back in the United States. (I hope that doesn't detract from the authenticity of my reporting.) Saying goodbye to this place will still be hard, but I'm ready to close this amazing and complex experience, and more than ready to see my husband!

Cooking Lessons

2008-11-13T23:13:00.004+01:00

Hello everyone, and welcome to my yard. I'm so glad you could all be here.

My name is Edwin, and I am coming up on two years old, though my extremely cool appearance may lead you to believe I am far older. Today I'd like to tell you about the day my friend Ann came over to learn how to cook some proper African food from Melanie, my mother. My mother is a good cook, so I figured she'd be a fine teacher for Ann. (These are Ann's sunglasses -- I found them on the desk where she'd set them, put them on, and proudly marched into the kitchen. Everyone seemed to like my new look, so I kept them on for a while.) Behind me in this picture is my eldest brother Patrick, who took most of the following pictures. (I have two more elder brothers and one elder sister too, but they were off at school.)

The featured meal in today's lesson was greens with peanut sauce, served with cocoyams. The ladies started off with a huge pile of greens fresh from the market, separating the leaves from the stems. They even did their hair the same way. Hmmm...

Then they brought them to the outdoor fire to cook in a big pot. Here you see me supervising as my mom puts the greens into the boiling water.

While we waited for the greens to cook down, we sat on the woodpile in the shade of the house and ate some oranges. You may have your own ways of eating an orange, but here we peel off the outer rind (leaving the white part), cut the fruit in half, and suck out the juice from each half, spitting seeds all over the yard.

Here you see Ann stirring the big pot to make sure all the greens are evenly cooked. She seemed to be enjoying herself already.

After the greens were cooked, rinsed, and drained, it was time for the groundnuts. They roasted them over the outdoor fire, then Ann used the grinder to make them into a nice paste. She liked turning the big crank, and kept right on grinding through some other ingredients: tomatoes, celery, garlic, ginger, hot pepper, and the like. It made a very nice sauce base.

Then the two of them took two smoked dried fish and separated out all the edible parts, including the heads of course, to add to the sauce later. My big brother Patrick peeled all the cocoyams (it was a big bucket full!) and washed them, putting them in a big pot on the outdoor fire to cook.

Finally it was time to start putting everything together. This called for the indoor fire, a single gas burner. Here is Ann adding the sauce ingredients to some hot oil, as my mother cuts the cooked greens into small bits.

Here's Ann stirring again. I think she likes to stir things. By this time, everything was all together in the big pot, greens, fish parts, sauce, groundnut paste, and some water. It sure smelled good. Ann and I ran around and played some hide-and-seek while we waited for everything to cook.

At last, the cooks get to taste the fruits of their labors! It was very tasty. I ate two big pieces of cocoyam before the greens were finished cooking, but by the time they gave me my little plate of food (see it there on the table?), I was getting kind of grumpy and went to take a nap. Later when I woke up, Ann was still there, and they had saved my plate of food for me. One of my other brothers got home from school and he thought the food was good too. Ann left to return to her house, so we said goodbye because it was time for my bath. It was a good day, and I think she learned quite a lot about how to cook a good meal.

YAAAAAAAAY!!!!!

2008-11-05T08:24:00.004+01:00

I'm tired. Spent the night at the house of friends with cable television, lying on their couch watching CNN, didn't sleep but an hour. I was far too riveted by the history unfolding before my eyes. First time I've been out of the US during a presidential election, but boy howdy, the world sure is watching this one. I am very excited about my new president this morning. As is nearly every single Cameroonian.

Again: YAAAAAAAAY!!!!!

Now I'm off to market, then off to bed for a long nap.
God bless America.

O Canada

2008-11-02T21:51:00.004+01:00

You know, Cameroon and Canada have more in common than first-two-letters or number-of-syllables. They are also French/English bilingual countries. And they also both celebrated Thanksgiving this October. In Canada it was probably quite simple -- everyone was doing it. But in Cameroon, it was the proud, the few, the fine residents of Cabtal apartments (and a few friends) who chose to lift up this fine holiday and celebrate with our two resident Canadians, Lois and Teresa. How does one go about celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving in Cameroon? Well, the ever-fabulous Kerry was pretty much the event mastermind, and directed us all in producing an impressive feast!

The first step: we cleared all the furniture out of Kerry's apartment and cobbled together a looong table, bringing in chairs, tables, and dishes from other apartments until there was enough for all.

Lots of neighbors worked together to prepare all those delicious Thanksgiving foods everyone loves, and laid them on the table. A few people arrived...

...and then a LOT of people. In the end, we were nineteen in all. We passed dishes around, serving ourselves, helping each other out.

Everyone ended up with a plate something like this: roast chicken, two kinds of stuffing, cranberry sauce, garlic mashed potatoes with gravy, cooked carrots, green beans with mushroom cream sauce, whole wheat roll with butter...ohhhh, we were very happy.

Zone-Zone definitely approved of his first Thanksgiving experience. He brought his own style to the meal, forming his mashed potatoes and gravy into a large round 'lake' in the style of a local dish called achu, and keeping his bottle of piment (hot pepper) oil close at hand.

Kerry was most pleased with the results of all the efforts, and rightly so!

Everyone was in a mighty good mood after such a delicious meal, but we got even happier as we stood up and made our way over to Lois and Julia's apartment for dessert. We talked about what we were thankful for as we digested a bit more, then attacked a magnificent spread of desserts.

There was pumpkin pie, apple pie, real whipped cream, chocolate chip cookie bars, and that chocolate-sprinkled whipped-cream creation at the top left is something officially called 'sex in a pan,' but renamed 'farmer's delight' many years ago by Lois' family, who apparently had some reservations about the original title.

In the end, we were all filled with food and gratitude, feeling especially fortunate to have celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving in Cameroon, and looking forward to feasting yet again in November for American Thanksgiving!

Milestones

2008-10-26T18:19:00.004+01:00

Well friends, the past couple weeks have included a few milestones, and what better way to celebrate than with a blog post? (A blog post about all the ways I've already celebrated, that is.) First off, I said goodbye to Karen's lovely apartment. Another person was scheduled to occupy it in mid-October, so I knew I'd need to vacate the fine place where Chris and I spent our last few months together in Cameroon.

I enjoyed it to the very last, hosting various meals and enjoying the large (by local standards) oven until the last possible moment. Here is my posse of work friends, toasting before dinner. They are (L - R) French, British, American, Dutch, and German, all enjoying Mexican food in Cameroon. How often does that happen?

Mmmm, quesadillas. (I actually cooked the beans Cameroonian style, with lots of garlic and ginger and a couple Maggi cubes, the way Julia taught me. They turned out really tasty.)

Also in the days before vacating the apartment, I hosted a delightful Food Club brunch, replete with banana-pecan pancakes, eggs scrambled with fresh basil and cheese and cherry tomatoes, and fruity tropical juice drinks. And my 'last act' on those dishes was preparing dinner for Marian (just back from furlough) and Ginger (owner of Bert Douglas the cat), both fascinating people who've been in Cameroon for many years.

Now I'm living in my friend Christy's apartment, just downstairs from the place I left, subletting from her while she's away for seven weeks. (We were both thrilled to discover that her absence matched up almost perfectly with the remainder of my stay!) She'll be back a few days before I leave. Anyway, her place is identical to Karen's in most ways, but laid out the opposite way, a mirror image of the old place. A key difference: as you can see, the mosquito net over the bed is blue!

After several days of cleaning and organizing, I'm feeling quite at home here, ready to invite others in. I've already had my friend Rebecca over for breakfast...

...And Beth came down to make cookies one night! Notice that she's armed with a hammer, which may not be a traditional baking tool, but for us it comes in very handy for breaking the Mambo bars into chocolate 'chips.' Beth did the hammering for this batch, and a fine job she did.

We were using the same recipe Chris used, and it was Beth's first time attempting chocolate chip cookies. They turned out great! As of this writing, I still have a couple left, but not for long.

A few mornings ago, the sound of chopping woke me up. Here's the sight that greeted me when I peered out the back window. Clearly this guy had been working hard.

Yesterday, the lovely Ann brought me some fragrant white roses from her yard. I had to take a picture because she's completely color-coordinated, from her clothing to the flowers right down to the oven mitt protecting her hand from the thorns. Yes, all is well in the new apartment.

Another important milestone duly observed was one full year in Cameroon. Chris and I first arrived here the evening of October 11th, 2007...amazing how much learning and transformation can happen in the course of a year. My friend Annelies is also celebrating her one-year 'Camiversary' this month, so we went out for dinner with friends to celebrate.

So yes, this October I've vacated one apartment, moved into another, and celebrated one year in Cameroon. But more wondrous still is the fact that as of this month, Chris and I have been part of each other's lives for six years! Yes, we met in October 2002, when I was fresh out of MVS and he was still fairly new in town, first over conversation and drinks at my Senegalese bar, then through innumerable other adventures, the extraordinary and the everyday. Nearly three years ago we embarked on the adventure of our marriage, and this year in Africa has been yet another remarkable experience. This picture of us was taken a couple years after we met, at a drag show benefit for my former place of employment. Can't wait to be sitting next to him again, with or without the red feather boa, and looking forward to whatever adventures the future may bring!

Kribi Again

2008-10-19T15:38:00.007+01:00

Even after several trips to Kribi over the course of the past year, with Chris and other friends, I was eager to go again, this time with a large group of (mostly) RFIS teachers on their October break. This trip is a tradition that goes back several years, so these folks have figured out how to maximize the enjoyment while minimizing the cost.

Kribi is such a lovely place.

Even lovelier when you add some friends and spend a few days there.

We stayed at Maison St. Benoit, a guest house with several rooms and a few small kitchens, plus a nice big porch and a sheltered deck that overlooks the ocean. We were 16, so we occupied four sleeping rooms and two kitchens. There were lots of other SIL folks staying nearby, enjoying the October school vacation on the beach.

We brought all our own food, and enjoyed some delicious meals as a group out on the sheltered deck, with the sound of the waves as a backdrop to our conversation.

Janell, Mandi, Christy, and Ruth are all very pleased about enchilada night...as were we all!

Even the lizard had its own little insect buffet going on overhead, right next to the light bulb.

We arrived on a Monday afternoon and left the following Thursday afternoon, so there was plenty of time for playing games, taking walks, reading on the porch, swimming, and relaxing with friends. Here Christy gives Julia a shoulder massage, while Julia models her new side ponytail flip hairstyle!

Tuesday was Liz's birthday, so we had a little celebration for her that night. After a delicious spaghetti dinner, we invited all the nearby SIL neighbors over to our deck, as well as a hilarious French guy who was also staying nearby. Christy performed a rap she had composed for the occasion (with Lois and Julia and me serving as back-up rappers), and we all ate chocolate cake.

There was a rousing game of 'around the world' ping pong, involving much hilarity and many shenanigans. (That's the French guy with the shaved head and no shirt on.) A large group of us spent quite some time running frantically around the table, hitting the ball back and forth, and laughing uproariously.

Jenny crouches in readiness for the next hit, as Christy runs with all her might to the other end of the table. Go Christy go! By the way, I noticed that my left-handedness put me at a disadvantage in the game, since most people leave the paddle with the handle to the right. The breakneck pace of the game often forced me to pick up the paddle in some funky way, since there's no time to adjust. So if you're playing around the world ping pong, lefties beware!

On our last night, some of us went out for dinner and ate some delicious seafood at a restaurant right on the beach. It was the very same restaurant where Chris and I ate with our friends Alison and Jordan when we were there a month before. The food was still delicious, and the chef (Adolphe Mesmer) remembered me.

One day, a bunch of us went to see the waterfalls at the south end of town. They were beautiful and the water was flowing much faster and higher than the time Chris and I saw the falls last December. There was a mist of spray in the air.

Here we are, trooping over the rocks. We spent a few hours there, some folks relaxing on the rocks, some playing in the water (cold!) or throwing the frisbee.

Liz and Ruth had their own special adventure at the waterfalls. Both very athletic and stong swimmers, they decided to swim across the channel, something Liz and others had done in years past. But the current was incredibly strong, and it was impossible for them to stay in the narrowest part of the channel. Both of them were swept quite far out toward the open sea, where the crossing was two or three times as wide. Liz eventually reached water shallow enough that she could walk to the other shore. She's the tiny speck on the bank in the photo above.

Ruth was swept even farther out, until a friendly pirogue came and picked her up.

The boat man went to the other shore, picked up Liz (much to her relief -- she was worn out!) and rowed both of them back to us.

Oh, did I mention that there were dogs? Maison St. Benoit must have about a half dozen resident dogs who hang out on the beach below. Here are four of them.

Beyond this rock outcropping was our favorite swimming area. You could walk around the rocks except at high tide, when you had to go around on a road above. The water was lovely, the ocean floor was sandy and even, and the waves were decent, but sometimes a bit too calm for body surfing. One moonlit night, there was even a contingent of ladies that took a dip in the altogether, if you know what I'm sayin'. (Apparently this is also a tradition.) You bet I was one of them!

I missed Chris, and he would have loved being there with everyone. However, he did call to say hello on the night of this sunset. All in all, it was yet another wonderful time in Kribi.

Food Club

2008-10-11T15:31:00.004+01:00

Who knew that I would leave the Bay Area, with its high concentration of 'foodies,' only to find another delightful group of gourmets? These women love to cook and eat great food, and a few times each month they get together to do just that. I've been invited to join them for the remainder of my time here -- hooray!

Here I am, toasting with Kerry, Liz, and Alison as we embark on the preparations for a fantastic dinner.

Ali hosted the gathering at her place, sporting a super-cute pink panther T-shirt.

Kerry raises a glass. She has actually trained and worked professionally as a chef.

Liz celebrated the beginning of October break by concocting some Thai iced tea. It was delicious!

Here are the raw shrimpies, spending some time in their saucy marinade. They're not much to look at now...

But in the end, they're looking downright sexy in their next of coconut rice, n'est-ce pas?

Ready to eat. Ali's son and a couple of his friends joined us for the meal, and there was another toast (with the Thai iced tea this time) before we launched into the food.

Afterwards, there was dessert (I made fresh ginger cake) and coffee with Amarula, a divine creamy fruit liqueur.

Kerry (holding the Amarula) cracks up as she watches Liz take a dainty sip from her wee little coffee cup.

There was ambiance (votive candle in coconut shell -- try this at home!), great company, laughter and conversation, and a few luxuriant hours later, all of us had bellies full of delicious and well-prepared food. That's 'food club' in a nutshell, really.

The aftermath: the kitchen was tired and so were we. Can't wait 'til next time, ladies!

Missing Chris

2008-10-02T23:52:00.003+01:00

Sure, I'm his number one fan in Cameroon, but I'm in good company when it comes to missing Chris. Allow me to introduce a couple other members of the club...

CeCe works in the computer department up at the school, in fact for the time being, she pretty much is the department. After a key person left at the beginning of the summer, Chris lent a hand there when he could. His assistance was much appreciated, and he was acknowledged at the school's weekly chapel service just before he left. Here he is, saying a few words to the students just after being presented with a stylish 'Whatever' t-shirt. (Bright blue, on the podium just in front of him -- those of you in SF may see him wearing it.) CeCe definitely misses having Chris around, and inquires after him when she sees me.

And this is Philip. You may recognize him from our goodbye party; he's one of the day guards at our apartment building, and always has a cheerful greeting for all who come and go. In this picture, Philip is wearing a shirt that Chris left behind, and he's also strapped on Chris's big sandals. He says he's very excited to have inherited these things not only because they're useful, but also because they'll remind him of his friend in the U.S. So now when I'm going out to work in the morning, or returning from an afternoon of errands, Philip greets me and asks about Chris.

Friends at work, friends in the neighborhood...yes indeed, I'm just one of the many people who enjoyed having Chris around, and who are missing him now. But I'm still the luckiest one of them all, because I get to see him again in just two months!

My Baby Friend

2008-10-01T23:14:00.003+01:00

Yesterday afternoon, I spent a few hours visiting my baby friend Grace. Two weeks had passed since my last visit, and already she is bigger and more alert. She entertained me with her usual tricks: sleeping, eating, crying, and looking around. That's really all it takes -- I'm an appreciative audience.

As the nephew of Grace's father, Paul is technically her cousin, but being her senior by nearly 30 years, he functions more as an uncle. Here he demonstrates how he soothes her by rocking her and singing little songs. Since he lives in the same house with Isaac and Julia and Grace, he's often 'on call' for the late night shift if the little one starts to fuss.

Julia and Grace, mother and daughter, smiling at each other. Aren't they beautiful?

Another Goodbye Party

2008-09-30T20:33:00.006+01:00

The weekend before Chris left, our friends Ann & Ray hosted a farewell gathering involving our friends in the SIL community. Everyone gathered for a few hours at their lovely home (the very same one where we lived while they were on furough in the US) to enjoy refreshments and each other's company.

The snack table was popular.

Dan and Sun. Later in the evening, Dan played his guitar
and sang a Bob Dylan song (Forever Young) for us.

Us with Philip. Check out our matching African outfits!
That's how we do in Cameroon...

Mary, Alison, and Ann on the couch

Ronald takes a turn at the keyboard.

Julia and Mandi

Daryl, Chris, and Paul

We have met some truly fine people in this community, and it was a joy to have them all together in one place for an evening. Thanks, Ann and Ray and family! Special thanks to Ray for taking all these photos so we didn't have to.

Two More Months

2008-09-25T12:55:00.002+01:00

For almost a year now, we've been in this together. This whole Africa experiment, living somewhere else for a while and seeing what it teaches us. Working, traveling, adjusting, reading, meeting some amazing people, getting to know another part of the world a little bit.

Last night, Chris and I said goodbye at the Yaounde airport, and I watched him step up the long staircase to the boarding area. The next time we'll see each other is December 4, when I will arrive at the San Francisco airport.
I'm still here in Africa, by myself this time. I've decided to stay for a couple more months, because I can, and the groundwork is already laid, and because I don't feel like Cameroon is finished with me yet. Chris has been so supportive of my choice to stay here, even when I have been disagreeable, and even when I didn't get my visa until about 30 hours before departure time. So for a while, we'll be living the adventures of life in different places, sharing the best we can over Skype and e-mail, looking forward to coming together again at the end of this time apart. I'll try to be a more faithful post-er here, since Chris is no longer here to do the lion's share of the blogging.

Really, I'm excited for both of us. He gets to be back in the best city ever (at least that we know of), re-connecting with friends, enjoying Mexican food, going to our wonderful church, doing theater, feeling the San Francisco chill in the air, and looking for work. I get to be here in Cameroon, continuing to enjoy some of the relationships we've formed here, exploring others more deeply, working with a great NGO, watching baby Grace grow a bit older, being warm, eating wonderful food, and dancing to the music. I think we'll have a good time. But it sure will be great to see each other again.

