Friday morning, kitchen table

(written Friday, 2007-10-19, 750am)
Yaounde, Cameroon
chez Jeff and Christi
kitchen table

Ann is fiddling with the cel phones. We just got them. Unfortunately, service is not good at the office, because of its location in the hilly Yaounde topography. Gilles, housemate and RELUFA staffer, is coming by to help with the phones, and then we're going for a walk through the neighborhood to look around a little, if the roads arent' too muddy. We'll probably swing by Select Bakery, since we're almost out of bread.

Hey, she got the phones working! We'll get to tell Gilles we figured them out on our own. It looks like maybe things were just down when I called; she dialled 155 like I did, per the setup instructions, but this time everything worked.

The phones here are smaller. Like most of the world, Cameroon is ahead of the US on phone technology. Ray actually bought a tri-band one while in Europe that he can use here or in the US. We went out with Gilles a couple of days ago and got the cheapest pay-as-you-go phones we could find, Chinese ones (of course) with service a South African company called MTN. The other service here is a French one called Orange. Neither work very well from the office, and just a bit better from the house.

We are headed back to RELUFA today to work. We haven't met a couple of our EPC contacts yet for our work there; we stopped by yesterday, and found out one of them has been delayed coming back to Yaounde after being out of the country, and the other has been very ill and is recovering in the hospital in Duala, the big industrial city on the coast. We left the number of the cel Ray and Ann K. loaned us, and they'll call us when we can come by to meet. So it's back to RELUFA. Taking the bull by the horns, I proposed to the microfinance administrator that we chat about the program today; his French is tough for us, so the sooner we can get more familiar with it, the better. But my brain sure tires out by the end of the day.

I'm sitting in the kitchen writing this on the laptop. The house is bigger than our apartment back home, and the stove is gas, which is a nice improvement. All the floors are tile or cement, perfect in this warm humid climate where a carpet would be, as Ray put it, disgusting. Fanny, a French journalist who works in the RELUFA offices, is living here for now, til she moves to the apartment she found. The food here is good, and comparable in price to San Francisco. Christi has lots of cookbooks, including Mennonite favorites "More with Less" and "Extending the Table". We made a great chicken vegetable soup out of the first of those a few days ago. We've always liked cooking together, so it's great to have our own kitchen. Next on the agenda: black bean and vegetable soup, substituting whichever dry beans they sell up the road at the Mahima grocery store.

The RELUFA offices where we work are about a ten-minute walk away. Again, all the floors are concrete or tile, which seems to be a constant here. There's lots of space; right now, Ann works in a conference room, and I'm next door in the kitchen, which has a sink, coffeemaker and water filter (another constant here; the tap water is not potable) but is otherwise empty. Each room has a network jack and an electrical outlet. The office has broadband, but it runs at about 56k. Christi, who works at the RELUFA offices, says she uses Skype, so we hope it works well enough at that speed to chat with our families back home. But it seems that brief cel phone calls to the US may be affordable too. Skype may be a little cumbersome for some family members.

Marie is here. She comes in three days a week, washes dishes, does laundry and cleans the house. She also does some shopping, and got us a pile of fresh fruits and vegetables from the market, which are great: avacadoes, oranges, mandarin oranges, bananas, lettuce, celery, papayas, etc. It's really odd to have someone working in our house; she is part of the household staff, along with the 24-hour guard service. Not used to that at home. Fanny (housemate for the moment, and AFP correspondent working at RELUFA offices) found an apartment she's moving to soon, which has one guard for the building; we'd be more comfortable with this arrangement, so maybe we'll get an apartment when we need to move. On the other hand, it's a contribution to the local economy to employ someone, since jobs are hard to come by here, so it's a complicated issue.