The sun is shining in Yaounde this afternoon...should've done some laundry!

RELUFA farewell party

2008-09-15T16:28:00.001+01:00

Our friends and colleagues from our past year of volunteer work threw us a farewell party last night. The Boyds hosted at their house, which is also the house where we spent our first three months here in Cameroon, while they were on furlough in the US. Nice things were said to us. We received some thoughtful gifts. There was a ping-pong table. It was a thoroughly pleasant evening full of friends, food, drink and music, and a lovely farewell to a place we have worked, made friends, and learned a lot.

Here are a few pictures.

Val and Terri's son Iman, with his uncle Romeo.

Ann, our friend Thierry who we invited along with us, and me. Thierry is a friend of a friend in the US, so it was fun to introduce him to our work crowd.

Ann, Thierry, and Christiana, a Brit who recently finished her master's in London and is interning at RELUFA.

Annelies, who works for RELUFA member organization CED, and her boyfriend Mikel. Annelies is doing communications work for CED, so we've had some good discussions with her related to work on the RELUFA website. She loves living here, and we've had some good times hanging out, although we only met her recently.

Sorry, Gilles. I had to put this up. Gilles is enjoying a brochette de boef. I intend to learn to make them when I get back. Small pieces of tender seasoned beef, onion and peppers, like satay-sized kebabs. Here you dip them in powdered pimantes, or hot peppers.

Naomi and Salome, the Boyd girls. It has been a pretty entertaining year getting to know the Boyd family, and they have welcomed us into their home and even brought us on vacation. The girls' brother, Matthias, wasn't at the party, because he left a couple of weeks ago for an internship in the US. We owe Matthias a huge thank-you for hand-carrying some paperwork to the US for us and mailing it from the airport.

Axel plays ping-pong...

... against Valery, RELUFA's coordinator.

Us.

Christiana and Ann.

I take a turn at the table. In my fine African shirt, no less.

Got one of Val and Terri dancing.

Thanks for a fine party, if you were there and reading this. The hospitality our friends and coworkers have shown us here over the past year has been humbling, helpful, and something we won't forget.

brunch with Nancy and Gretchen

2008-09-13T18:13:00.003+01:00

We had Nancy and Gretchen over for brunch this morning, on their way out of town back to the village. I learned, finally, how to make a proper omelet thanks to them, so I made some today, and Ann made cardamom biscuits.

We showed them the blog post that Ann wrote about our stay in their village, and talked about our plans for the future.

They're headed to the Bay Area in the spring to visit Gretchen's mom, so we hope to see them next year back home. They should be home in the village right about now, as I write. Here they are with Ann in front of their truck (Nancy is on the left, Gretchen on the right):

They told us they found a tiny frog in their truck on the way down to Yaounde. They got a few pictures of the little guy before releasing him.

It's rainy season here again. I sat awhile this afternoon and just watched the rain from our third-floor back balcony. I took a few pictures last night from there, around sunset.

The secret to a good omelet, by the way, is to get a couple of tablespoons of oil smoking hot in the pan before pouring in the eggs. Then you get the texture.

So who are all you people, anyway?

2008-09-11T15:54:00.002+01:00

The little map at right shows where our readers are. If you read this blog, even once, a little dot shows up on that map in your part of the world. I saw this elsewhere, and thought it was neat, so I put one here.

Now we're wondering who all you people are. We have friends from San Francisco, especially from our church, who are now all over the world, but I'm not sure it's that many. Especially in South America. Neither of us even speak Spanish or Portuguese.

So if you don't know us personally, and you read this blog, and you feel like it, please leave a little comment with a note about yourself. You can click on the "comment" link below. But if you prefer to continue reading in secrecy instead, that's fine with us. We just wanted to get you know you a little.

If you do know us personally, but feel like leaving a note anyway, just to say hi, feel free.

Kribi farewell

2008-09-08T16:01:00.002+01:00

Our friends and neighbors Alison and Jordan (her son) invited us along to Kribi last weekend. Jordan's heading for university in London to study photography. He leaves Cameroon tonight, so Kribi was his sendoff. We had a fine time hanging out, sleeping late, eating seafood, and spending the day at the beach. Here are a few pictures.

Ann got this out the window of the car when we pulled into Kribi Friday night.

Lizard!

The beach in front of our hotel.

On a beach walk.

Alison and Jordan.

Saint Ann.

The hotel, looking back from the edge of the beach.

Sunset.

After sunset. They didn't have rooms, so they put us in a two-room suite with a veranda, where I shot this, looking towards the ocean.

Our chef, who said his name was Adolphe Mesmer. He has worked all over, including the Hotel Xaviera, which is just up the road from our apartment in Yaounde.

Ann, Alison and Jordan.

Us.

Rain on the ocean on Sunday.

We're riding along to the airport with Alison tonight to bring Jordan, so we'll get to see them both one more time, probably over fries and a 33 beer at the airport restaurant.

odds and ends from Tropicana

2008-09-02T15:37:00.002+01:00

We're planning on remaining in Yaounde until our departure from Cameroon at the end of the month. Here are a few pictures I shot today, around the house and our quartier of Mvan-Tropicana.

The Xaviera Hotel, shot from our balcony. Line of sight means line of sound as well, and the Xaviera is frequently rented out for all-night wedding celebrations with what, I suspect, are outdoor amplifiers as tall as me, with tweeters like dinner plates and woofers like truck wheels. It sounds like the party is in the back yard, not across the valley. The Kapteyn house, where we lived for seven months, lies in between this place and our own, so we heard it there too. Their house is lower and closer, but on the other hand is better-protected by brush and solid windows rather than louvers, so the noise level is probably about the same. Happily, like the el train in the Blues Brothers film, the parties happen so often you cease to notice them.

Living room. The cup of coffee and novel were my long morning. The CD is something in the Yemba language that Gretchen and Nancy gave us. I am mystified about the pillow in the background -- it looks like the Hand of Fatima on there, a Muslim symbol, but we inherited the pillow from Karen, who doesn't seem likely to own one. Have to ask her.

Three essentials of our life here -- antibiotics for a minor but persistent inconvenience, insect repellent (especially necessary because we take no antimalarial medicine, preferring to treat it if it comes), and a laptop. This bug repellent (thoughtfully sent to us with many other fine things in a Christmas package from the US by Brian, Kate and Dave) is hardcore; we wear it regularly, and did at the Kapteyns' house too when we lived there. We took our cues from them before they left, and so got in the habit of putting our legs up on the coffee table there to watch TV. The bug goop on our legs actually ate through the finish on the table, over time, leaving chemical burn marks of bare wood. I've started sticking a pillow under my legs now, in our new place, when I prop them up. Some guy named Larry owns most of the furniture, and will come back to it after we leave. He is reputedly a stickler, too.

Missionaries drive trucks. Some of the teachers drive cars instead, but a truck has the advantage of being able to leave town and to go deeper into the neighborhoods, because it can handle rougher road conditions.

The front gate of Cabtal, where we live. The tower over the gate is the office building, and the diagonal stairways behind it belong to our apartment building. The guardhouse at left is always manned.

The apartment complex next to ours, called New Land, is also full of SIL ex-pats. I went over there to get a picture of a monkey and a parrot who live in separate cages under a stairwell. But they seem to have moved. So here's a flower instead.

The gate of CTC, the complex that houses SIL offices and Rain Forest school. I'm in here at the moment, writing this.

Entering CTC, I heard a plane in the sky, and grabbed a zoom shot. This is SIL's plane, so this could be our friend Ray up there. If not, it's either Dennis or Daryl, the two other SIL pilots. Funny to see a plane and be fairly sure who's flying it. The only other small aircraft around are military, usually a green helicopter. We hear large aircraft noise at night, sometimes, too, but don't see any during the day.

With the advent of rainy season, the skies are spectacular again. This doesn't come through all that well in a 400-pixel image, but I thought it might be worth a try anyway.

And another.

Part of the CTC campus. Everything grows here, often with wild abandon, so you can trim a tree by simply hacking all the branches short, and sure enough, they sprout green again pretty quickly. I'm currently sitting in a hot sun on the left-hand side of this porch, where there's a network connection, blogging and shooing the occasional mosquito in spite of repellent.

Fooling around with the camera and laptop screen.

Me on the porch just now.

I'm off back home now, to get some work done on the new RELUFA website (coming soon!), and dinner with Ann and our friend Christy W at her favorite restaurant. We're sorry to see Christy go, to teach in another part of Cameroon for awhile, but hope to see her in Michigan one of these Christmases, since her parents live 30 miles from ours. Meanwhile, planning continues for departure and Europe, with San Francisco just over the horizon in October.

Welcome, baby Grace!

2008-08-31T19:22:00.004+01:00

This past Monday, August 25, Grace Mambo Zama was born. (She started out as Glory, but the relatives re-named her Grace. A fine thing, either way.)

Here she is with her parents, our friends Julia and Isaac. After twelve years of marriage and no children, Julia and Isaac thought they might never have a child. But near the beginning of 2008, they found out Julia was pregnant, a surprise and a miracle.

Here she is in her fancy crib, with her beautiful blanket. She's very tiny, and was sleeping the whole time we visited this afternoon, only opening her eyes a few times and quickly closing them again. She was all bundled up in some cute little clothing, a sweater that was giant on her, and her little hat, not to mention her blanket. That's one warm baby!

Her hair is so soft and curly, and she already looks a bit like her dad. During the two hours or so that we were there, various other people also came and went to visit her and her parents. There are lots of people who are very excited that she's here. Welcome to the world, baby Grace!

Le Vie au Village, Part 1

2008-08-27T14:42:00.012+01:00

(by Ann)

Two weeks ago, I got on a crowded Cameroonian bus headed west, and stepped off several hours later across from the pointed tin roofs of Chefferie Bafou. I was here to spend a few days with Nancy and Gretchen, SIL friends of ours who live and work in Bafou, and get a little taste of village life.

My very first experience was the tail end of a special service at the church where Nancy and Gretchen attend, a commemoration of the deaths of family members in the church followed by a meal. She snuck me in during the offering, while the choir led everyone in an especially animated series of songs and one of the pastors got up and joined the dancing, much to everyone's delight.

I particularly appreciated this mama, banging away at that large drum while holding her little one. The singing was great, particularly a song (Kwa' Atsék) performed by many friends of Gretchen and Nancy in the local language, Yemba.

After the service and before the meal, everyone lined up for photographs. Look at all those pastors in their long black robes and frilly little collars. (The white-skinned man is albino, not uncommon in Cameroon.)

My attention was, of course, attracted by this cute baby…

…And by this girl's fine silver pants with pink fur trim. She has surely never even heard of burning man. Nancy introduced me to many of their friends, we ate fish and plantains with everyone, and we stayed a bit longer and socialized at the pastor's house, where there was another rousing performance of Kwa' Atsék and an unfortunate accident involving a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey. I tell you, these church people know how to live it up.

By the time we headed home, the sun was setting exquisitely across the hills.

Nancy and Gretchen have been working with the people of Bafou on the Yemba language since their arrival 25 years ago. They are now known to many people in the large village, have a small translation team working steadily with them on various projects, and are quite comfortable in Yemba (not to mention French, English, and snippets of various other Cameroonian languages).

Here's Nancy working with two of their main language helpers, Micheline and Brigitte. They are working through a Yemba translation of a folk tale about a rat and a squirrel. Yemba is a very tonal language, so as they examine words and phrases, they actually sing little melodies back and forth. It's fascinating.

An example of a page from another illustrated storybook. Yemba has various sounds not present in English, so there are additional characters in its alphabet. I had trouble sounding things out, and even the word 'thank you' has four distinct parts and a couple different tones. Yikes!

Gretchen and Nancy employ Sylviane to help them with housework. She comes every weekday morning and helps with dishes, laundry, cleaning, etc while the ladies do their language work. She invited us to a special mass and celebration commemorating the death of her mother several years ago.

In Bafou, traditional 'chefferie' style pointed roofs are popular, and our friends' landlord had stuck a couple peaks atop N & G's carport, complete with decorative stars. The ladies denied any official 'chief' status for them or their vehicle, and insist the fancy roof was there prior to their tenancy.

The main gate of a very large compound nearby, affectionately dubbed 'Disneyland.' I was somewhat surprised that no fairy princesses emerged at any time during our visit.

The landscape is a series of ridges and valleys, green and rolling. Goat hill, thusly known because many people tether their goats there, is a short and lovely walk from N & G's house, and climbers are rewarded with sweeping vistas of the surrounding countryside.

Stay tuned for part 2, wherein Chris and Ann climb Goat Hill, Chris does yardwork with a machete, and Ann attends a funeral!

the day to day

2008-08-20T03:08:00.007+01:00

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.

RELUFA's work

2008-08-07T21:53:00.006+01:00

Most of our blog has been about our own experience here living in Cameroon, along with pictures, for friends and family. But beyond simply living here, we spend a fair amount of our time working for a Cameroonian NGO network called RELUFA. Some of RELUFA's support comes from Joining Hands, a mission of the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA). So Ann and I are officially Presbyterian volunteers.

Christiana, a RELUFA coworker, has been reading some interesting books related to RELUFA's work lately, and has offered to loan some to me. I just finished reading one of them, a stern indictment of the international aid industry entitled The Lords of Poverty. The book ends with the hope that "it will become possible for people to rediscover ways to 'help' one another directly according to their needs and aspirations as they themselves define them, in line with priorities that they themselves have set, and guided by their own agendas." This seems to be very much in the spirit of the work of Joining Hands. If you're curious, you can read the Joining Hands mission statement here.

You can read about RELUFA's recent activities in the Cameroon section of the latest Joining Hands newsletter, prepared by our friend and coworker Christi Boyd, the Joining Hands Companionship Facilitator here in Cameroon. It describes:

efforts to get the PCUSA to officially join the Publish What You Pay campaign, which works to get multinationals in the oil, gas and mining businesses to publish their financial transactions and contracts, and why this effort matters
a review of the environmental impact of the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline project, and efforts to get the oil companies to meet their obligations to communities that have lost their drinking water as a result
RELUFA's new fair trade program, with Partners for Just Trade
the recent workshop on campaign organizing for peaceful social change (I missed most of this, daunted by the prospect of all that discussion and my own limited French, but now regret it)
one Cameroonian fruit dryer's encounter with EU bureaucrats

These are just a few of the efforts that our work here supports, directly or indirectly. We've been working for RELUFA for almost a year now, writing articles and software and working on web design. Some of our work is for programs that didn't even get mentioned in this issue of the newsletter because there's so much other activity to report. And RELUFA is continuing to expand in the areas of fair trade and revenue transparency, and looking for opportunities to expand its microfinance program as well, all in the interest of its mission to alleviate hunger, poverty and social injustice in Cameroon.

SIL branch picnic

2008-08-05T17:36:00.004+01:00

We were invited on Sunday by our friends from SIL to attend the SIL branch picnic on Sunday. I've been doing a little helping out at SIL's Rain Forest International School with the computers, and we are now neighbors in the same building with many SIL folks, so we have several SIL friends now. The picnic was lots of fun. Here are a few pictures.

Ann reads on the couch before the picnic, with an assistant. Bert the cat has now left the building. His owner, Ginger, picked him up today. We are now almost pet-free for the first time since we left San Francisco. We do still check in on the Kapteyns' dog faithfully, til they get back, but we don't live with her anymore either.

Picnic time at Rain Forest International School.

Ann with Charlene and Fabienne, being fabulous together.

Our neighbor and friend Christi, who shared her food with us. I grilled that pan of delicious halal garlic sausage shortly after taking this picture, along with the layer of burgers hidden beneath it.

Me with another neighbor of ours, Julia, who lives downstairs with Lois. The classic hold-out-your-arm self-portrait, which worked out pretty well in this case.

The grills. That's Daryl the pilot in the blue shirt, who works with our friend Ray.

Friend and neighbor Liz (at left) checks the progress of her burger. Charlene's husband Michael is in the white shirt at right.

Shirley and her daughter. Shirley lives around the corner. Guy, who lives in the dependance we were going to move into at the Kapteyns, studies English with her. We often see her outside after a heavy rain, filling in ruts in the dirt road with a shovel. We play frisbee with her kids sometimes. They run like the wind.

Liz, Ruth and Ann. Ruth just sprained her ankle, undoubtedly complicating her new position as Rain Forest's PE teacher. Ann is about to enjoy some dessert from the well-stocked dessert table just out of frame to the left.

Lois (at left), the director of Rain Forest, and our downstairs neighbor.

Bert and Wilma. Ann would go running with their daughter when she was in town. We've played boardgames with Bert and Wilma, like Ticket to Ride and Settlers of Catan (a favorite here), and Bert seems to win pretty much all the time.

We'll be heading off to the west on Saturday to spend a week in a village, something we haven't managed to do until now. We're staying with a couple of SIL linguists, and may get to help out with their projects a bit. And we're starting to wind down our affairs here in Cameroon, and prepare to leave toward the end of next month. As we continue to settle in, and get busy preparing to leave, time is accelerating again, but it's still going nowhere near as fast as it does back home.

new home at Cabtal

2008-07-31T16:29:00.010+01:00

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.

dinner at Isaac and Julia's

2008-07-27T22:28:00.004+01:00

We moved out of the Kapteyns' home over the past week, and they return to Cameroon on Wednesday after a seven-month furlough in the US. We've enjoyed living there, and one of the best parts of that has been getting to know Julia and Isaac, an anglophone Cameroonian couple. Julia works for the Kapteyns, and thus for us for seven months, as what is known here as "house-help," cooking and cleaning and helping to run the household. Isaac, her husband, has another job but does yardwork for the house on occasional weekends, and once hired on to a RELUFA work trip as our driver. We also hosted their nephew Paul's engagement dinner, and had them over for dinner a few times, and Ann goes to the market with Julia every chance she gets, where Julia has introduced her to the vendors she buys from regularly.

They invited us to their home for dinner tonight, for a joint birthday celebration for Julia and Ann. It was great to finally see where they live. Two of the sisters of Paul's fiancee came too, with a friend.

The two sisters, their friend, Ann and Julia, at Julia and Isaac's house.

Isaac, Julia, Ann, Paul and me. I can't believe we caught Isaac smiling in this one; lots of people here are serious for pictures, and this is one of the only times that I have ever seen Julia not smiling or laughing.

Ann with some birthday fleurs

2008-07-26T18:11:00.003+01:00

Re-Entry?

2008-07-25T12:01:00.003+01:00

I've been wondering what it will be like to return to life in the US after living in Cameroon for a year, so when a friend here offered me a book on the subject, I took her up on it. The book is actually for missionaries, not NGO volunteers like us, but it was interesting and helpful.

Some of the advice didn't have much to do with us, or why we're here. For example, I doubt we'll go back to our church with a sense of Christian superiority, or that we'll fail to submit to the authority of our male pastor (especially because her name is Sheri), both of which the book warns returning missionaries to beware of. But the warnings about "reverse culture shock" seem apt. Living in a much poorer country can change your perspective (how could it not?) on life in a rich one like the US, and make it difficult to pick your former life back up again:

What are some of the signs of reverse culture shock? One is feeling "out of place," as thought you are a spectator watching from afar. You don't really fit in with what is going on around you. While everyone else seems to be sure of their social position, you seem to hang out at the edges, wanting to participate fully, but not being quite able to.

Another sign is feeling lonely. You feel isolated from your closest friends and family members. They have changed, and you don't always understand exactly where they're coming from. Thus you feel like the "odd man out."

You may also find yourself reacting in odd ways; weeping at a children's television program or being completely overwhelmed by the number of television movies from which to choose on a typical Saturday night.

However, one of the biggest aspects of reverse culture shock is the reaction to western materialism.

...[it] takes time, but if you don't adjust in some measure to the "wasteful West," you will become critical of and alienated from others around you. You will find yourself becoming judgmental of your family and friends for doing exactly the same things you used to do. And as time goes by, you will find yourself falling back into those old habit patterns, and you will become angry and frustrated with yourself because of it.

(from Re-Entry: Making the transition from missions to a life at home, by Peter Jordan, 1992; liberal italics from the original)

Again, as with my experience of culture shock, I can't help finding this all strongly reminiscent of life in junior high. Culture shock, reverse culture shock, it's all really just time travel. Go figure.

(As you might expect, the earlier post about culture shock generated a lot of email and comments, more than anything else we've posted. One friend said he was pretty depressed after reading it. It was certainly a shock at first (it is "culture shock," after all), but like a lot of painful things, it's a chance to grow. Nobody seems to talk about the negative aspects of our kind of travel, at least not in any detail, so I wanted to share it. We have a pretty good time here most of the time, and have seen things most people in the US never get to see. I have no complaints, only occasional difficulties. I won't speak for Ann, but once or twice we discussed coming home early when things were difficult, and always decided against it.

All that said, thank you to everyone who sent us expressions of support, well-meant advice, or just checked in with a few comments.)

Happy Birthday Ann!

2008-07-19T15:10:00.004+01:00

Ann's birthday was Monday. It's been a week of on and off birthday celebration, because the actual birthday on Monday was a doctor visit for a minor skin complaint, which is why she has this great hat:

The nice French doctor didn't want to stick tape in her hair for the bandage. Apparently little French babies get a gauze chapeau like this too.

Christy and Liz, our friends and neighbors, stopped by that night. Christy (center) composed a rap for Ann's birthday, which she and Liz performed. Then we all sang Happy Birthday.

Wednesday, we invited the Boyds for dinner. Christi was in the US, but Jeff and the kids came over. We made quesadillas, and Naomi (center) brought over a chocolate pudding cake she made that we're still finishing off. We finally got to meet Matthias (in the black t-shirt) a few days before this, because he just got back from his first year of university in the Netherlands.

Last night we made some pizza, and invited our next-door-neighbors the DuBois family over to join us. In the flurry of excitement entailed by their two small children, I neglected to take a picture. I did get one of the pizzas, though. The DuBois had given us some American pepperoni, unavailable here, on a previous visit to their house, so we decided to serve it up.

And there is more to come. I went with Ann to the doctor on Monday, so I never got to the other side of town to get her present. I hope to pick that up next Monday.

Happy Birthday Ann!

Yaoundé walkin' blues

2008-07-15T18:11:00.005+01:00

I seem to provoke a lot of hostility when I walk the streets here in Yaounde. I had an appointment to give someone some technical training today, and walked the mile home. Along the way, people made rude remarks I was intended to overhear, started talking loudly and aggressively all of a sudden when I walked by, looked at me and laughed and made mocking remarks to their friends for my to overhear, and stared, stared, stared without smiling. It's usually young guys who actually say things, sometimes a woman, and it's only a brief something every minute or two, but everyone stares without smiling, and the streets are full of people. I've tried saying hello to people in the past, but after being mocked for this, I just walk in silence now. It's much more pronounced on a busy street like I was on today than it is right around home, where maybe a hundred other ex-pats live.

I don't want this ignorance and hostility to bother me. It's not personal. I feel petty to care about it. The people who actually say things are a tiny minority of everyone on the street. And I'm not interested in isolating myself and hiding at home. So I continue to expose myself to it in small doses, like my walk home today, to try to learn how to let it just roll through me without getting angry. I've come a long way in staying calm, although I'm still far from not noticing or caring. But frankly, even though it's probably valuable, the experience always makes me look forward to leaving. I've learned to avoid really strong exposures to all this negativity, like trips to the market, or prolonged time downtown. And every time we travel this disappears; nobody acts this way anywhere we've ever been outside of Yaounde, although I heard from an ex-pat friend that Bamenda, which is another large city, is similar.

It persistently reminds me of being a junior high student, this sense of constant scrutiny and random hostility, and the occasional impulse to cower as if avoiding a blow. I adopt some of the same coping mechanisms as I did then, and stare at the ground in front of me while walking sometimes, or wear a low cap and sunglasses to avoid eye contact. Oddly, I even find myself with that junior high requisite, a large backpack, most of the time when I'm in public, since we carry them to and from work every day. And junior high was the last time people seemed to feel free to mess with me like this. Back home, if you treat adult men like this, they can get violent.

But it's all just talk. There has never been any threat of violence in it. People just don't like how I look; a lot of the comments have "blanc" in them, which means white person. I heard from another ex-pat that people of Asian descent get a lot more negative attention yet, walking around.

"Yew've come to a haahd paaht of the wuld," a frustrated middle-aged Australian traveler assured me several months ago, when we met him on the Cameroonian leg of his drive across Africa. Sometimes it feels that way. And yet, this only happens on long walks out in public, which are pretty rare for us. We cab to work, and we don't get much of this on the side roads around home or the office where we do most of our walking. It was a shock at first, but it's manageable now, perhaps even a useful exercise. And of course, nobody we have any kind of relationship with is like this.

Sometimes I wonder how much of it is just me. I often suspect that if I were to stay here for two straight years, almost everything would seem normal. But this, I think, might take me a little longer.

We leave in ten weeks.

micro-loans

2008-07-13T13:42:00.004+01:00

My major official project as a volunteer this year is creating a database system for RELUFA's micro-finance program, CAP, or Credit Against Poverty. I got the first draft of it (the "beta") done around Christmas, and we've been adding features and reports ever since. We plan to put it on the Internet soon, so we can continue to collaborate on it easily when we leave. I've wanted a solid pro-bono side project like this for years.

The CAP program makes small loans to individuals and groups who would not otherwise have access to credit. They use this money for a variety of small businesses, everything from running a food stall to raising small animals for sale to fruit drying to brickmaking. Micro-finance is a popular idea now, and you'll see signs and billboard for micro-finance programs if you drive around Yaounde, interspersed with signs for all kinds of other NGOs. Micro-finance in its modern form got its start in the seventies, when a Bengali economics professor named Muhammand Yunus decided to start loaning small amounts of money to the poor. This grew into Grameen (from the Bengali for "village") Bank, the institutional pioneer of micro-finance.

I just finished reading Yunus' book, Banker to the Poor, where he describes the history and philosophy of his work and Grameen. It's a fascinating read, and a positive and encouraging take on the difficult problem of world poverty.

Grameen has loaned billions of dollars to poor Bengalis in tiny increments to pull themselves out of poverty, and boasts a loan payback rate of 98%. This number is surprising because micro-loans work differently than other bank loans. The reason poor people cannot typically get loans from banks is that they have no collateral and need only small amounts. Micro-loan programs require no collateral and deal in small amounts. So why would anyone pay the loans back? The borrowers are in groups, so there is peer pressure to pay it back. The bankers build relationships with the borrowers, often over a long period of time. And the borrowers, initially anyway, are genuinely poor people, the bottom layer of society, and thus have no other option if they don't make this work.

Yunus' concept of poverty is an arresting one. He argues that the poor are creative and able to solve their own problems; they don't need training or handouts, just access to credit. He has found this idea to be a hard sell, even in the face of his own success in Bangladesh:

Almost everyone I spoke with dismissed what I said, arguing that the Bengali experience could not be relevant to poverty eradication in the United States. They claimed that Chicagoans needed jobs, training, health care, and protection from drugs and violence, not micro-loans, and that self-employment was a primitive concept lingering only in the Third World. Low-income people in Chicago needed money for rent and food, not for investment. They had no skills anyway.

I advanced the same arguments I had made to bankers in Bangladesh. "The poor," I said, "are very creative. They know how to earn a living and how to change their lives. All they need is opportunity. Credit brings that opportunity. Perhaps our two societies are different and thousands of miles apart, but I don't see any difference between the poor of Bangladesh and the poor of Chicago. The problems and consequences of poverty are the same."

His vision is to use micro-finance and other such empowering tools to wipe out world poverty. And he is no fan of most international aid or the welfare state.

I have always believed that the elimination of poverty from the world is a matter of will. Even today we don't pay serious attention to the issue of poverty, because the powerful remain relatively untouched by it. Most people distance themselves from the issue by saying that if the poor worked harder, they wouldn't be poor.

When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding a solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our conscience.

World poverty, says Yunus, is a soluble problem, and not as complicated as we make it out to be.

...things are never as complicated as they seem. It is only our arrogance that prompts us to find unnecessarily complicated answers to simple problems.

The book is not just a clear description of an innovative approach to world poverty, but Yunus' argument for respecting the experience and abilities of the poor people he serves with a cheerful sense of possibility. Start small, think big, and never say die.

Cute Pets

2008-07-10T14:27:00.002+01:00

Our friends the Boyds have some new animal friends at their place, a puppy and a kitten. What can I say -- they're extremely cute. Puppy was the first arrival, and she was just a tiny thing with a high little voice. She has already grown a lot, and is in almost constant motion, frisking around the yard, trying to dart indoors, and nipping at people's feet.
I caught her here in a rare moment of stillness, sitting next to her cage. She's a beautiful little dog with large scruffy ears.
Here's a more typical pose, with her gnawing on my arm as I take the picture. Albert the day guard looks on in amusement. She is really discovering her teeth, and enjoys playfully nipping at any body part that comes close enough for her to reach. Fortunately, she's quite good about nipping softly, not trying to hurt anyone.
The other new addition to the Boyd family is this adorable tiny kitten. She lives in the house, and is much less spastic than the puppy, although the two of them have met and she can definitely hold her own. The day I was photographing her, she was very sleepy and barely opened her eyes as I scooped her onto my lap.Here she is again, occupying one of her favorite spots: on Chris's lap as he types. This gives you a better idea of her size. Such a cute little handful!

On a more somber note, Kibibi, the Boyds' grown-up guard dog who lived in the yard while we stayed at their house, died about a month ago. She fell sick all of a sudden, and was gone within a couple of days. We've heard this does happen to pets here, what with all the interesting diseases available in Cameroon. Still, it's sad for the pets' owners. Fortunately these new little ones are here to help fill the void, although it will be some time before they'll be much use in guarding the house.

in Mbingo with Ann's parents

2008-07-01T15:42:00.003+01:00

Ann's folks are visiting from Grand Rapids, Michigan. We are running them around Yaounde today and tomorrow, and they leave tomorrow night. We spent the past several days in a place called Mbingo, in Cameroon's mountainous, lush, English-speaking Northwest Province. It was our first time there, and we had a great time. Here are a few pictures from the Mbingo trip.

Ann's ma, Ann, and Julia, who just happened to be taking a bus up to Bamenda in Northwest Province that day and wanted some company.

The major river we crossed on our way from Yaounde to Bamenda.

We did lots of hiking. We scaled that green mountain behind Ann right after we took this picture.

This is the view from the guesthouse where we stayed, which was just behind me when I took this.

The entire place was encircled by mountains, which you could see when you hiked up a bit from where we stayed, which was already at the head of a mountain valley.

View from the top of that green mountain a few pictures back.

Ladies at church, taken by Ann's folks. The guesthouse is part of a Baptist mission hospital, which also has a church, hostel, daily chapel, and a school.

Ann's folks, in front of the school. They spent some time volunteering there; Ann's mom in the library, and Ann's pa sanding tables.

Ann and her ma removing her African braids.

Another hiking picture: Ann's ma and Ann.

The hospital reception area. That was our cab, which we took the 40 minutes or so from Bamenda.

We had a fair amount of rain, especially at night, but not enough to seriously interfere with hiking.

Rain rain. This is the view from the guesthouse again.

The guesthouse, at right, and the cottage next to it.

The view over the valley looks south from the guesthouse. This was the sky around sunset.

The resthouse had tupsicles (tupperware + popsicles). My mom used to make these.

Us outside the guesthouse.

More hiking. There is a small waterfall to the right, just out of frame, that we had hiked up to see. This rock hung over a serious drop.

View from the rock in the previous picture. The buildings at right are the hospital compound; the big L-shaped one is the school.

With Ann's parents at the bus station in Bamenda, the city nearest Mbingo, coming home again.

The four of us bought out the back row, which otherwise would have had five people plus babes in arms, like this row just ahead of us. People here ride like this for seven hours straight and think nothing of it.

The bus ride home, at the halfway stop. Luggage on top.

We heard great things about Mbingo when we got here, and decided to save it for Ann's folks, when they visited. It was worth the wait, and one of the most beautiful places we've seen in Cameroon, in a very different way from Kribi on the sea, the semi-desert far north, or the hills of Yaounde. And everyone speaks English, which made it a perfect place to visit with Ann's parents, who don't know French.

travel complications

2008-06-23T16:59:00.007+01:00

I want to share how travel here in Cameroon can be more complicated than it is back home in the US. Last week, our friends Caspar and Char arrived from Switzerland. Being complete francophones (this beautiful word means French-speaking, in case I haven't mentioned that before), they landed in Douala on the coast, found a bus to take them the 3+ hour ride to Yaounde, and found our neighborhood. There, they were supposed to meet Ann. They had her number and mine. The phone network in our neighborhood chose that time to simply quit working; Ann had a "limited service" message on her phone, couldn't use it, and more to the point, our friends couldn't call her. So they called me. The plan was for Ann to meet them, so I was across town, an hour away by cab. There was nothing else to do but drop my work, cancel meetings, and come home to meet our friends, since they had no idea where to go, and couldn't get into the house even if they could find it, since Julia who works at the house had already left. And sure enough, about the time I finally got back to our neighborhood, Ann's phone had kicked in again and they had found each other, I had come all that way for no good reason. It was pretty frustrating for both of us.

Today, a week later, Ann's folks fly into Yaounde. Our plan was to meet them at the airport here. But no, today is the day that some dignitaries arrive for a big economic meeting of African countries (if I understand the explanation, anyway), so -- the roads are blocked. I got up to work, ran some errands, and I couldn't get home again. My taxi driver told me the road was blocked, but took me as far as downtown, where we couldn't get any further. So I won't be meeting the in-laws at the airport.

The roads are blocked all the way to the airport, but apparently some of the side roads are open. So Ann and Paul, Julia and Isaac's nephew who has their car tonight to help us out, are working out how to get to the airport. Ann called around, and found out that the Air France flight her parents are on may just keep the passengers on the plane until the dignitaries clear the airport.

Also, when I started heading home, it started raining. And I forgot my umbrella but had my computer with me. That one is entirely my fault; I need to find a plastic pancho to stick in my computer bag for future weather surprises.

So we'll figure something out, and Ann's folks are levelheaded and seasoned travelers, and will no doubt just hang out at the airport til we turn up.

But it seems like it's always something.

It's a lot harder here to labor under the illusion that you are in control of your own life. I was chatting about the situation today with our coworker Guy, and mentioned to him that it seems like Cameroonians don't get upset about things like this. He said no, they don't, there's no reason to get angry about it. I wonder how long I'd have to live here to cultivate this? Ann has more of this than I do.

UPDATE: here's a quick news item from the Post in Buea about what caused tonight's road delay:

Yaounde Hosts 9th CEMAC Heads of state summit
By Orock Eta

Heads of State of the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa zone (CEMAC), are converging in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon. The 9th Summit of CEMAC will be holding on the 24th & 25th June 2008. Leaders of six countries amongst others will be part of this event. President Theodoro Obiang- Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, Omar Bongo Odimba of Gabon, Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Congo, Francois Bozize of the Central Africa Republic, Idriss Deby Itno of Chad and Paul Biya of Cameroon will be in attendance.CEMAC was created in 1994 to collectively develop the human and natural resources of the sub region for the wellbeing of its people. President Paul Biya has been receiving guests for this occasion.

Looks like they might continue for a day or two.

Compo-Ma'an National Park with Char and Caspar

2008-06-22T11:41:00.009+01:00

Our friends Charlotte and Caspar arrived for a visit last week. Charlotte was Ann's roommate in San Francisco for awhile. Caspar is her Dutch biologist husband. They live in Switzerland, and we hope to visit them there, maybe on our way home in October.

Charlotte and Caspar are seasoned travelers and speak French fluently. We tagged along for their visit to a national park in the southwest corner of Cameroon for a few days. They took off this morning for the southwest. We stayed in Yaounde to meet Ann's parents, who arrive tomorrow for a ten-day visit. We'll be headed up to the cool and mountainous northwest with them on Thursday.

The trip

The park we visited is called Campo-Ma'an. It lies along the river that borders Equatorial Guinea, in the forested part of Cameroon. We left Yaounde on Wednesday afternoon on the bus to Kribi on the coast. The next morning, Thursday, we took a cab three hours to Campo town, found the park forestry office described in our guidebook, and arranged a park visit with guides. We stayed at the San Tropez hotel in Compo town, in a spartan concrete room with a cold-water shower and an oscillating floor fan. We set up our mosquito net, and since the windows were unscreened, Caspar and Char bought a net for themselves at the town store, although they're also on antimalarials for their short trip here. That night we found dinner and some beers on the veranda of the local bar, where we watched Germany and Portugal play football on satellite TV with half the town.

Friday we rode motorcycle taxis to Campo Beach, hopped in a boat, and rode an hour or two up the river to a guard post at the park. We picked up an armed soldier guard and hiked around the park for several hours, until the path gave out. I kept thinking on the hike that the forest looked a lot like Michigan. It turns out that this we were hiking on a former German plantation. So this was second-growth forest a little over a hundred years old, which is what you see in Michigan's lower peninsula where Ann and I both grew up. The plants themselves were not the same, of course. Much of the forest here consisted of moderately-sized rubber trees and giant bamboo, neither of which are native to Cameroon, plus lots of brush. We saw lots of birds, some small wildlife, flowers, and a few monkeys high in the trees. We were stalking forest elephants, and saw traces and some tracks in the mud, but never found the elephants themselves.