I've started doing some database design for RELUFA, based on their application forms. It's just preliminary work, pending some long conversations about their requirements, but I like having something to work on for part of the day that actually seems familiar. I did a lot of database work before getting into Java development. I have a lot of questions to ask, but if it meets their requirements I'd like to use java6 and its built-in Apache Derby database to build their system. One key question is whether they want to run it on a web server and share that, or run it on each separate computer in the office and maybe in the field; it might be interesting to combine the two approaches (centralized and local), perhaps via some mechanism to guarantee unique key generation on each machine, combined with a last-update-wins approach to edits and an automated merge. Will probably use HTML for the interface, but not sure which GUI library yet. (Sorry if this is gibberish to you; I wanted to throw in a few technical notes for a couple of coworkers and my brother Paul, also a software developer).

Week One, short version

We’re here in Cameroon's capital of Yaounde, housesitting til January, meeting friendly, helpful people at the 2 places we’ll be working, both of which are within walking distance. We have some college friends in town who have welcomed us and helped us out a lot already, and even took us on a picnic. We’re getting by with our French but it’s uphill for now, and lots of people speak some English. We just got cellphones. Ann lost her voice yesterday. It’s 65 to 85 degrees, intermittently rainy, and we listen to rain and thunderstorms at night and birds in the morning. The one light in the living room when we arrived was a fluorescent tube inside of a fat eight-foot boa constructor skin mounted on a 2x10, which casts a soft warm glow over the room. It’s raining, but we see lots of sun every day.

Week One, long version

(leaving SFO)


We’re here in Cameroon, in the capital city of Yaounde, for the next year. Specifically, I’m at the kitchen table drinking coffee and typing. The Vaio laptop I’m using comes with a trial version of MSWord, but MSWorks is on here too, so at least I can compose in something that does word wrap. It’s about 740am; we go to bed early, since we’re still adjusting to the time change (GMT +1), and it’s unusual to go out at night here. We have a meeting at 930 at the Secretariat of the Eglise Presbyterienne Camerounais (hmm, my spellchecker doesn’t speak French, have to see if I can fix that) to discuss our work for them. I have two positions here, one to do some computer instruction for them, the other to assemble a database of microloan beneficiaries for an NGO called RELUFA, which is just up the street. Ann will be interviewing RELUFA beneficiaries and writing articles to promote the microloan program, and probably working with me at the EPC. Since most of this is in French, it’s a full plate for the time being at least, and we’re just settling in. We went to RELUFA yesterday and had a long and fascinating talk with the coordinator, Valery, about RELUFA’s initiatives, what different staff members do, and how we might be able to help. RELUFA is a network of other organizations, and has a micro loan program (lending small amounts of money directly to individuals), a food sovereignty program for farmers, and a transparency initiative directed at multinationals, but of course this is the briefest of overviews.

We are housesitting through December for Jeff and Christi, who work with the EPC and RELUFA, respectively. Their place is in a neighborhood called Jongolo (not sure of the spelling), across the street from the EPC office and a few minutes’ walk from RELUFA, which saves us from communiting in Yaounde’s fearless anarchic taxicabs every morning. We need to find our own place starting in January, but the EPC may be able to help with that; we’d like to stay in the neighborhood. The house has a big yard with a 6’ wall around it and a 24-hour guard. It’s warm here, but we’re at a couple of thousand feet of altitude so it’s about 65 to 85 degrees with high humidity. The windows are louvres with screens and bars, and its pleasantly cool at night. We have a small stove and oven that run on propane, a big fridge, and bought ourselves a water filter on the second day that consists of two silver pots that stack, and filters the water through “candles” made of minerals. It looks like a big silver coffee urn. We’ve been doing our own cooking and it’s nice to have a gas stove again; the one in San Francisco is electric. They have some great bread and baked goods here -- baguettes, beignets, etc. It’s the rainy season here (you get 2 on the equator, rainy and dry, or maybe 3: dry, rainy, and extra rainy), and it’s great to lie in bed at night and listen to thunderstorms and rain, and wake up in the morning hearing all sorts of birds. I miss having real weather, living in San Francisco.

We flew out of SFO last week Tuesday, a week ago already. Brian (our friend who has our place while we’re gone) and Miriam (Ann’s sister) and all our luggage for a year, and us, all packed into our Scion XA and drove to the airport.