Before returning we took the boat to see the nearby falls on the opposite side of the river. We ate at a guest center the park office runs on the beach in Compo Beach, then took motorcycle taxis back to our hotel, where we found more cold beers and well-attended European satellite TV football on the veranda (Turkey won). Saturday we took a cab back to Kribi where we caught a bus for Yaounde.

Wednesday: the bus ride to Kribi

Ann made a friend in the row ahead of us on the way to Kribi.

Thursday: Kribi to Compo, and arranging our park visit

Our cab from Kribi to Compo town on Thursday. This is our driver Mark, Ann, and Charlotte. Mark was going to take us back to Kribi on Saturday too, but apparently (per our new driver) Mark got drunk on Friday night and partly demolished a bridge with his cab, so he sent a friend in another car on Saturday.

Another shot of the ride from Kribi to Campo, to show the size of the trees a bit. The entire road was lined with forest like this, with the occasional house, village or pygmy encampment. (Pygmy is what people all say here, and what the driver said in this case, although the people in question prefer to be called by their people group, such as Baka.)

The road from Kribi to Campo town. It was early, so I was still a little bleary and not smiling in spite of my coffee, but this is a good picture to give you some idea of what the road looks like. Once you leave Kribi it's all dirt. This is a pretty smooth section; the potholes and ruts in some places slowed our cab to a careful crawl.

Mark, Caspar, Ann and Charlotte on the way from Kribi to Compo.

The ubiquitous .65-liter bottle of beer, about a pint and a half in the US, along with a satisfied customer at the end of a long, dusty, hot day.

Caspar, the forestier Jean-Marc who set up our visit to the park, and me.

Friday: Compo-Ma'an National Park

We had breakfast here in the town of Compo Beach before setting out on the boat. That's the river in the picture, and on the opposite side is Cameroon's neighbor to the south, the country of Equatorial Guinea.

The river at Campo Beach, looking out to the Atlantic where the waves roll in.

One the river. The boatman's shy son Paul is at left, and me and Ann.

Near its mouth at the Atlantic, the river is lined with mangrove. As the water gets less salty, they fade out and are replaced by pandalouse, a primitive plant with similar roots, and large grassy-looking leaves.

Aerial roots along the river.

Ghyslaine, one of the park rangers, who accompanied us on the hike.

Our pilot, whose boat we hired for the trip to the park.

Char and Caspar. To Caspar's right is our "guard", although an armed soldier from the park's guardpost where we landed also came with us.

Riverbank. All of it was thickly forested like this, except for the very occasional clearing. The trees in the background are really high; my guess is that they were well over a hundred feet.

On the boat to the park.

Ann and me in the boat.

Char and Caspar with the pilot and our guard.

There's a toad about the size of an apple in the middle of this picture. He was hard to spot on the trail, too. I only saw him because he hopped into the trail mud the minute I walked past him.

There was a small tributary of the river that crisscrossed our path. This was where the soldier knew the elephants had been, and we saw tracks and trace several times, and even hiked off the path and into the mud once, but didn't find the elephants. This was not a surprise or much of a disappointment, since they are notoriously elusive. If you want to see big animals, it's much easier to do so at a savannah park like Waza in the north of Cameroon. But there are elephants, chimps, mandrills, pangolins and other mammals in the park. I wondered whether they were sitting quietly and watching us as we stamped through their forest.

The yellow there is Ann's shirt. This gives you some idea of the scale of the larger trees, and how thick the undergrowth was.

Our guard is chopping a bit at a big rubber tree, to show us the sap.

A termite house, about a foot high. We saw these every so often, as well as one or two termite mounds, and some ball-shaped termite houses in the trees. We didn't see any actual termites, but did see lots of ants. They were everywhere, and where they swarmed on the path we had to run through, then stomp them off. Inevitably, a few got under your clothes and bit you, leading to some brief impromptu dances. Every so often, someone in our party would cry "fourmi!", which is French for ant, and either point at the ground, start running, or hop around and smack their legs. The bites weren't too frequent or too bad; they hurt far less than a bee sting.

Charlotte and Caspar on the path.

Another toad.

Two butterflies mating. This and most of the other critter pictures are from Caspar's camera.

Some of the giant Chinese bamboo that was all over the place. This stuff was maybe fifty feet high. Some friends of mine were challenging me to built a dirigible out of bamboo while in Cameroon, Gilligan's-island style; this would be the thing to use.

Our soldier guard helps Ann across a tributary. This was an unusually open spot.

A closeup of the rubber sap seeping from our guard's small illustrative cut in the tree.

Me and Ann in the forest.

Didier, the armed soldier (he carried an assault rifle) who came with us. He was a friendly young guy who led the way. When we left, he asked to come along on the short ride we took to see the waterfalls on the Equatorial Guinea side of the river.

The falls, loud and a few feet high. They don't look too big here, but we didn't get that close.

Another shot of the falls, further out.

The boat.

Us in the boat in the afternoon sun, heading back from the park.

Char on the way back, in her rock star sunglasses.

Our boat's engine gave out a bit short of our landing, so we hiked back through a residential quarter of Campo Beach from where the pilot paddled to shore.

The Atlantic in the evening, where we had dinner at the eco-reserve after visiting the park.

We took motorcycle taxis ("mototaxis" in French) back to our hotel after dinner. This is me and my driver speeding down a dirt road. No helmets, of course. There almost never are here. The dirt roads and 125-cc engines mean we never went faster than about 25mph. All the mototaxis are Chinese.

The view ahead on the mototaxi ride. That little blur on the road ahead is Caspar. I also took a shot behind me, where Ann and Char were sharing a ride, but I missed.

Our arrival back at the hotel, settling up with the drivers. That light-colored building across the street is the verandah where we sat and had dinner on Thursday, and watched the Turks win a football game on Friday night.

Ann, Ghyslaine and Char back at the hotel.

Saturday: back to Yaounde

This is what a bus ride looks like. We bought five tickets for the four of us on each bus ride, and our thoroughly francophone friends, bless them, made sure we got to sit together in a row all by ourselves. These rows are built for four people, so the bus companies cram five into each row, plus any number of free-riding children on laps. So people routinely sit partly on top of each other like this. Nobody seems to mind in the least.

Char and Caspar fly out of Douala, not Yaounde, so we won't be seeing them again in Cameroon. They're off to see more parks, headed to Limbe today, then to the foothills of Mount Cameroon, and then to the ring road in the northwest.

New Adventures in Hair

2008-06-16T11:13:00.005+01:00

As many of you know, I enjoy an occasional drastic change to the color of my hair. But here in Africa, the more common practice for women is to drastically change the style of their hair. I certainly couldn't resist, so this past Saturday, I embarked upon a new adventure in hair!
BEFORE: "Oh Beckaaaay, what ever shall I do with this shaggy 70's hair of mine?"
I called over Charlotte (left) and she came with her friend Davina (right) and a few packs of different colored fake hair. Mmmmmm. After some pondering, I turned down the black and the brown in favor of a purple and magenta combination. And so they started in to work...
Here is the hair itself, draped over the back of the couch. They prepared it, cut it to the right length, and eventually arranged it into numerous small portions with a bit of each color, ready to braid.
Four and a half hours and a couple of movies later, I was lookin' pretty fine, with long thick hair the likes of which I've never had before! Yes, it hurt at times, but they worked really quickly and did a great job. Here they are finishing up the last few braids, just before they tied it all back and dipped the ends in near-boiling water.
AFTER: "Hmmm, this hairstyle and color is not entirely unlike that of DJ Adrian from Bootie!"
Thanks ladies! I have been greatly enjoying my new big hair, and have not yet taken it out of the convenient ponytail as of this writing. (Will probably do that later today, and put it in a different style.) People say it can last for several weeks, so we'll see how it goes. I'm already scheming about colors for the next time I get this done!

graphing Cameroon

2008-06-14T15:18:00.002+01:00

I'm sorry to say that many people in the US know little about Cameroon. They may not even know it's an African country, or that it's not an island country. I had that last assumption for a little while, perhaps confusing "the Cameroons," which was the name of the country when divided between British and French colonial rule following WWI, with the island nation of Comoros, off Mozambique. Most of this blog is about sharing our direct experience of Cameroon, but I thought it might be interesting to look at the numbers briefly. Since you can draw charts with Google, here are a few charts comparing some numbers between the US, all of Africa, and Cameroon. As a farewell gift to Karen (see previous post), I'm throwing in Canada too.

Population
Africa: 922 million
Cameroon: 18 million
Canada: 33 million
US: 304 million

Land Area in Square Miles
Africa: ~11.7 million
Cameroon: ~184 thousand
Canada: ~3.9 million
US: ~3.8 million

Human habitation
Africa: ~200,000 years (ie, all of it)
Cameroon: ~85,000 years (Neolithic period)
Canada: ~26,500 years
US: ~12,000 years

GDP
Africa: $2.16 trillion
Cameroon: $42.5 billion ($0.04 trillion)
Canada: $1.274 trillion
US: $13.13 trillion

GDP per Capita
Cameroon: $2421
Canada: $38,200
US: $43,444

Human Development Index
("normalized measures of life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per capita")

Cameroon: 0.532
Canada: 0.961
US: 0.951

(sources: Google, and the Wikipedia pages on Africa, Cameroon, Canada and the USA. Thanks to Dave for prompting me to put this together on an idle Saturday, since he said he likes graphs.)

work and housing

2008-06-14T13:54:00.005+01:00

I collaborated with Jeff to put together a training session in French on Microsoft Excel for administrative personnel at the EPC, the Francophone Cameroonian Presbyterian Church. I presented it, in French, this past Tuesday and Wednesday. The first day (coincidentally my birthday) was exhausting, and I came home and ate dinner and went to bed. But it was much easier the second day. Next Monday I go back for a Q&A session, when people from the training can spend some time working with Excel and asking me questions. In French, I repeat, because I can't quite believe it. I was pleased that the training sessions finally happened, since they have been difficult to organize with the EPC. The simple fact that we were able to get a few computers with the same version of Excel on them in a room with power, lights, and six or seven interested EPC administrative personnel all at the same time feels like quite an achievement, after all the time and effort it took to put this together. If you ever get a chance to teach in another language, I'd recommend trying it. It will blow your mind. Plus, with the advent of the internet, you can steal liberally from other peoples' online notes, which makes preparation much easier.

On the housing front, we are sorry to see our friend Karen leave. If you follow this blog you've seen some pictures of her. She's the one who injured her knee playing ultimate frisbee. So far it hasn't healed, and she hasn't been able to keep off of it since she lives in a third-floor walk-up apartment in hilly Yaounde', half a mile from work and without a car. So she's headed back home to Canadia (as Ann pronounces it) to get some medical attention. We're glad she's taking care of herself, but sorry to see her go. She'll be back a few days before we leave Cameroon. She invited us to visit her place on Lake Winnipeg when she gets back.

In the meantime, we offered to sublet her place in her absence, and she agreed and squared it away with the powers that be. So instead of spending our last couple of months in Cameroon living in a 9x17' room off the Kapteyns' garage, we'll have our own one-bedroom apartment a block away from them, in the same building as some of our other single friends. Karen is happy because she can leave all her stuff in place instead of packing it, since we just have clothes and our laptops. We're happy since we get some extra space and privacy for the rest of our trip, and that building has wireless internet as well. And the Cameroonian fellow who lives in the Kapteyns' dependance, as the room is called in French, doesn't have to move out yet. So everyone wins. But we'd still rather have Karen stay here.

The apartment comes with a cat named Bert Douglas that Karen is keeping for someone else. So we'll take care of Bert til she gets back too. Since we don't move in there for another month, we'll be stopping by to share feeding duties with some other friends in the building. Of course, if we can get our wireless internet hooked up right away, we'll by stopping by quite often to work there. Never did get wireless connected where we live now.

Karen has a habit of taking pictures of the sky here, which is spectacularly visible from her balcony. I copied her sky pictures recently, and also grabbed a few she had of us. So here we are on the couch in the apartment where we'll be moving in July. That's Bert Douglas on my lap. He's insistent and picky, like most cats, but affectionate.

We get to use the couch, too.

Serious Yard Work

2008-06-09T12:22:00.003+01:00

Behind the house where we live (outside of the wall, so it's not really our yard), there is a footpath where people come and go from the main road, and an embankment sloping up to the fenced-in field where we play frisbee on Sundays. This being Africa and all, things grow quickly and vigorously upon said embankment, so every few months, a troupe of young men has at it with machetes.
This time around, they let it go for 3 or 4 months, longer than usual, so it was quite a jungle back there. It took them three mornings of work to cut back all the brush. I took the picture above when they were partway through with this side, so you can see where they stopped. The grass and bushes are as tall as I am.
Now here's another picture I took after they were done. There's a whole fence back there, and a couple palm trees, and a footpath. Who knew? And if you liked it better with all that greenery, never fear, it'll be back in a couple months...

Africa: A Biography of the Continent, by John Reader

2008-06-09T11:55:00.004+01:00

We've been doing a lot of reading here, as you can see from the growing book list in the sidebar on the right. One of these books is Africa: A Biography of the Continent, by John Reader. I borrowed this from Terri and Valery awhile ago, and enjoyed it immensely. It covers the history of Africa from the dawn of geological time through the present day; beginning with geology, it moves into anthropology, archeology, and finally the documentary record, covering not just the history and origins of the people here, but the land and natural history as well. It's a big book, and if, like me, you didn't get much about Africa in school, it's a great way to learn a lot. The earlier stuff on geology is drier, so if you pick up the book, you might want to skip ahead to start with something more interesting.

I plan to buy this book in hardcover when I get home, and reread it. The book is so big that reviewing it in detail, or even sharing its contents in detail, is out of the question. So instead, here is an assortment of information from the book that I found interesting. The book is so comprehensive even these excerpts are only from the first part; they don't include, for example, anything from the startling chapters on the first European interactions with Africa, and African slavery.

Anything quoted from the book is in quotation marks. From the book:

Africa is enormous. Here in Yaounde, it's as far to Johannesburg, South Africa as it is to Paris. “Africa is only the second largest continent, but it contains 22 per cent of the Earth's land surface. The Sahara desert alone is as large as the continental United States. In face, the United States, China, India, and New Zealand could all fit within the African coastline, together with Europe from the Atlantic to Moscow and much of South America." The Nile is the world's longest river.

The Bantu peoples who “colonized virtually all of sub-Saharan Africa” over a span about 3000 years in prehistoric times come from what is now the border area between Nigeria and Cameroon.

The Sahara used to be wooded grasslands and savannah. It was inhabited up until the last glacial maximum dried out the climate 18,000 years ago, and still wasn't fully dried out then. It's drier now, and getting bigger.

People have been eating honey for an awfully long time. There is a bird called the African honeyguide evolved to get the attention of people who show up in an area with an available bees' nest and lead them to it, in order to get a meal of leftover grubs and combs.

Farmers and elephants have been competing in Africa for more than 2000 years. The farmers finally got the upper hand in the 1950s. The plunge in elephant numbers in recent decades may well have more to do with human population numbers than the ivory trade.

Why does Africa seem to have so many threats to human health? People have been here the longest: “The tropical environments of Africa have seen the evolution of the greatest number and diversity of life forms on Earth. Although humans are a relatively recent expression of the continents' fecundity, the array of organisms that evolved to take advantage of their existence is no more than might be expected to result from five million years of co-evolution. Parasites and diseases affecting humans are uniquely prevalent in Africa. The afflictions are numerous; the means of infection bewildering and various.”

“the tropical rainforest is so efficient at keeping available resources at work within the living community of plants that the soils in which they stand are virtually devoid of nutrients... The result of such total self-sufficiency is that the entire system is rooted in sand, and is much less stable that might be supposed.”

Most mammals on the African savannah, where human ancestors evolved, stay cool because they have a muzzle and specialized blood vessels that serve as a radiator and heat exchanger. But this only functions if the brain is small enough. Our ancestors evolved a different cooling strategy (sweating, and walking upright to reduce sun exposure), which removed this limitation on brain size. Big brains require so much energy that our diet also changed: “Our small gut runs exclusively on high-quality foods, principally the rich reproductive nuclei of other organisms – seeds, nuts, tubers and eggs – topped off with significant quantities of protein in the form of meat.”

“the distinctive form of modern humans had evolved between 140,000 and 290,000 years ago, in Africa” and that “the entire population of the modern world was decended from a relatively small group of people that left Africa about 100,000 years ago.” How small? All non-African humans are decended from “as few as fifty” people. And “every human being alive today carries the mtDNA of just one African woman who lived more than 10,000 generations ago.”

When humans left Africa for the first time, there were fewer than a million people in the world.

The oldest primate in the fossil record considered our evolutionary ancestor was found in Egypt and lived 35 million years ago.

Human groups tend towards about 150 as an optimal size. This is related to the size of the neocortex in our brains. This corresponds to the smaller group size of other primates, and their smaller neocortexes. We maintain our bigger groups by using language instead of grooming for social cohesion, which is why about 3/4 of our conversation is about other people and relationships.

Population cycles of boom and bust are common throughout human existence, based on a fluctuating food supply. The story is not one of stable, steady population growth. Large numbers of people have died off every so often when food ran short, often because of climate change. (Anyone else feel a sudden chill...?)

Our ancestors were using fire “not less than 1 million years ago” according to evidence found in South Africa. And modern humans have been around no more than 290,000 years, so our hominid forbears used it for over 700,000 years before we came along and replaced them.

Sites at Katanda, on the Upper Semliki River in Congo, dating back 75,000 to 90,000 years, contain quantities of spears and barbed fishing harpoons. These specialized tools are 35,000 years older than anywhere else. The human invention of the spear here coincided with major climate changes and “a slew of mammalian extinctions.”

The earliest evidence of human agricultural management is 70,000 years old. Not quite farming, probably controlled burning to encourage growth of edible plants, inferred from the scale and nature of the leftovers unearthed.

“the world's earliest-known centralized food-production system was established along the Nile 15,000 years ago” and lasted for 5000 years, when climate change destroyed it thousands of years before the Pharaohs. Increased rainfall upstream severely reduced the size of the Nile floodplain that sustained it.

“The first animal to be domesticated was the dog, in western Asia, about 12,000 years ago, and the most recent appears to have been the goldfish (in China, about 1000 years ago).” Domestic cattle are descented from a monster called the aurochs (the last one died in captivity in Poland in the 1600s), which stood two meters high at the shoulder and had enormous forward-pointing horns. It may have been seduced into domestication by being provided with salt and water. The earliest “incontrovertible evidence” of domestic cattle is 8000 years old. Adult humans are naturally lactose-intolerent and had to evolve to drink milk.

Aksum, an ancient kingdom in modern-day Ethiopia: “From indigenous African roots dating back many thousands of years, and encompassing the full history of hunting and gathering, herding and agriculture, Aksum developed a civilization and empire whose influence, at its zenith in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, extended through the regions lying south of the Roman Empire, from the fringes of the Sahara in the west, across the Red Sea to the inner Arabian desert of Rub'el Hali in the east. The Aksumites developed Africa's only indigenous written script, Ge'ez, from which the written form of the languages spoken in modern Ethiopia has evolved; they traded with Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean and Arabia, and financed their operations with gold, silver, and copper coinage – the first and only coinage known in sub-Saharan Africa until the tenth century, when Arabian coins were used along the East African coast.” Aksum converted to Christianity in the fourth century AD. It met its end through environmental degradation and consequent demographic collapse.

The Aksumites carved stelae, gigantic stone tomb-markers. The biggest, visible today in five huge pieces, weighed over 700 tonnes and was “probably the largest single block of stone ever quarried, carved and set up in the ancient world.”

Coffee comes from Ethiopia.

People lived in peace for 1600 years without centralized authority at a place called Jenne-jenno, which lies on the inland Niger delta. They had plenty of food and a robust trading network, and their city got as large as 27,000 people. Through most of evolutionary history, people lived in small groups in Africa in peace, without the need for states. “But of course, like everything else in human evolutionary history, small peaceful communities in Africa were an ecological expedience.” Peace was an accident.

so Christy had this wig and some funny glasses...

2008-06-08T15:24:00.004+01:00

Our friend Christy, itinerant teacher, had a farewell party before leaving town for six weeks. She had a wig and some glasses at her place, and one thing led to another, and people had cameras, and then Karen made a collage:

I Love Shopping!

2008-06-05T17:35:00.006+01:00

For people who know me well, the title of this post may come as a shock. (And for people who follow this blog, the fact that I'm posting at all may come as a shock...) But here in Cameroon, I really do love shopping, specifically for food at Yaounde's main food market, Marche Mfoundi. Julia generally buys all the household fruit, vegetables, meat, etc. there, and once I started going with her several months ago, I never looked back. We go to market about once every two weeks, and it's like the best farmers market you've ever seen, but BIGGER and way more entertaining. Let me describe a typical trip to the Marche, along with some pictures I took there yesterday.

Our first stop is almost always our carrot man, which means he usually ends up changing the large bills that I start with. (The ATM gives 10,000 CFA bills; most of our purchases are 500 CFA or less.) He is very good natured about it, and every once in a while I try to give him some 'small money' instead of the big bills.
Mr. Carrot selects our pile of carrots and puts it in a bag. Julia's pregnant belly protrudes into the picture from the right. In the background, you can get some sense of what a wonderland this place is...
Our next stop was our onion lady, from whom we usually buy our onions and garlic. She said I could take her picture as long as I give her a copy. Hmmm, we use many onions, so I should probably follow through. Here, she bags up our onions.
Onions grow in the far north of Cameroon, and are trucked down to Yaounde in giant sacks. It's onion season now, so they are very inexpensive. Each of the smaller piles (still good-sized onions) is only 100 CFA, or about 25 cents. Yesterday we bought 2 big piles (eight very large onions) for about a dollar fifty.
Then we stopped and bought some beans (we got the black beans near the back in the photo) so that Julia can make her delicious beans & rice with plantains. So cheap and so good!
Our tomato lady bags up our allotment, while a hopeful 'porteur' waits in the background. Part of the market experience is being constantly assailed by young men who want to carry your things for you, either by hand or in a wheelbarrow. There are also lots of young boys trying to sell you extra sacks for your purchases. For some reason, there are also aggressive roving salesmen pushing leeks and black/white peppercorns. Because I'm a whitey, we get about five times the normal attention. Julia is very good to put up with all this!
There are lots of spices and such for sale, most of which I have no idea what they are, let alone how to use them. Some of them smell absolutely amazing! Also, those things on the right that look like rocks...they're rocks. Certain minerals are used in preparing certain foods.
Now it's time for some fruit, non? Look at those fine watermelons and giant grapefruits!
This is our main fruit lady, Maro. She sells great papayas and the most amazing pineapples, which we buy every time we go. She was very amused that I wanted to take photos, and I got this great shot of her laughing.
But really, she is a serious businesswoman. Here she is with her merchandise.
See? We're pals.
Nearby, Julia checks out some impressive avocados.
I'm gonna buy one of these soon, because they're coming into season. In French, it's called a corossol. No idea what it's called in English, but I've never seen these before coming here! It's a fruit, and we once had some tasty jam made from it. I was triumphant to actually discover what the fruit looked like.
The ever-present hot pepper, used in most of the cuisine here. They are so beautiful, and a whole section of the market is devoted almost exclusively to them. They have such a lovely and exciting smell, perfuming all the air around.
Our last stop is usually this woman, for lettuce (so it won't get crushed beneath other purchases) and anything else we've missed along the way. Isn't this a gorgeous picture?
Here is OUR porteur, Emmanuel. He is usually hanging around near where Maro sells her fruits, and once we meet up with him, the other guys leave us alone. You can't see his friendly smile in this picture, because it's hidden by his hat. Take my word for it, he has a friendly smile.

So that's the Marche, really a great highlight of our time here for me. And what you see here is such a small portion of it...the guys holding live chickens upside down by the feet, the piles of mangoes and citrus, the dried fish, women slicing bunches of greens into fine shreds with sharp knives, the dried flowers that we use to make juice, the fragrant heaps of basil and parsley, and my own personal fantasy come true: immense sacks of ginger root! I'm looking forward to showing this amazing place to some visitors later this month, so they can see even more why I love shopping.

Grease at ASOY

2008-05-31T11:40:00.003+01:00

Last night we went with the Boyds to attend the opening night of the American School of Yaounde's production of the musical Grease. Watching African schoolkids perform an American musical was something new. The kids had a blast, and the audience was enthusiastic and appreciative. Lots of fun. Here are a few pictures.

Danny Zuko's pals.

The cast sings and dances.

Danny meets the new and improved Sandi. Danny was the one American in the cast.

The cast performs the closing number.

The show runs today and closes tomorrow afternoon. They worked on it all year. The performance was at a theater in town, and even had a live band. It seems fair to assume this is the one student production of an American musical that we'll be seeing on this trip. But you never know.

commuting by taxi

2008-05-30T13:22:00.006+01:00

I thought it might be interesting to share a bit about our commute. We wrote about taxis once awhile ago, I think, but the subject never gets old. Plus it's an almost-daily part of our life here.

We take a taxi into our office two or three days out of the workweek. We chose not to own a car here, because of the expense and the potential legal complications in case of an accident; my friend Paul has a brother who got into a car accident in Spain many years ago, and when the police arrived the crowd sided with the other guy and they took Paul's brother to jail. His parents had to wire him a stupendous amount of money just so he could come home. This story has stuck with me.

I'm not sure my parents would send the money.

(Sorry Mom, I couldn't resist; just wondering whether you're reading the blog.)

Anyway, since we don't have a car, we do what lots of people here do, and take cabs. Our friends the Boyds have warned us that they consider this unsafe, and recommend we find a regular driver we know and trust. But we've talked to other people who have taken cabs (during daylight hours, as we do) in Yaounde for years without any trouble; one single woman who teaches at Rainforest has been doing so without incident for 10 years. So we decided to travel the way most people do here, instead of being apart from Cameroonians in one of the few ways we can choose to share in life here a bit more.

It's been very interesting. Cabs are shared here, among random people. Someone who wants a cab will just flag one down; the cab slows to a crawl, and the person calls out their destination, and maybe an offered price as well. Standard cab fare in Yaounde is 200 FCFA, about 50 cents US. If the rider wants any other price, either becuase it's a short ride, or they want to get a really far ride that costs extra, they'll call out a price along with their destination. Getting downtown is 200 FCFA from where we live. Work is about twice as far, so we offer 800 FCFA for the both of us. So there we are, in quartier Mvan where we live, at the side of the road in the morning, both with our backpacks, flagging down a cab. Often there are one or two other people in the shade where we stand to do this. The cab slows, and one of us calls out "Etoi-Meki, deux place, huit cent" -- carrefour Etoi-Meki by where we work, two of us, for 800 francs, or about two bucks.

This is a lot of money, even though it's a long way, and we usually find someone pretty quick. Coming home is another story; there's a lot more traffic at the end of the day then there is at the late-morning hour we usually wander into the office, so it's harder to get a cab, especially up in the busier neighborhood where we work. So if I'm flagging down the cab, I offer a thousand francs up front. This is all of an extra fifty cents, but it usually gets us a cab pretty quick. Otherwise we can stand there trying to flag one down for ten or fifteen minutes.

The cabs themselves are banged-up Japanese cars, almost exclusively. I assume that people buy them used; Valery told me that you can get a used car here for a few hundred dollars. They are always yellow, if official; I think there are official red ones too that are for longer-haul operation, but we always take yellow ones. The driver's official license with picture is always suspended from the rear-view mirror, and if you're in one after dark, the cabin light is always on, and frequently disco-colored. The cars range in size from an old Toyota Carina, which in the US is a Camry, down to a Toyota Starlet, which may be the Tercel. These are 80s models, judging from their boxy shape; definitely not the roomy middle-age person's Camry of today. So there is often not much headroom. Combine this with some drivers' penchant for dropping the seat way back in what I cannot help but think of as a gangsta lean, and you end up with very little space in the back seat sometimes. I am often folded up pretty tight, my knees up, my upper body folded downward over my heavy computer backpack as I look sideways out the window at Yaounde going by. It's often better than this, though; today there was little headroom, but lots of legroom, so I could just slouch. There are three people in the back seat, in a full cab (keep in mind this may be the back seat of 25-year-old Tercel), and another three in front, in the bucket seats. The two in the front are stacked on top of each other, literally. No space is wasted. Nobody seems to mind, and often the cabs aren't full.

We go a long way, so people get in and out for shorter rides as we make our way across town, a trip that takes us anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, but usually somewhere in between. People often fall into conversation in the cabs, and it makes me wish I could understand more French than I do, the real fluid French that francophones speak with each other. Today the woman in the back with us got into an animated conversation with the two guys up front about schooling, but I couldn't follow it. They were giving her some opinions and advice.

The drivers are collegial with each other. We've never once heard a cab driver actually yell, ever, at anyone. They murmur (it's not even muttering, being free of hostility) when cut off on the road by another cabbie, or by someone deciding to merge across their nose and hold them up. Sometimes they'll pull up next to another cab and borrow a few francs, or say hello.

Taking taxis to work has been a fun, if sometimes uncomfortable, way to get to know Yaounde, since they'll take a few different routes between our home and work. And it's fun to pass through the streets almost unnoticed, this way, in contrast to all the attention and stares we get sometimes when we walk around on foot. Nobody here with money walks around on the street. Our Cameroonian friend Isaac told me once that when people see us do that as foreigners, they just assume we're too cheap to pay for a cab.

Taking pictures of taxi drivers and their passengers we don't know seems like a bad idea. So here, instead, is a picture of a pizza we made recently, modeled by Ann and our friend Karen:

Cameroonian Literature in English, and brief news

2008-05-28T15:20:00.005+01:00

Every so often someone who doesn't even know us but has an interest in Cameroon finds our blog. So this is for you, if you're one of those people, or someone we know who is also interested in Cameroon in general.

There is a blog about Cameroonian English-language literature! You can find it at http://anglocamlit.blogspot.com

I found it via the news feed for the term "Cameroon" that I set up on Google News, which fed me a link today to a story about it.

I haven't yet spent much time reading it. Caveat lector. But at first glance, it looks interesting, and certainly relevant to Cameroon.

* * * * *

It's raining. I'm at CTC, across the road from our house, checking email. We're having a few people over for music tonight, including Phil and Cathy one last time before they leave town tomorrow. I'm working today on writing a videogame called ScholAfrica, which we hope to present at a big Presbyterian Church USA meeting next month; if we manage to get it online, I'll post a link to it here. Then I need to polish up the Microsoft Excel training session I'm presenting (in French, ulp) at the Eglise Presbyterian Camerounaise (EPC) in a couple of weeks, with help from Jeff and Ann. Tomorrow Jeff and I go into the EPC offices to check out the machines we'll be using. Other projects in the works include finding a server for the microfinance database application I wrote, and some redesign work on the RELUFA website at relufa.org. We've gotten busier with our volunteering, that's for sure. Tomorrow night is the high-school musical at ASOY, the American School of Yaounde. We're going with the Boyds, our friends and coworkers, and their kids. The show ASOY is doing is the American musical "Grease".

Ann has some great pictures of a couple of recent interviews she did with people connected with RELUFA; one is with a lady who dyes cloth, another with a lady who provides a lunch service in the quartier where our office is located. If you know Ann, consider sending her an email asking her to post these. :)

And here's a picture of Ann a friend of ours shot. It's blurry, but I love it anyway:

ultimate!

2008-05-26T13:26:00.001+01:00

We play a weekly Ultimate game here in Yaounde with people from the SIL community, on their field. Here's a few pictures from last Sunday:

Steve, Marta and Ann.

I love this picture and wish I could publish it bigger here, but you'll just have to ask to see it blown up when we get home. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to get an action shot of an Ultimate game with a little snapshot digital camera, because of the shutter delay.

Karen, who injured her knee playing a few weeks ago but gamely showed up to watch, and Regan.

Beth (married to Steve), Harry, and Ken (married to Marta), with teenage friend.

Anna, Amy and friend. These were some of my teammates that day; we had so many people that we played three teams of six (this was the most players ever) and rotated teams every three points; I got these pictures when we were on the sidelines waiting our turn.

music nite!

2008-05-23T14:38:00.002+01:00

We got together with friends last night for some music. Here are a few pictures.

Ann cooked Thai peanut sauce and roasted eggplant last night before we left. Note whiskey bottle at upper right, with yellow label. We are not big whiskey drinkers; this is actually a peanut bottle. For some reason, all the peanuts in Yaounde are sold in old whiskey bottles. Someone here is drinking lots of whiskey.

This is Beth. She hosted last night. Her apartment is near our place, in an apartment complex called Cabtal.

Phil and Cathy. Phil can play anything, and Cathy can sing it. We met them last month, and had them over to our place along with another guitarist named Dan, who has since returned to the village where he works. That first night was mostly bluegrass, but we sang all sorts of things last night: Johnny Cash, Neil Young, Beatles, blues, hymns, and lots of old-time gospel numbers from the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, with Cathy and Ann singing beautiful harmony. Alas, Phil and Cathy are leaving Yaounde next week and won't return til after we leave the country. We may get one more music night together before they leave, if they have time.

Karen. She hurt her knee a couple of weeks ago; thus the borrowed crutch. It doesn't seem to have gotten her down though.

Me and Ann.

Pam, Phil, me, Ann and Cathy. Pam also hurt her leg. She has the other crutch from the set Karen's came from. We met at Beth's last night so she and Karen wouldn't have far to walk, since they all live at Cabtal.

radio silence

2008-05-22T15:22:00.002+01:00

Not much to post lately. We are in a routine, such as it is. We go into work a few days a week, via a 45-minute cab ride through town. We work there. We come home. Our social life is active now; we haven't had a dull evening in some time. Last night we went out with a few SIL people in the neighborhood, including a Brit, to watch Manchester United and Chelsea battle out the European football championship. I had meant to take pictures but forgot the camera. The Cameroonians in the bar were raucously enthusiastic, and we had a lot of fun. Tonight we're getting together with a few people in the missionary community to play and sing some bluegrass music. Tomorrow we go into the office again. I'm writing a videogame for the Presbyterian Church's assembly next month. Ann is working on articles and setting up the fair trade program. And we're both working on some changes to RELUFA's website. There hasn't been much new to tell lately, but we'll be doing some traveling next month when Ann's folks come to visit, to the mountains in the west. And I'll try to get some pictures up soon. There is plenty more excitement to come.

church, braids, beasties links

2008-05-12T12:53:00.003+01:00

I stayed home, a little under the weather yesterday morning, while Ann went to church with Karen. Karen got some pictures and wrote up a blog post about the experience. So if you're curious about Ann's trip to church yesterday, check it out here.

Also, Mandi is a SIL pilot here. She recently participated in an airborne wildlife survey, and got some fun pictures. That's here.

She also got her hair braided, a five-hour procedure here that a few other friends have gone through as well. That's here.

Fellow ultimate frisbee player Brad really liked Mandi's hair. I'm encouraging him to get his done, along with his beard. He'd look like a Babylonian king.

internet outage

2008-05-11T13:04:00.005+01:00

My family had a moped when I was a kid, a yellow Motobecane (a French brand) that looked like a little 50cc motorcycle. It had wire side-baskets. My Mom used it to go to the grocery store sometimes, a brown grocery bag in each basket as she zoomed home in a white 3/4 "jet-pilot" helmet. A few years later I used it for my paper route. You couldn't really get all the Sunday papers for the route in those 2 baskets, but you could jam quite a few in there, and it sure beat carrying all of them on your back. My Dad (who to his everlasting credit would get up on Sundays and help me out with deliveries) has a friend who thanks his years working for the postal service for his back trouble; I sometimes wonder if my slouchy posture owes something to the Sunday edition of the Grand Rapids Press.

The moped developed a compression problem with its little one-cylinder, 2-cycle engine. You had to pedal to start the thing up, and eventually it wouldn't start. But I discovered by experimenting with it that I could still get it started if I rotated the flywheel with my hand to the point of maximum resistance. No idea why this worked, but it did.

I was thinking about that moped today. I got up here to CTC to use the internet, and the proxy server is down. My browser tells me that the proxy server is refusing connections. This has been a problem on and off here for several days. Email still works, so I'm posting this via email. But the net is down.

Or mostly down, anyway. I immediately tried bypassing the proxy server and connecting directly to the net, but that didn't work. And then, on a whim, I tried connecting to facebook.com with https instead of http. And it went through. So, oddly, http won't work with the proxy but https will. Almost nothing on the net that I use requires https (a higher-security protocol most often used for passwords and purchases), but it turns out that a little bit of facebook does.

Rotate the flywheel a bit. Who knows? It might work.

two recipes

2008-05-10T14:09:00.008+01:00

A propos of nothing in particular...