(sendoff committee)

We flew to Paris on Air France, which serves really good food, by the way, if you’re flying overseas. We booked our tickets within the past 2 months so we had a 24-hour layover in Paris, but this turned out to be a good thing, something I’d do on purpose next time. Our friends Joe and Morgen, writers who moved to Paris from SF three months ago, met us at the airport. Our luggage stayed checked through all the way to Africa, so we just took our carryons and wandered off with them to the train into town. No customs! We dropped our stuff off, went out to lunch, and meandered around Paris awhile.


(lunch with Morgen and Joe)


(walking by canal near Joe and Morgen's place)

They have an apartment in the 10th arrondissement, and have a panoramic view of Paris out their bathroom window. Paris felt like home, since we were going so far away. We later took the Metro to fin Boris, a friend of Ann’s volunteer days in SF, who put us up for the night.


(Ann and Boris on the Pont Mirabeau, Tour Eiffel behind them)


(Tour Eiffel, with lights on the hour)

In the morning we grabbed a ‘choco Suisse” from the local patisserie on Boris’s recommendation -- bread with chocolate and pudding. Then we found our way back to the airport via the Metro and RER trains, and boarded another Air France flight for Cameroon.

We overflew Algeria, which I never thought I’d see, so I took a couple of pictures.


Then over the Sahara, Chad, Nigeria and into Cameroon. More good Air France food. College friend Ann K. met us at the airport in Yaounde; her NGO has diplomatic status here, so she came right in and found us at the baggage carousel. Again, no customs. Getting back into the US next year probably won’t be so easy. Ann K. drove us to their place in Yaounde. She and husband Ray, both college friends of mine and Ann’s youth group leaders, work here for an NGO called SIL.


(Ray and Ann)

Ann’s a translator, and Ray is a pilot. They have three kids, and live in a beautiful house near other SIL folks on the other side of Yaounde from where we’re staying. They helped us get set up here, giving us all sorts of information, and driving us around in their enormous truck to buy groceries, a broom, a water filter, etc. Ray paid someone to solder what the Aussies call “roo bars” on the outside of the truck, due to the aforementioned taxis, and the bars already have some dents and spots of yellow paint. Apparently a new truck makes the taxis bolder, because they figure you don’t want to bang it up, so the bars buy a lot of respect.

We went with Ann K. and their kids on a picnic a couple of days later:


We spent our first night at Ann and Ray’s, and they brought us here to the house the next day. Jeff and Christi and their kids threw all their stuff into the house before leaving town, and had not actually lived in here, so we had some rearranging to do, but we’re settled in now. We also displaced a journalist when we arrived, who was staying at the house. She’s the Cameroon rep for AFP, France’s newswire agency (go to news.yahoo.com and look at the tabs under “World”, and you’ll see AFP listed alongside the AP, Reuters, etc.). She works at the RELUFA offices and is looking for an apartment in the area. Once we figured this out, we invited her to stay at the house with us until she finds something. It’s a three bedroom, so she’s in one, we’re in another, and all the extra furniture is in the third. We had a long talk with her last night about the history of this country, her work and our own. All in French, actually, and mostly me, since Ann has lost her voice at the moment.. My French is probably embarrassing, but most of the time I can make myself understood, and I understand more than I speak. It’s enough to get started. Ann knows more than me, but is still getting used to actually speaking it.

So today it’s activating the cellphones we bought yesterday with help from Valery and Gilles from RELUFA, meeting with the EPC in about 90 minutes, going to RELUFA to get some help obtaining certified copies of our passports (you need to carry ID, but it’s a really bad idea to carry your actual passport around), and trying to keep our heads above water speaking French. And installing Civilization 4 on my laptop and figuring out the play-by-email option. More soon.

maps

Cameroon is a bit bigger geographically than California:
Cameroon: 183,568 sq mi/475,442 sq km
California: 158,302 sq mi/410,000 sq km

People seemed surprised by this when they asked about the trip. I think this is due to Cameroon's appearance on the map of Africa (see first post, or the the page title above for map). For an African country, Cameroon is not particularly large. And traditional maps understate the size of Africa.