1. Egg sandwiches, as sold up the street by a Senegalese guy who runs a little store. No idea if any Africans eat these, but he sells lots of them to the expats who work for SIL nearby.

ingredients:
- cooked spaghetti noodles
- one or two eggs
- large hamburger roll (aka "gateau" en Francais)
- Maggi seasoning cube (a combination of MSG, spices and perhaps some dried bouillon)

to prepare:
- reheat noodles in a small skillet with a little oil
- crumble Maggi cube into noodles
- break eggs into noodles and scramble together
- when eggs finished, scoop final product onto roll

wrap in small black plastic bag, sell for 400 central African francs, a bit less than a US dollar.

Very tasty. Size varies a bit; the guy working today makes them a bit smaller, about the size of a big restaurant hamburger. The usual guy, who I think is the owner, makes them about the size of a Chicago softball.

2. Folere smoothies

ingredients:
- 1 liter folere (a cold sweetened beverage made by boiling dried hibiscus flowers with sugar)
- 2 trays ice cubes (made with filtered water)
- 1 cup sweetened ginger beverage (contains lots of pureed ginger, sugar and some water)
[update: also 1 mango, diced; thanks for the reminder, LR!]

to prepare: mix in blender and serve

These are really, really good. We found the ginger beverage at Mahima, the grocery store downtown. Julia makes folere every week or two. It's pronounced fo-luh-ray, and actually has accents on one or more of the e's when correctly spelled.

There's a sweetened yogurt beverage here, also sold at the egg-sandwich place, called khosam. Next time we'll probably throw some of that in the smoothies too.

Food is love. Or a kind of love, anyway.

Ann and Karen enjoy folere-ginger smoothies
photo credit: the Laughing Rover

portraits from the north

2008-05-06T11:26:00.002+01:00

Here are a few of the people we met up north on our recent trip.

friendship

2008-05-05T12:05:00.001+01:00

I finished reading all of African Friends and Money Matters, by David Marantz, which Kate, Brian and Dave were kind enough to include in their January shipment to us of things we neglected to bring. It was published by SIL, but nobody here had a copy handy.

The book explores lots of topics, but the title gives some clues about where Westerners often run into trouble in Africa. It's been helpful to me in understanding some unfamiliar and difficult things. If you like the book, you can find it on Amazon. It was recommended by a friend who worked in Zambia for awhile as the one essential thing to read before living here as a Westerner. I second that.

Interpersonal relations between Africans and Westerners in Africa may be friendly and even cordial, and typically are, but developing significant friendships on a personal level requires considerable effort. For many Africans it is difficult to forget history, the relationships of power that the white man represented and still represents, the economic disparities, the color of skin, and perhaps above all the great cultural differences. Of these the most significant one is the important place that material resources are given in African friendships.

25. [for Africans] A network a friends is a network of resources. A disinterested friendship is something without sense. It is only natural to expect material benefit from friendships. To a Westerner this comes close to buying friendship, or of seeking and having friends for what one can get out of them.

25W. Disinterested friendship is the ideal in the West. Any friendship that includes material considerations is suspect.

It is helpful to consider several factors that lead to the [Westerner's] doubt about relationships. First, when these questions arise, it is good to remember that the Westerner and the African live on very different socioeconomic levels, with the African considering the Westerner to be rich and himself to be poor, with much cultural behavior flowing from these differences. Second, many Africans are ready to use casual meetings or acquaintances as a means to gain personal profit.... Very different relationships can be built with [affluent Africans] as socioeconomic equals. In these relationships it is often the African who represent higher economic and social classes than do the Westerners.

-- however --

28. Visiting [by Africans] is concentrated on friends and acquaintances who are actively part of a person's economic network.

and

29. Most [social] networking [by Africans] is done horizontally or "up" and seldom "down" socially or economically.

So opportunities for egalitarian relationships, which is to say a real personal friendship in Western terms, are rare.

This may seem cold written out on the page like this. But it's a fact of life here, and something I've been struggling with a lot lately. Ann doesn't, much, except on my behalf. We have very different personal boundaries, and some of what we want from this trip differs as well. Plus I'm male, 6'4" tall, my hair buzzed short for comfort in the heat, and older than she is, so perhaps we elicit different expectations. People who look like me have the power and the money, to be blunt, and Ann is a woman, which here tends to mean not much of either, alas.

I'm clear on why I'm here and what I'm doing, but I'm often unclear on how to respond to people on an individual level, especially people with whom I don't already share a work or social context. People here have lots and lots of friends, according to Maranz, and are always trying to enlarge their circle of acquaintances, especially upwards as clients to patrons from whom they can benefit materially, relationships then maintained by frequent and unannounced home visits (something mercifully rare in our experience). I tend to take my time getting to know people past a certain point of cordiality, I value my privacy, and I avoid people who take advantage of my friendliness to impose on me.

I am a bad fit for Africa. The positive way to formulate this insight is that I have a lot to learn from living here.

None of this is a shock to me. I have been to Africa before, and I at least skimmed Maranz's book before we came here in October, so I had some idea of how it would be. Our work relationships at RELUFA are friendly partnerships free of these misunderstandings. And Ann is untroubled by this. But it's still perplexing for me to know how to just accept all this, and to know how to deal with people when it comes up. But if the Devil's in the details, God is too.

quotes

2008-05-04T18:25:00.005+01:00

We do a lot of reading here, especially me; you can see the list over on the right-hand sidebar if you scroll down a bit. It wasn't really the point of the trip to come here and read, but we have a wonderfully flexible schedule and more time here than at home, and it is one of the best things in life, after all.

Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values, and less a barbaric land than an unfamiliar voice. (Beryl Markham, West with the Night, 1942)

Our friend David recommended Markham's memoir and loaned it to me. He and his wife Danielle have just left town. We were just getting to know them, and were sorry to see them go. They went up north, and are not planning on returning to Yaounde when they leave later this year, so we may not get to see them again. The transient nature of the SIL community is like our urban San Francisco church, where people come and go like this, sometimes (it seems) in almost no time at all.

Some of our friends back home are having a rough time right now, and one of them mailed something around that I really liked:

When we honestly ask which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not-knowing, not-curing, not-healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness... makes it clear that whatever happens in the external world, being present to each other is what really matters. (Henri J.M. Nouwen)

Whatever else we're accomplishing here, or not, we're present, for a little while anyway.

flight home from the north

2008-05-01T12:58:00.002+01:00

Here are some photos from our flight home from Maroua last week.

Ann rode in the front on the way home.

And here are a few pictures out the window of landscapes in Cameroon's Extreme North:

We flew through a curtain of rain, in between two thunderstorms, on the way to our fuel stop in Ngaoundere.

This next surreal photo is looking down on the airstrip in Ngaoundere. That's a herd of cattle being shooed off the runway for our approaching plane:

And here are a few last ones I shot flying into Yaounde:

And landing:

Since the photos on the blog are so tiny, I might clip out some portraits of the people we met as well, just the faces, and post a few of those sometime soon.

Elsewhere in the news, besides being back from the north, we had a good meeting with Valerie at work this week and decided to go into the office every Monday, so people there know when to find us. Ann continues to work on fair trade research and article writing, and I'm working on the microfinance program database, an Excel training session (in French, ulp!), and may be doing some web design work, which is always fun. Our social life here on the SIL end of town where we live is a continuing pleasure; last night we had David and Danielle and Karen over for dinner; D&D brought gazpacho, Karen brought smoothie fixins', Ann made a salad and I brewed coffee and did dishes and talked a lot. We talked about books and food and the boat D&D lived on for a year back in the states and friends and things we love and hate about Cameroon for hours and hours, blissfully ignorant of the time in a way we never seem to be back home.

more photos from up north

2008-04-29T19:31:00.003+01:00

Here are more photos from our time up north last week, in the Extreme North Province of Cameroon, near the city of Maroua. The trip was to visit granaries in villages participating in RELUFA's food sovereignty program.

A granary, and a Presbyterian volunteer. Those sacks are 100 or possibly 120 kilos. The granaries we saw stored millet, sorghum, rice and corn.

He's displaying an open bag. This is either millet or sorghum, which is also known as millet.

There are lots of kids in the villages we visited, and they were always interested in our delegation.

One of the men who welcomed us.

A village in northern Cameroon: conical roofs, mud-brick architecture, hot sandy ground, stony hills behind, and trees for shade.

A traditional one-family granary, accessed through a roof hole. The ladder is the log at right, with steps carved in it.

People dressed up for our visits, especially the women.

Visiting with women in one of the villages.

We were fed at one stop, by this lady, just outside the granary behind us. That's me in the yellow shirt.

Ann and Christi visiting with women in one of the villages.

Lionel (left) from PC-USA, and our driver.

Me with Elias. Elias heads up an NGO that is very active in the food sovereignty program. He's the one who reports on this program at RELUFA assemblies, and he lives in the region, in a village himself.

Meeting under a tree, in one village. Ann's on that high rock in the middle.

There were often goats around. Or maybe sheep. Not really sure how to tell them apart, since I'm a city boy. Chevres and moutons, respectively, in French.

More village architecture. We heard people don't sleep indoors except during the rainy season, since their houses get so hot in the sun.

Village well.

More kids. This meeting ran long. Can you tell?

We saw donkeys here and there as well.

This is fresh-harvested millet.

A thatched-roof house belonging to a Christian family, which I was told is discernible by the cross at the peak.

This guy seemed a bit lost.

This one actually spent awhile looking for his friend from the previous photo.

One of the village women who administers a granary.

Roof thatch.

More kids. This was a shorter meeting.

Talking things over at our hotel in Maroua after our visits, on the morning of the day we flew out. From left, Elias, Lionel and Christi.

Basil, who works for an NGO in Garoua, the next city south, who came along to observe. I found out he's another computer guy.

Mangoes, lots and lots of mangoes, for sale at the side of the road in Maroua. It's mango season here at the moment. There are a few different varieties.

That's our whirlwind tour of the north. We had a great time seeing it all for the first time, and never would have gotten to see the villages like that if we had just wandered up here on our own instead of coming along on a work trip. This was much better than simply being a tourist. We made ourselves useful by taking pictures and tracking expenses.

And, actually, by blogging. RELUFA has a new intern we met just today, and apparently she found RELUFA partly through our blog. So maybe this will all be useful in ways we can't predict.

Mango Chutney

2008-04-29T12:55:00.003+01:00

Okay, I’ve been holding out on you in the mango department. Not on purpose, but it’s been several weeks, perhaps even unto a whole month, since I tried making mango chutney for the first time. Got a recipe from epicurious.com, played around with it a bit so it suited me, put it all together one afternoon, and there it was. One nice jar-ful, plus another cup or so to freeze. As it boiled along contentedly on the stove, I had a taste every now and then to monitor the progress. But then I put it away and went out to play ultimate Frisbee, and didn’t really think much of it until nearly a week later at dinnertime.

Our friend Kerry (she used to work as a chef) was over, and we had some couscous with a few raisins, some sautéed chicken pieces seasoned lightly with salt and pepper (thanks Chris!), and then added a few dollops of the chutney. Wow – it was SO GOOD! Absolutely loaded with flavor, not too sweet, with a nice round of spices and fresh ginger to perk up the fruit and onions. So without further ado, here’s the recipe. Even though most of y’all don’t live anywhere near a mango tree, I bet you’d still enjoy this if you made it with an imported mango from Mexico. (The apples I used were imported from Europe, so we’re even.)

Mango Chutney (adapted from epicurious.com)

1 ½ medium apples, peeled, cored, and chopped (I used golden delicious)
1 large mango, peeled and chopped (not quite fully ripe)
(You should end up with roughly equal amounts of apple and mango.)
¾ cup granulated sugar
½ cup finely chopped onion
¼ cup raisins
¼ cup white vinegar
¼ cup (scant) finely chopped peeled gingerroot
1 tbsp lemon juice
2 tsp curry powder
1/4 tsp each: ground nutmeg, cinnamon, and salt (be slightly generous with the nutmeg and cinnamon)

Combine apples, mangoes, sugar, onion, raisins, vinegar, and gingerroot in a large stainless steel or enamel saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat, reduce heat, and boil gently, uncovered, for 20 minutes or until fruit is tender and mixture is thickened, stirring occasionally. Add lemon juice, curry powder, nutmeg, cinnamon, and salt; boil gently for 5 minutes. Can, freeze, or just refrigerate if you’re going to eat it right away.

back from the far north

2008-04-25T13:13:00.003+01:00

Here's a first few pictures from our trip to the far north of Cameroon. We flew on SIL's airplane, piloted by our friend Rob. We left Yaounde on Monday and flew up north to the city of Maroua, with a stop for fuel on the way, and then flew home again on Wednesday.

The Extreme North Province, as it's know, is a completely different part of the country from where we've been so far, in the region of Africa called the Sahel, a hot, dry area that lies south of the Sahara desert and stretches across several countries. This part of Cameroon suffers poor harvest, droughts, and people often simply run out of food at certain lean times of the year.

Our RELUFA network has a food sovereignty program to help villagers set up communal granaries in this part of Cameroon. The purpose of our trip was to visit some of the villages where the granaries are located with Christi, and with Lionel from the Presbyterian Church USA's Joining Hands program, who was here visiting Cameroon for a week.

Here's the plane, just leaving the hangar. We got there about 545am, so this picture is at maybe 615.

Christi, Lionel and Ann. We work with Christi on a regular basis; she is the Joining Hands liaison to RELUFA and, along with her husband Jeff, the one who offered us volunteer work in Cameroon. In fact, we're officially Presbyterian Church USA volunteers. Jeff works with Presbyterian churches in Cameroon and other central African countries, and he and I are collaborating on a French training session for Microsoft Excel at the moment. Christi and Jeff live in Yaounde with their two high-school age kids, and we typically see them several times a week. Lionel is Christi's boss. He's lived in a few different African countries, lives in the US now, and is originally from Haiti. He's been doing development-related church work a long time, and it was a real pleasure to get to meet him and talk with him a bit about development projects here and elsewhere.

Me in the front seat. I don't have a lot of small-plane experience, and I loved it. I kept thinking of the Millenium Falcon in Star Wars. Lionel and I agreed that this was the next-best thing to motorcycling.

Rob, who works for SIL as a pilot, and is flying the plane.

Shot this out the window as we were leaving Yaounde on a clear, beautiful Monday morning.

Another shot from the plane. Cameroon's terrain is varied; we're still in the green central part of the country here, headed north into the mountains.

Partway to Maroua, stopping for fuel. We lingered about half an hour refueling from a drum some local missionaries trucked to the airstrip. A couple of friendly Cameroonian guys in soldier uniforms showed up and I think Rob checked in with them briefly. Us passengers stretched our legs. People kept trickling in from the surrounding bush, and we had a crowd of maybe 10 scattered along the sides of the runway by the time we taxied to the end, turned around, and took off for Maroua.

More pictures coming soon, including the villages and countryside up north.

music night

2008-04-20T15:02:00.005+01:00

Music Night, one of the final social events of the annual SIL branch conference, was last night. Ann and I were invited to help out a pop bottle orchestra. She played and I held up the music for everyone, which is a pretty good distribution of labor based on our relative musical skills. I got a couple of photos with friend-and-fellow-orchestra-member Karen's camera. Here are the players:

And here's a shot of us at Karen's later, where the orchestra ended up hanging out after the show:

Images are shamelessly purloined from Karen's blog, which has some great pictures and some stories as well from her own experience here.

cultural differences

2008-04-19T14:23:00.014+01:00

Here's a list of cultural difference from a handout at the anthropology
seminar I attended at SIL yesterday. (Scroll down to see it, for some reason Blogger is having a hard time displaying tables.)

African culture	Western culture
strong community values (group participation, decisions)	strong individualistic values (individual initiative, decisions)
community identity	individual identity
community living style	private living style
extended family emphasis	immediate family emphasis
holistic approach to life	categorical approach to life
importance of the event	importance of schedules and clock time
people-oriented priorities	task- and goal-oriented priorities
real-life (situational) thinking	abstract and academic thinking
preference for real-life learning	preference for academic learning
spiritual worldview	scientific worldview
emphasis on spoken communication	emphasis on written communication
emphasis on spoken agreements based on relationships	emphasis on written agreements based on policies
respect for the elderly	respect for the educated
traditional inherited leadership	elected (democratic) leadership
death is passing into the spirit world, survivors must perform rituals	death is a practical problem, survivors need couseling and support
resolve conflicts through a mediator	resolve conflicts face-to-face
practical, ritual response to spirit realities	intellectual response to spirit realities
practical, ritual approach to religion	intellectual approach to religion
vulnerability seen as weakness	vulnerability seen as strength
much interest in the spirit world	little interest in the spirit world

Why "Western", I wonder? Maybe "Northern" instead? The Cameroonians I've discussed some of these differences with, if they're not university-educated, just say "white" for this category.

I wonder which "Western" people this list applies to as well? Where on this scale would a rural American, for instance, without a lot of educational opportunities lie? Sure, the list is a generalization, and it certainly does seem to express pretty clearly, judging from what people said about their own experience, a set of different expectations between the foreign missionary community where this discussion took place yesterday and the Africans they encounter, employ, and seek to serve with their Bible translation work. But the missionary community here is an elite group of people, with a high level of education and the resources and motivation to come all the way here to do complicated and often difficult work. Would you find a lot of these differences within the US depending on which groups you compared? Maybe as class differences within the US? Or between the evangelical community Ann and I grew up in back in Michigan, and the Mennonite religious community several people in our San Francisco church grew up in back east, with its focus on community and group decisions and spiritual harmony? And where would, for instance, our San Francisco yoga instructor Kristie lie on this chart? I'm guessing somewhere in the middle.

This handout was actually an adjunct to the main discussion, which was based on a book called African Friends and Money Matters, by David Maranz, although the discussion did cover a lot of the differences on this list. Here are a few items from Maranz's book, which is actually published by SIL:

"Africans find security in ambiguous arrangements, plans and speech."

"Westerners find security in clearly defined relationships, arrangements, plans and speech."

And this:

For many Africans it seems that they believe there is such a danger of offending others that they prefer silence, indirectness, the solution of time making opinions clear, and extreme tact. An African friend told me this is one reason that Westerners are often misled, interpreting silence to mean that all is well. And of course to many Africans the Westerner comes across as insensitive, callous, indifferent to how others think and feel, and as having a great lack of human sensitivity and tact.

The thrust of the discussion yesterday was on this point, the difficulty in communicating based on very different expectations of social and economic relationships. Everything here, from employment arrangements to the prices in the markets to the traffic in the streets, is endlessly, constantly in a state of negotiation. It's exhausting until (or perhaps unless) you get used to it.

Maranz's book not only explores these differences, but explains how they make sense for people in Africa, which has a very different history from the West and where people's material conditions are usually very different today. He has a list in the book that summarizes these differences; here it is (somewhat abbreviated and annotated), and as he takes pains to note, this chart concerns the fewer than 50% of Africans who are employed, and thus doing better than lots of other people here (again, scroll down to see the table, due to strange Blogger layout trouble):

Concern of Life	Westerner [in Africa]	[Employed] African
Residence	big house, upscale neighborhood	small house crowded full of extended family members
food	varied, balanced, eats in restaurants, invites friends over	local affordable foods, feeds many friends and relatives, food budget always under stress
clothing	buys as needed, well-dressed per chosen lifestyle	tries to dress well but struggles to afford, buys used clothing from West, has one/few very good outfits
transportation	has efficient private vehicles to go to work, church, club, for shopping, outings	uses inefficient public transportation, walks [I question whether it's really "inefficient", based on our experience]
social life	varied; entertains at home, hangs with friends, big budget	largely centered on visiting and receiving kin and friends with food and drink; possible sporting events
vacations	takes vacations in home country	may have mandated vacations, does not leave country
educational background	university-level	limited opportunities in ill-equipped schools
educational resources	books, magazines, tv, videos, [internet!], keeps up with the world	radio, possibly tv, possibly newspaper, owns few books or magazines
children	few	many
children's education	good, well-equipped schools, well-trained teachers, relatively small classes, up-to-date curriculum, headed for university	difficult to ensure minimal schooling for all, large classes with almost no equipment, univerity possible only for the bright and lucky
telephone	home, work	public phone, possibly at work too
computer	up-to-date machine, email and net access	possibly available in office, hard to afford [this may be changing somewhat; we know at least one family with few resources but with a computer that was donated]
family responsibilities	to nuclear family	to large extended family including parents, grandparents, cousins and others
medical situation	access to well-trained doctors, dentists, specialists, hospital care, prescription drugs [and an insurance policy that promises medical evacuation if services are needed that are only available abroad]	can barely afford marginal care in a very limited local clinic, well-trained doctors beyond reach, may consult traditional healers and use traditional medicines [the interurban buses we've ridden often have someone on them selling herbal medicines, who gives a one-hour lecture and then does a lot of business]
discretionary income	lots of money for nonessentials	hard-pressed to make ends meet for food, housing, power, water and clothes
retirement expectations	preparing with investments, house ownership in home country, government-provided security	paying into government-run social security fund with marginal prospects of ever receiving its limited benefits [this sounds a bit familiar, actually...]
economic security	little-concerned with long-term unemployment or destitution, possibly concerned about maintaining a well-paying job	very much concerned with obtaining or maintaining long-term employment, loss means hard times and possibly destitution along with many dependents
physical security	solid construction, iron bars, guards [and secure location, dog, a yard with high walls topped with glass shards and barbed wire, and ex-pat and local friends to call in case of trouble]	questionable construction, neighborhood insecurities

The other thing that all this leaves me wondering, both these great, thought-provoking lists and the discussion yesterday, is how best to leverage all these differences to communicate effectively across our cultures? To partner with Africans to do the kind of linguistic and translation work that SIL does? To do the kind of development partnership with African organizations that we're helping with at RELUFA? How do you partner in a way that lets you collaborate not just on your methods, but on your goals? (Joining Hands seems to be doing this very thing with RELUFA, based on the meetings we attend). What does a development project based on African cultural values look like, and how does it differ from a development project under Western management? How about a church? And what does it take for an institution that may have its origins in a culture of domination, like colonialism, to reclaim its identity in a way that frees people instead of dominating them, to leave or reformulate alien values that don't work well here into something local that does? There's such a long history of foreign domination in much of Africa, culturally and religiously and in the rawest and most practical physical terms (slavery, resource exploitation, colonization) that it seems to be part of people's worldview, foreign and local people alike, seems to have molded everyone's expectations.

I wrote more about this and then deleted it. Back in college, I took a trip to Africa for a month, an overseas anthropology class during the interim between semesters. We went to Kenya for three weeks and then spent a week in Liberia. I came back and wrote up an article for the Calvin College Chimes about it. I didn't use the right language to express what I had to say, and got an outraged letter from an Ethiopian student at Calvin shortly thereafter, asking me if I had ever taken the time to actually talk to an African while I was there, and informing me how ignorant I was. I kept that letter -- it's in a box at home -- and I have never forgotten it. It made clear to me that, whatever my intentions were, I had offended someone through my ignorance of cultural differences and poor choice of language.

So all this is really interesting, but complicated. And dangerous.

Fun Night improv

2008-04-15T13:19:00.003+01:00

I mentioned to a few of my friends back home recently that I missed doing improv. Sam in San Francisco suggested I find a way to do some improv here. A few days later, our friend Christy here in Yaounde suggested to Ann and me that we get together with a few other people and put an improv set together for an upcoming SIL event. Christy has never done improv before, and neither had any of the people she had in mind other than us, but she thought it might be fun. And once we decided to do that, I discovered that there was another alum of River City Improv, an improv group from my hometown that I performed with for years, here in Yaounde for a few weeks volunteering with SIL. There are maybe a dozen of us in the entire world, and another one was right here, right now. It didn't work out for her to join us onstage, since she was flying out that night, and not sure if she would make the show, but it was great to see her, and since it turned out that she was there, she threw us some good audience suggestions.

The event was SIL Cameroon's annual Fun Night, which took place last Friday. This is a traditional part of the branch conference, when SIL people from all over Cameroon come meet in Yaounde for a few weeks. Ann and I don't actually work for SIL, but we've met and made friends with several people who do, including our friend Christy, who travels around the region teaching homeschooled SIL kids for several weeks at a time. One of the slides they showed at Fun Night was a great picture of her and two of her students up north dressed up as pigs for a play they wrote and performed for an audience of two, their parents. The pig play probably would have been a fine contribution to Fun Night, but Christy proposed to Ann and me that we put together an improv set.

So we did. With a grand total of one hour of rehearsal, seven people who had never done improv before in their lives, plus Ann, got up and performed it in front of a couple of hundred of their friends colleagues and family members. And they were great! We got to do two sets, since the other acts ran a bit short on time. We did 20 or 30 minutes of improv, all told. I was the MC for the improv sets, so I introduced the games, got suggestions, and edited the scenes when they finished, in order to keep things moving.

Our preparation and rehearsal was a one-hour meeting at Christy's apartment. I spent some time combing through the Improv Encylopedia online to jog my memory, took some notes, and then came to the meeting with improv games that seemed good for new improvisors, games with clear rules and a structure for who talks when. As we talked about each one at Christy's, people volunteered to try them and then perform them on Friday night. Some people were nervous, but everyone was willing to give it a try, and seemed to like the idea.

These performers weren't actors, but linguists and teachers who work for SIL and for Rainforest School, where lots of SIL kids attend. The format was improv games, which are funny and quick and depend on language and cleverness and a willingness to be silly, rather than acting experience. When our turn came to perform, I asked all the performers to get onstage, asked the audience who had seen improv before (most had not), and then explained that since we depended on them for suggestions for our success, we had to warm them up. We invited them to sing My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean with us, and every time a word was sung beginning with the letter B, they had to stand if they were sitting, or sit if they were standing. Meanwhile the performers and me sang lustily from the stage and bobbed up and down ourselves. Then to business.

The first game was Actor's Nightmare. One actor reads consecutive lines from a play script, the other has no script and has to improvise lines to somehow make the scene make sense. Dan improvised and Christine read from the script. I asked the audience for a random page number, and a location in Cameroon for the scene to take place. The location was Lolodorf (not sure on the spelling), which is the village where Dan actually works. The only script I had for this game was one I had borrowed. It was the script for the recent Rain Forest high school play, written by an SIL member here, so I introduced the skit as "deleted scenes from an early draft of the recent high-school play." Dan and Christine did a great job, and the audience was warm and appreciative, and stayed that way the whole show. Then we played the same game again, another scene, with Karen improvising and Margaret reading from the script.

The next game was the only one with all the actors, so we did it second to make sure we got it in, in case we got cut for time; we didn't realize we'd get a chance to do everything we had prepared. This was an advice game, where the audience asks questions. I asked the actors to come onstage in a line. I explained to the audience that I had found a strange snake out on a logging road in the wilds of eastern Cameroon that could answer questions. The snake had many heads, and each head could say only one word. I then fielded questions for the snake to answer, and the actors passed the mic from one to the next, each actor contributing one word to the snake's answer. As usual, this game resulted in a lot of hilarious semi-coherent nonsense that more or less answered the question; the audience loves the consternation of the players themselves as they try to come up with something reasonable.

For the last game of the first set, Chris J. and Christy came onstage and improvised a song based on the audience suggestion of "travel." So these two people, who have never improvised before but are a couple of hilarious over-the-top characters who clearly love performing in front of an audience, got onstage and made up a song about travel in Cameroon, on the spot. They really sold it too, and as the scene went on they got more and more over the top, crooning into their mics and dancing around onstage as people cheered them on.

That was it for the first set, but the MC for the whole evening told me they wanted us to perform again, and we had prepared a couple of extra games just in case this happened, so we were ready to go. The second set started with the mighty Ann playing the alphabet game with Michael. I asked the audience for something you might do in Yaounde while you were in from the village, for the scene to be about, and the suggestion was "buying cheese." So Ann and Michael did a scene about buying cheese in Yaounde; the game was that one actor (Ann) said a line starting with the letter A, then the other (Michael) said a line beginning with B. Then Ann with C, Michael with D, and on through the alphabet up to Z, trading lines. They were hilarious; I've seen Ann play this game before, and she's great at it, quick and very funny, and she and Michael got a huge reaction when Ann switched the scene from English to French on the letter O, with a line starting with "oui", and she and Michael carried on in French for six or seven more lines, without missing a beat. Since SIL is a linguistics organization in a French-speaking country, people just loved this. I've done improv for awhile now, but this was the only bilingual improv game I've ever seen.

The last game was another advice game; one good thing about advice games is you can really tailor them to your audience, so I explained that when I was in eastern Cameroon and found the snake, I had also run across three linguists who had been out there a long time, and had agreed to answer some questions for us here in Yaounde about linguistics. Karen (who really is a linguist), Beth and Christy came onstage and lined up to be the linguists. The game was that Karen always gave a correct, or at least reasonable answer, Beth always gave a completely wrong answer, and Christy gave as crazy an answer as possible. Once again, with no improv experience whatsoever and on one hour's rehearsal, these folks did a fantastic job in front of a crowd that loved them. Beth actually balked when it came time to get up onstage, which is a completely reasonable reaction if you've never done this before; we're friends with Beth, and I was convinced she'd enjoy it if she did get onstage, so I told her to she wasn't getting away that easy, and asked the audience if they wanted Beth to come onstage to play. They cheered her, and she got up onstage and did a great job.

And that was it. I got all the performers up onstage together and had them take a bow in front of the happy audience. Over the next few days, several people told me how funny they had found the show. People really liked it, and most people in the audience had never seen improv before. I wish I remembered more of what was said in the scenes so I could share it here, but that's not how it works. Since I was responsible for introducing things and tying it all together, my brain was taken up with that during most of the show, and although I had a great time listening and watching everyone improvise, it was more with an eye towards when to edit the scene and move onto the next one, and paying attention to the audience reaction as much as what was said.

Ann and I didn't take any pictures that night, but I'm going to try to track some down. Christy says she has a video of the entire evening, and promised me a copy once she transfers it to her Mac, so I may get video and audio. It would be great to have a record of the evening. I've never done or even seen a show quite like it. Some people who performed said they want to continue to improvise, so we might set up a regular meeting to get together and play games.

Technical note: for my improvisor friends (hi, Sam!) who may be curious, here's the set list from that night:

My Bonnie (audience warmup)
Actor's Nightmare 1 (Dan and Christine)
Actor's Nightmare 2 (Karen and Margaret)
Mr. Know It All (all)
Lounge Singer (Christy and Chris J.)
(break)
Alphabet (Ann and Michael)
Good, Bad and Ugly Advice (Karen, Beth and Christy)

of elephants and mice

2008-04-10T14:53:00.005+01:00

We're in a neighborhood full of missionaries and linguists who work for a Bible-translation organization called SIL. We go to church with them on Sunday nights, use their internet after we set up an account with them, and have lots of friends in the SIL community we see regularly. It's been a huge improvement in our social life; before we moved to this side of town in January, we'd lock the door at 6pm and spend the next 14 hours alone at home, cooking and reading and maybe playing Boggle.

In church a couple of weeks ago, someone asked for volunteers to take notes at the upcoming SIL branch conference, the annual gathering of SIL people from all over Cameroon right here in Yaounde. So I signed up for a 90-minute stint, since I can type, and it seems only decent to contribute something back. It happened to be the transfer of the General Directorship of SIL Cameroon from the man who's had it since 1999 or so to the new man. There were many thank yous and tributes, and then the outgoing director got up to the podium. He talked about his career and self-doubts, expressed some concerns, and told a story:

Elephant and Mouse were best friends. One day Elephant said, “Mouse, let’s have a party!” Animals gathered from far and near.

They ate. They drank. They sang. And they danced. And nobody celebrated more and danced harder than Elephant.

After the party was over, Elephant exclaimed, “Mouse, did you ever go to a better party What a blast!”

But Mouse did not answer.

“Mouse, where are you?” Elephant called. He looked around for his friend, and then shrank back in horror.

There at Elephant’s feet lay Mouse. His little body was ground into the dirt. He had been smashed by the big feet of his exuberant friend, Elephant.

This made me sad. But given the significance of parables in the Bible, the choice of this story for a speech in a mission organization struck me on several levels. So I thought I'd pass it on. As someone with big feet, I've been thinking a lot about it since, about how uncomfortable this story made me at the time, and how out of place I feel here in a missionary community, in Africa, and often just in the world.

I wonder -- can the elephant decide not to be an elephant?

We come home is less than six months. Going to Africa is the sort of thing that looks great on paper, an adventure, a chance in a lifetime. And it is. But part of the reason it is goes way beyond the scenery, and comes from the difficult questions you have to ask yourself if you're a person from a rich country living far from home among poor people you can't easily communicate with. If you're an elephant.

photos from Douala

2008-04-04T15:48:00.010+01:00

We arrived at the Procure Generale des Missions Catholiques guesthouse in Douala in the late afternoon, on the second day of our road trip. I took a few pictures of their beautiful chapel, and a few portraits in the late afternoon light that show some of the city of Douala in the background. The guesthouse itself was the most architecturally comfortable place we've been in Cameroon, for us -- a no-frills, rambling place with big verandas and comfortable furniture, high ceilings, and plenty of light and space. The Cameroonian sense of space, and architectural use of light, is very different -- houses tend to be much darker and more full of furniture than back home, and often have more residents as well, at least in our limited acquaintance. This place felt European. The fact that Christi and the Belgian Catholic brother who checked us in were speaking Dutch probably had something to do with that. After dinner we sat outside in the warm Douala night drinking beers and talking late.

The chapel, with afternoon light streaming in.

Chapel windows.

A chapel statue.

This is Isaac, who drove for us on this trip, on the veranda at the guesthouse. He said he had a good time.

Me and Ann.

Ann.

Christi. You can just see a bit of the pool through the rail behind her, but we didn't swim.

This is Douala, a small slice of it anway, looking toward the ocean from the veranda. Ann said it looked like West Oakland.

Self-portrait with stiff upper lip.

The veranda upstairs. There were two, one atop the other. The one downstairs had more shade and more comfortable lounge furniture. It was so nice up here, at the end of the day, that I just said in a chair and read, in spite of the hot sun.

Christi, Ann and Isaac talking as night fell, looking at the lights across the water.

the 100% guilt-free blog

2008-04-03T16:58:00.002+01:00

No fewer than three of my friends from the US have apologized to me recently, via email, for not following this blog or emailing faithfully enough. So I want to make something clear:

Ann and I have no expectations that anyone will or will not be reading this blog or emailing us while we're in Africa.

The blog is on the internet for all the world to see, so it's available, but whether you look is up to you. Our families and a few friends expressed an interest in keeping up with us while we're away, and it's nice for us to have a record of our experiences, and plus it's fun to write, so that why it's here.

It might be the kind of thing you like, if you like this kind of thing. If you have other things to do and want to catch up with us once we get home, we're fine with that too. We love you just the same.

incidental fauna of Cameroon

2008-04-01T09:54:00.001+01:00

Cameroon has a diverse animal population, some of whom we met on last week's road trip.

We had to pull over to make some room for these guys.

They took up two lanes. We pulled over.

One of the fruit dryers had some neighbors with a small piggery, containing four or five residents. It happened to be siesta time when we visited. Unlike the typical Iowa hog farm, which admittedly is somewhat larger, this operation did not smell bad at all.

They were interested in us too.

They also took an interest in the camera.

We have lots of these multicolored lizards in Yaounde too.

This guy lived was watching us from the top of the wall in a drying operation in Douala. The span of his legs was maybe four or five inches. He also had a small neighbor to the right, just out of the picture here.

When Presbyterians attack!!! (Note helpful danger warning at left).

The restaurant in Douala had a pet cat. It kept lookout towards the road while we dined, and patrolled the roof.

New Life

2008-03-31T16:33:00.005+01:00

[A couple of weeks ago, our pastor at First Mennonite Church of San Francisco emailed us to ask whether we might like to write something on the topic of "new life" for an upcoming church service. Ann and I worked on it together, and sent it off, and yesterday Ann's sister Miriam read it aloud on our behalf. It's about our life in Cameroon, and it's a joint effort, so here it is. (Image: chapel of Catholic Procure, Douala, Cameroon)]

Greetings, First Mennonite Church of San Francisco, and we sure do miss you! From our vantage point in Cameroon, we figure we’ve taken the concept of ‘new life’ to a whole new level. For one year, we’ve literally chosen a life that is completely new to us. New country, people, culture, language, weather, foods, work, and everyday surroundings. This halfway point in our year is a perfect time to reflect on what we’ve been noticing around and within us, and we thank you for the invitation to do so with you. If you want to respond to this in any way, feel free to email us!

Poverty, AIDS, war, famine, corruption…the news most Americans get from Africa is not exactly brimming with resurrection and hope. But good news doesn't sell newspapers, as the saying goes, so maybe this says more about the media than about Africa. Where are the signs of new life in Cameroon, whose government is consistently recognized among the most corrupt in the world? The joke goes that they were voted the most corrupt country in the world, but paid to be moved to second place.