Africa is about 11.7 million square miles/30.2m sq km. The US, in contrast, is about 3.8 million square miles/9.8m sq km. But if you look at them on a traditional Mercator projection world map, they look much closer in size; Africa looks about twice as big as the US:


In fact, Africa is too small by an entire US in this projection (which also positions the equator well below the middle of the map). You can see this if you look at a globe, or at a different projection, such as Buckminster Fuller's dymaxion map, where the globe is projected onto a polyhedron and then unfolded into two dimensions:


(Fuller was a pretty interesting guy, by the way, if you haven't heard of him. His map deliberately had no right way up, and shows all the world's landmasses connected.)

This map shows the relative sizes of the US and Africa much more accurately. The Sahara by itself is just about as big as the US, over 3.5 million sq mi/9m sq km.

globalization is overrated

Multinational corporations get a lot of press, but I have found out that the world is not the gobal village you might think. We're wondering how exactly to do things like pay rent while in Cameroon, and it turns out that moving money over there is not a trivial exercise, at least for one or two individuals. Credit cards are unwelcome in that part of the world because of fraud troubles. More surprising was the discovery that you'll have a hard time finding anyone interested in cashing traveler's checks (thanks to the Bradt travel guide for Cameroon for that tip). But what seemed strangest of all was the completely blank reaction from the banks here when asked how to do this. After all, these are themselves multinational corporations.

Apparently there's a Citigroup office in Yaounde, the capital, where we'll be living. (Like, next week; wow.) So Ann made a call to Citibank today to ask about this. She ended up talking to someone friendly at a desk somewhere in south Asia, who said that her information was that the African branch offices were all in Egypt. She had no further advice. I did even worse asking the friendly people at the neighborhood branch of my bank about this. They had no idea how you get money overseas. And when I called the international desk for my bank, I ended up on someone's voicemail.

Our friends in Yaounde tell us we can use ATMs over there, for a fee of course. The exchange rate you get is supposed to be pretty good, actually; better than a currency exchange. And one of the NGOs will let us open an account with a US check, but we have to cross town to their offices to get our money. So it's not impossible. Just inconvenient and/or expensive.

You'd think this would be a solved problem by now. But maybe there's no money in it.

opinions now welcome

OK, the comments are fixed. You can now add comments here without registering as a blogger.com user. Never actually requested that "feature", but apparently it's the default setting when you create a blog. Thanks to Bojil V. for pointing this out!

one week out

We fly out in a week! We have most of the big items taken care of -- plane tickets, passport, vaccinations, visas -- but this of course leaves a thousand smaller things to do. I have to stop by the job I just quit (amicably) to pick up my final paycheck this morning. Then Ann and I are having a farewell lunch with her coworkers and students. Then a meeting with someone from Kiva.org, a microloan organization based here in San Francisco. That should be interesting. Kiva lets people make direct microloans to individuals overseas, so maybe we can connect them with the organization we'll be working with (RELUFA) in some useful way. Or maybe I can just grab a cup of coffee with someone who had the nerve to start a charitable organization, which wouldn't be all bad either.

No picture for this entry. We haven't left yet. Plus, if you're reading this, you probably have a good idea of what San Francisco looks like already.

Then there's the job of picking out a few books to bring, ripping more CDs to bring along to listen to (it is a whole year, after all), figuring out car and renter's insurance while we're gone, some last-minute acting work I couldn't resist, and lots of last-minute goodbye dinners and drinks. Ann's wondering what shoes to bring. I wonder about finding a hat that doesn't make me look like a frat boy, Southern Baptist or Travel Channel host. We continue to pack up things in the house to get them out of the way for our friend who will stay here while we're gone. I need to pick up some 240v adapter plugs for our laptops. It's all frantic but lots of fun.

Yesterday was my last day at work. Was that ever exhilarating. Nothing feels quite like quitting a job. It's that scary, walking-along-the-edge-of-a-cliff feeling, like getting away with something you're not supposed to do. I hope to go back there once the trip is finished, if they can use me, so it was friendly, but it's still an illicit thrill. I hope to do some coding on open-source projects while we're over there, though. I'd miss programming too much to give it up for a year.