We're happy to say that in actuality, we see signs of resistance and resurrection here every day. Yaoundé, the capital city where we make our home, is bursting with new life and hope. Our neighborhood is near the southern edge of town, where the hillsides are dotted with half-finished houses, places where people hope to establish themselves and their families, each one a concrete investment toward the future. People flock to the city from surrounding regions, and from the dry deserts of the Far North, all hoping to find a better life in Yaoundé. There is a shadow side to this new life, as the city becomes increasingly crowded, crime increases, and there is never enough paid work for all. But the hope and determination that draw people here are beautiful, powerful forces. Like many others in Africa, Yaounde is a city of dreams.

We also see new life in the green and growing things that cover the immensely fertile regions of Cameroon. The markets spill over with fruits and vegetables and spices grown in the soil here, and even our urban area is sprouting with mango and papaya trees, banana and plantain trees, the huge leafy plants in the swamp behind our house, the riot of orange flowers in our backyard. Boys hack away roadside grass with sharp machetes, and land owners burn tangles of brush, but it all grows back eagerly. Even now, the rainy season is starting, and nature is staging an extravagant show of new life all around us. The glorious explosive rolls of thunder we lie in bed and listen to, so rare back home in San Francisco, remind us of our childhoods in Michigan, and herald new growth all around us.

The people we meet and the work we see going on here also resist the forces of death and discouragement and create more signs of resurrection. The neighborhood where we currently house-sit is full of expatriates and locals working together to translate the Bible into over 250 local languages. While we might not agree completely with the theology that motivates them, their work is important and empowering for the speakers of all these languages, as they work with local people to teach literacy skills and to capture African languages for the future, often writing them down for the first time. New life is breathed into each language as it is studied, written, preserved, dignified, and used in new ways. And those who do the work seem to find real fulfillment and positive collaboration in what they do.

RELUFA, the network of Cameroonian non-profits with which we work, also engages in numerous life-giving projects. We have some amazing and visionary colleagues determined to work for justice in their country, even when the odds seem insurmountable. Meeting beneficiaries of RELUFA’s micro-credit program, we’ve been impressed with their creativity and resourcefulness, and the way access to small loans gives new life and hope to people’s activities and aspirations. Granaries in the north help villages save their millet harvest to eat during leaner times instead of selling it off to speculators and then buying it back at a huge markup when times are lean. Lawyers and other advocates work hard to hold logging, mining, and oil companies accountable for how they treat the land and its people by confronting them with the human cost of their activities, and by persuading them to open their books to international public scrutiny. These truly are small resurrections in the face of death-dealing forces like poverty, hunger, injustice and exploitation.

Of course, the new life we notice here in Cameroon is not only around us, but within us too. As volunteer workers in a culture with a very relaxed attitude toward time, we find ourselves removed from the constant feeling of hurry that’s built in to our San Francisco life. For the most part, it’s been really lovely, allowing us to take time to read widely, cook meals together, explore the reaches of our neighborhood on foot, and (perhaps for the first time in our adult lives) get enough sleep – all the time! This unique opportunity to slow down for a year is definitely very renewing for us. We hope to bring home some enduring lessons about the value of living slowly.

Another effect we notice is our ability to be more present in our interactions with others, and to truly take time for conversations and social interactions. Everyone does this here, even foreigners, and people aren’t always thinking about rushing off to the next thing on their agenda. Although it took us time to get used to it, we now appreciate the fact that building relationships and interacting with others is an important part of life here, even of work and business.

Our relationship to each other also gets more time here, and consequently more growth. Here our work, home life, and social activities overlap almost completely, so conflicts and communication issues which would be easier to ignore in our busier and more divergent lives back home are pulled into the light. It’s hard work sometimes, but also a wonderful opportunity to face and deal with these things, getting to know each other and our marriage more fully in the process.

Another important area of growth for us has come through the challenges of adjusting to our ‘new life’ in Cameroon. We are certainly out of our comfort zones in various ways, whether it’s our inability to communicate well in French, the constant attention that comes with being a racial minority, increased safety concerns, personal requests for money and favors that would be out of place back home, or any number of other adjustments to an unfamiliar culture. While the everyday struggles of most Cameroonians serve as a good reality check, making our problems seem petty in comparison, it has been good for us to acknowledge our own struggles and accompany each other through them, widening our horizons in the process.

On a broader scale we are faced with gaping disparities of wealth every day, with the harsh realities of how many people of the world live. Our privilege is supported by complicated systems of exploitation that contribute to the misery of the poor, and the lack of simple solutions and clear courses of action is painfully clear. But even hard truths like these are laced with resurrection for us, in that we don’t want to give up. Being here has brought to life for us how important it is to engage with our world, and to act out of hope so that hope can remain alive. It's said that we can truly change only ourselves, so educating ourselves is a gift to the world, because from this can flow a lifetime of informed engagement and hope.

Finally, stepping out of our usual surroundings and into this new life has sharpened our perspective on what we’ve chosen to leave behind for a year. The relationships, the natural beauty, the food, the cultural opportunities, our spiritual home at First Mennonite, and the general vibrancy of San Francisco (as well as a mean temperature of about 60 degrees, as far as Chris is concerned) …our appreciation of all this grows deeper across the distance. There is much that we are excited to return to! When we do return, shaped by our experiences here in Cameroon, we hope to find ways to hold these new thoughts and spaces that this year is opening for us, to bring new life to the way we live and maybe to our community too.

We love you. Peace.

fruit dryer photos, from the road trip

2008-03-31T15:53:00.001+01:00

These are pictures of the fruit-drying operations we visited on our road trip last week. They are all run by small groups of 3-6 people who are members of TerrEspoir. The drying is done in large wooden ovens filled with racks on which fruit is dried, heated by the same gas (propane?) that everyone runs their stoves and ovens with here. All the dryers have received training and startup funds from TerrEspoir, who also sets the prices at which they buy fresh fruit and sell dried. TerrEspoir places orders, conducts inspections, and handles delivery of the fruit to Switzerland. There is very little market for dried fruit in Cameroon, because of the cost.

In uniform, in front of a dryer. That small white hose runs into a gas container you can just see behind her.

The inside of that same dryer, with bananas on the rack. Normally all the racks are filled, but this is the tail end of a drying order, because we visited towards the end of the week, and deliveries are on Friday.

Dried bananas. In a bucket.

A larger dryer at another group. These are three of the six members we met. Note gas cannister again. The inspector from TerrEspoir recommended putting the cannister outside, so this group in working on running a line for that, and constructing an enclosure outside the building.

The inside of that big oven. Bananas again.

Work uniforms, hats and a scale from one of the operations.

That red circle on the right is a chute by which fresh fruit comes into the building. The drying facilities are separated into different stations, so that the fresh fruit does not come into contact with the dried product.

Christi, our coworker, who works with RELUFA on behalf of the Presbyterian Church USA.

Another group of dryers. This is the other side of that red chute from a couple of pictures ago. The TerrEspoir inspector also recommended those glass louvres in the window, which also has mosquito netting. The concrete sinks are for washing fruit.

A small digital scale, and the sealer used on the bags once they are filled with fruit. TerrEspoir ships in these bags from Switzerland, and all the dryers use them. They label the back with a lot number, a date, and the name of their group. The front part of the bag has a window that displays the product -- this one, obviously, is empty.

Tools of the trade. That doodad next to the blue glove is for coring pineapples.

Two members of another group, and a daughter, along with two drying ovens.

Your intrepid bloggers, traversing Africa to bring you the latest from the front lines of dried fruit production. Ann is working with Christi on fair-trade research, and took notes during this trip, so I was on photography duty.

A member of another drying group. You can see a basin and some gas bottles behind her. That item at the lower right is a stainless-steel work surface.

Here she is again with some of their products. Those plastic buckets are filled with various dried fruits yet to be bagged. They sent us on our way with some dried pineapple and mango. Dried mangoes are the best, and it's almost impossible to find them in the US with no sugar added, which essentially turns them into candy. The eventual goal of the fair-trade research is to sell them in the US market under a fair-trade label, and as far as we've been able to determine, there is no competition yet.

If you've never eaten a mango, it tastes like a combination of a peach with the smell of a pine tree. The dried version is chewy and tastes even more intense.

Fruit pics from Terrespoir trip

2008-03-30T14:15:00.006+01:00

Cameroon is a cornucopia of fresh fruits and vegetables, among other things. It's a real pleasure to have some pictures of a few of these to share, from our road trip last week. Enjoy!

The trip was to visit with fruit dryers associated with a Swiss-Cameroonian NGO called Terrespoir. Their growers and dryers produce fruit for export to Switzerland. Every Friday, Terrespoir collects the fresh and dried fruit at a church in the port city of Douala, boxes it, and loads it on a truck. The truck heads to the cargo port at Douala airport, where the food is loaded into small containers and onto a pallet for air shipment to Switzerland. This is the process we saw on our trip, starting with the dryers and moving on to the collection point and the airport, omitting only the farms where the fruit is grown.

Terrespoir is a member of RELUFA, the Cameroonian NGO network we volunteer with. The trip was a fact-finding mission for our coworker Christi to find out more about how the business works, because RELUFA is interested in getting involved with fair trade. This, if you haven't heard of it, is a worldwide movement to get more of the revenues for products, especially food, back to the actual producers. We took a lot of pictures, some of them interesting, so this is just the first installment.

Boxing papayas for shipment.

From left, boxed eggplant, ginger and limes.

Passionfruit!

Small hot peppers. The tasty and ubiquitous Cameroonian pimante sauce is made from these.

Plantains and sugarcane. There was only one box of sugarcane that we saw, so this may be a snack for the workers rather than an export product. It's sold all over the place here in Yaounde as a snack, in short lengths like this. Incidentally, the Coca-Cola here is made with sugar, not corn syrup, and so is a bit less sweet, and to my mind much tastier, probably because this is what it tasted like when I was a kid in the US.

Boxing mangos. Like everyone else we met here, this lady was all smiles and laughter until it was picture time, when she assumed her serious demeanor.

Loading the truck with pineapple.

More mangoes. This lady is laughing because just out of frame to the left, her friend is harassing and teasing her to crack her up for the camera. After the picture she actually jumped up and, laughing, gave her a smack.

This is some of the dried fruit. Each individual bag is stamped with a date, a lot number, and the name of the dryer. Terrespoir checks the weight and labeling of each individual bag when it is boxed up on Friday, and visually inspects the fruit (bananas, in this case) through the window in the front of the package. If there's any problem with the product, Terrespoir ships it back from Switzerland and docks the dryers not only the cost of the fruit itself, but the cost of air freight.

Back from the Road Trip

2008-03-29T19:02:00.005+01:00

Hey, we're back in Yaounde after our road trip with Christi and Isaac, and Daniel from Terrespoir. We visited lots of fruit dryers, saw their weekly delivery to a church in Douala where everything is weighed and boxed up for delivery to Switzerland, and we even got to follow the truck into the cargo section of the Douala airport. I always wanted to see a cargo port. I'll post pictures from all this tomorrow or soon after. At the moment, Ann and I are up at CTC, across the street from home, checking our email.

Also, here's a quick followup to the "Mission Statement" posting from March 12 (available here). The document I took the quote from is "Poverty and Mission" by Fr. Fernando Domingues, MCCJ. I found it on the "Vulnerable Mission Discussion" page of the Jim Harries Mission website, which someone linked to from a page in the network here at CTC, the SIL compound where we sometimes use the computers. SIL is the translation organization our friends the Kapteyns work for. We live in their house right now. They were our link to the Boyds, who offered us our volunteer positions here.

Got all that? I mention it because someone asked. And I believe MCCJ is a Catholic religious order.

road trip!

2008-03-25T19:34:00.004+01:00

We're off with RELUFA coworker Christi and two others on a four-day road trip early tomorrow morning, to the towns of Douala, Njombe and Bafoussam. Ann and Christi are doing research related to fair trade (a term that refers to programs that ensure a healthy chunk of the revenues get back to the producers), and I'm coming along for the ride, and taking pictures for any articles Ann will write about this. We'll be visiting some fruit dryers associated with an NGO that is a RELUFA member. We want to get better acquainted with the dryers and their work, to see their facilities and how they run their business. We'll be back in Yaounde on Saturday. No bus this time after all; we'll be taking Christi's car, and we hired Isaac, who is married to Julia who works at our house, to be the driver. I'd love to drive myself, but I never bothered to get an international license for this trip. We're glad we could throw Isaac some work, and it will be great to have another anglophone along to talk (fluently) with. He's a solid, friendly guy, so maybe this could lead to more work for him too.

We had Isaac Julia and some of their family over a couple of weeks ago, and their nephew Paul announced his engagement at our place after dinner! We got some nice pictures of that, so I'll get few of those posted sooner or later. Paul's fiancee is off to Dallas to live with her folks and go to school, and they decided to get engaged before she left.

Reading list for the trip: Wind, Sand and Stars, by Saint-Exupery (Ann); The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Chris); Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow (Chris). Packing list: clothing, bug repellent, assorted medicines, aforementioned books, flashlights, water bottles, notebooks,
pens, nifty bandannas stuffed with water-retaining chemicals to wrap around your neck and stay cool, camera, hats, sunglasses, towels. We forgot the mosquito net this time; we'll have to lard up with repellent before we go to bed at night.

Journee Internationale de la Femme

2008-03-18T16:02:00.004+01:00

Quick, when is International Women’s Day? What, you don’t know? Extra credit for all those who already knew that March 8 marked this year’s celebration, but I think most Americans probably move along in more-or-less blissful ignorance of this supposedly international day of recognition. Indeed, I don’t recall any sort of fuss being made about it during any of my three decades of life in the United States.

Imagine my surprise at finding it one of the major national celebrations here in Cameroon! Early on in our time here, I would occasionally notice women and girls wearing clothing made from ‘International Women’s Day’ fabric. Some in orange background, some green, some pink, all featuring different pictures and patterns and words. Soon enough, I learned that a new International Women’s Day fabric is created in Cameroon each year, and women are encouraged (pressured?) to buy it and have dresses made so they can march in the annual procession. Different civic, corporate, church, and social groups get together and have a grand parade in the center of town.

Though I frown upon pressures to conform socially or fashionably, I’m certainly a great fan of women, and I do like a parade. So on Saturday the 8th of March, I headed downtown with friends Adriana and Beth to take in the festivities. Adriana had purchased some of this year’s fabric and sewn herself an outfit, with enough to spare for an extra shirt. So I had the great pleasure of wearing the extra shirt! This mostly meant that people would smile and wish us “bonne fête” as we walked along. There was much to see, mostly involving huge crowds of women wearing dresses made out of the same fabric.

Our first glimpse of the action after we disembarked from our taxi was the main road toward downtown, blocked off, filled with women lined up waiting for their group’s turn to march in the parade.

Some found more comfortable places to wait, involving benches and/or shade umbrellas. Really, I don’t blame them. It was nearing mid-day, and sensible shoes were not a popular choice. (As they rarely are with African women.)

When the time came for marching, then march they did…

…in LARGE numbers! (Note the gendarme with his big ol’ gun in the foreground to the right. There was a large police and military presence that day, presumably there for crowd control, but also a reminder of the recent unrest and violence.)

The goal of their marching was to parade past the grandstands, filled with local dignitaries and other folk, where each group in turn was announced (by female announcers) in French and English. In this way, it was not entirely unreminiscent of the Rose Bowl parade.

It was truly a march for the women, a time for them to display their numbers and the various groups and careers to which they belong.

The few men who marched were only allowed in if they were ‘with the band,’ as it were.

Most of the fellows just had to watch from the sidelines for once.

There were few exceptions to the ‘uniform’ of the day. These fairy dancers (as we called them) were some of my favorites, and they were rockin’ some pretty graceful moves in their pink-and-white gauzy outfits instead of marching in matching dresses. Note the police officers guarding the street are also women.

There were also a few exceptions to the rigid marching formation, such as the more laid-back wheelchair delegation. Some of the handicapped women were in ‘typical’ wheelchairs being pushed by assistants, and others were moving themselves along in the innovative hand-pedaled contraptions that many people use here. Bringing up the rear of their delegation was a woman in one of these, rolling along in a gracious slalom pattern, a large yellow umbrella fastened to her chair. She was great, and I’m sorry not to have gotten a picture of her.

The sight I most regret not photographing was even better though, so I’ll describe it here. As we walked back up the road to where we could catch a taxi home, we saw the last few groups of women finally marching toward the grandstands. After the final group came a few trucks and an ambulance (just in case), then a few moments later, a magnificent sight rolled into view. A big yellow bulldozer with one woman driving and another perched on the side seat. They were both wearing the matching dresses, grinning from ear to ear and waving at everyone. It was fantastic! Alas that my camera was all put away in the depths of my bag, because they were past before I could snap them.

All in all, it’s good that people celebrate International Women’s Day, but I’m not convinced that this one day of marching in the streets and dressing alike does much to change Cameroonian women’s lives for the better. The worth of a woman here still seems to be primarily measured by how soon she can find a husband and how many babies she can produce. Once found, that husband may or may not stick around, treat her with respect, or find enough work to support a family. And that husband definitely won’t help with any of the housework; gender roles are still very much engrained into the culture here. Many women are not encouraged to learn any skills beyond cooking, keeping house, and perhaps singing with the women’s association at their church. Women are only just beginning to be allowed into positions in society that allow them to fully participate in leadership or decision-making, and then only rarely.

So it is my hope that this annual celebration will help Cameroonian women to realize their own strength, will remind them that some of their sisters are indeed holding all types of jobs in all levels of society. The women here are numerous, resourceful, and goodness knows they are not afraid of hard work. Who knows what might happen if they decide to step into their own power?

Mission Statement

2008-03-12T13:03:00.004+01:00

The challenge today is no longer that of doing great works in favour of the poor, but the more demanding one of helping the poor to fight their own poverty doing the works they can do with their own hands, in their own time, with their own priorities … and to the extent that is possible, also with the financial resources they can gather. (Fr Fernando Domingues, MCCJ)

I found this statement at the end of a document about poverty and missions that someone here in the SIL mission community linked to, but it seems like a good mission statement for a lot of the NGO work we participate in here as well. Partnership and accompaniment, rather than patronage and handouts. Helping people to build their own solutions instead of solving their problems for them. And finding ways to be effective and useful in the face of enormous difficulties. I find this enormously appealing. But it's on the largest scale possible, and leaves me with questions about how to live this way from day to day.

Cameroonians we know here (not our coworkers) ask us for money and favors on a fairly regular basis. And while we certainly have far more resources than they do, I always wonder whether I'm being played. But then, even if I am being played, a friend once mentioned to me, here it just means someone is probably covering up a real and more embarrassing need with something else that seems more likely to produce the desired results.

Throw into this mix the fact that local culture dictates that people with resources share them liberally, and that there is no shame in asking someone for something that they have that you do not, and I'm left with a lot to think about.