Hey y’all! It’s been a REALLY long time since I updated this blog, I know. Right now, I’m back home in the U.S. of A. for a little vacation. I’m in Asheville, NC visiting the most lovely and erudite Cari Ficken. Don’t feel slighted, though, if I didn’t get to see you while I was here. I hardly saw anyone, and spent all the time with my family. Anyway, I’d like to tell you a little bit about what I’ve been up to recently work-wise, and then follow this with a brazen solicitation for money. Over the last three months, the major project that I’ve been putting together is an environmental education program at three schools in my area. I have been teaching classes at these schools since October, focusing on rural environmental issues that affect the lives of the students, the majority of whom are going to grow up to be farmers. Topics that we have addressed include food webs, deforestation, soil erosion, renewable vs. non-renewable resources, the importance of soil, etc. The classes have been both classroom-based and field-based; Below you can see some pictures of me working with elementary school students to build a compost pile. Encouraged by the positive response among students and administrators, I decided to try and expand this project and make it my main lasting contribution to my village. I partnered up with a super-volunteer in a nearby village, Juilie Gallus, to try and implement a lasting environmental education curriculum in five different schools, centered around creating orchards at the schools and examining how planting trees can help solve a lot of the environmental issues (reduced crop yields, mudslides, etc.) that the students face. The program is going to be participatory on a lot of fronts. Teachers and local stakeholders are going to help design and implement the curriculum, local tree nurseries are going to plan the tree plantations, and the children are going to plant the trees and keep them healthy to plant a little over six acres of land, and use over six thousand trees! I don’t want to go on too much about the details of the project in this space, but if you want to read more about the project, the links below will provide it all for you. Detailed Project Proposal Project Budget A major goal of mine for this vacation was to round up funds for this project; the schools are donating all of the land and the manpower for the project, and my host NGO is also giving a lot of time in developing the plans. Currently, though, Julie and I are looking for finances to buy the tree seedlings for the project. If you’d consider giving any quantity of money, we would be much obliged. The link to donate is below: Click here to give to this project! There is absolutely no overhead associated with any gift; the U.S. government pays for me to work here in Cameroon, and the Peace Corps does not take out any money from your donation to cover costs. Also, any donation is tax-deductable, and you’ll be issued a receipt by the donation website. The site for making donations is run by the government and is completely secure. Additionally, Julie and I are looking for partner schools in the US that we can do exchange programs with and hopefully have the students raise money for the project. If you’re a teacher and interested in doing this, please please email me. The exchange would likely involve sending pictures and letters (translated) back and forth between the schools. In other news, my beekeeping cooperative is coming along quite nicely. We just put in 20 hives for the 7 members combined, and we’re getting registered as an official cooperative, which will qualify us for government-subsidized loans and grants. I’m not going to write too much more because I want to get out and enjoy my last few days in the US, but everyone stay tuned for more updates soon!

Before I get to other issues, can anybody help me identify this very strange tree? I live in the Western highlands of Cameroon at an elevation of 1500m. The tree is in my neighbor’s live fence, but I’ve never seen it growing wild. As you can see below, it bears very queer-looking fruits that resemble the eggs of a reptilian extra-terrestrial race. The fruits are about 2cm in diameter. When the fruits are picked and cut open, the wounds exude a lot of sticky white latex. I am pretty certain that they’re inedible. I have noticed, however, that ants are attracted to the lighter green splotches on the fruits. The immature fruit is semi-hollow and the interior surface is covered with what look like thousands of villi. These grow and fill in the fruit as it matures. The fruits feel like really soft racquetballs when you squeeze them.  Below you can see the fruit cut open and some leaves. The tree had a somewhat bushy habit, although it had also grown about 7m tall. The leaves are simple and alternate. The bark is thin, white and nondescript. Who knows what it is? My first thought was that it is some type of wild, inedible fig, but the leaves don’t look like the fig trees I’ve seen. I promised a roundup of Cameroonian cuisine. All I really know is Bameliké cuisine, but I’ll give you guys a brief summary based on the Cameroonian food pyramid. The graphic and the following excerpts are stolen from Cameroonian Dietary Guidelines 2010, published by the  Maggi Inc. Endowed Ministry of Nutrition of Cameroon.   Palm oil (12-43 servings per day): At least six thousand calories (of the recommended eight to ten thousand calories per day) should consist of palm oil. Very few Cameroonians have difficulty meeting this dietary requirement. However, if you have trouble consuming enough palm oil, alternative sources of fat include pig and beef skin, squash seed oil, and and soy oil, although the latter two suffer from incomplete hydrogenation (saturation). Bringing your palm oil consumption up to par can be as simple as asking your local beans-and-beignets lady to ladle another tablespoon of grease from the fry pot onto your beans. Palm oil is the staple cooking oil, and it is used in mass quantities to fry nearly everything. Also, if a food was stewed, boiled, roasted, or somehow else cooked without being fried, palm oil will invariably be added just before serving, “for flavor.” Raw palm oil is rusty red, opaque and quite thick. Refined palm oil is a deep, transparent tan color. Both are a strongly-flavored, low-quality cooking oil. The comment about having extra oil ladled on your beans as “le sauce” is no joke either. The woman who runs my local beans-and-beignets shack looked at me with confusion and suspicion the first time I asked her to not pour extra grease on my food. MSG (4-8 servings per day): “Avec Maggi, chaque femme est une etoile.” With Maggi, every woman is a star. This has been the pan-African slogan of Maggi International Seasoning Conglomerate of China Incorporated  for the last fifty years, and it rings as true today as it did then, Give your husband the glutamic acid he needs in abundance; he deserves it… Experience the vast array of complementary Maggi MSG delivery systems, including Maggi Original(you know and love it as “le cube”), Maggi Arome (liquid MSG concentrate), Maggi Poulet, Maggi Oignon et Épices, and Maggi Crevette. Also, new for 2010 and aimed at the discerning but budget-conscious consumer, try Maggi Poubelle, refined from the pure effluent of our Guangzhou factory and naturally fortified with mercury and other essential heavy metals… Use of inferior sources of MSG, such as the Honig Beef cube, has been linked to erectile dysfunction and depression in your husband. Additionally, insufficient dietary MSG has been shown to lead to an increased risk of infidelity, heartbreak and divorce among Cameroonian couples… Remember, with Maggi, every woman is a star! I would like to note now that I am officially very much pro-MSG (monosodium glutamate), despite the selective editing of the above quote which might imply sarcasm. 1) Glutamic acid is an amino acid that is one of the essential building blocks of human proteins. 2) Humans have evolved taste buds specifically receptive to glutamate ions, called “umame” or savory receptors, and so as a result 3) everything tastes much better with MSG. Finally, 4) many of the most delicious foods, such as tomatoes, nori (sushi seaweed), aged cheeses, miso and cured meats contain high levels of naturally-occuring glutamate.  It is thus my uninformed opinion that anyone that says that they have an allergy to MSG is either a moron or willfully full of shit. Nobody is allergic to any other amino acids that are necessary for making human proteins. Also, you never hear of someone getting a “tomato headache” after eating lots of natural glutamate from a few tomatoes. In short, MSG is the real deal, and haters are just trippin’, Feel free to correct me in the comments if it turns out you have good evidence to contradict my opinions on MSG. I’m still going to cook all the time with Maggi, though. How can it be wrong when it feels so right? Starch (8-10 servings per day): The bulk of calories not obtained through palm oil should come from starches. Cameroon has many, many starches to offer, including cassava, taro, cocoyams, yams, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, corn, rice, plantains, millet, beignets, and wheat bread. Beignets, fried balls of dough, contain all three of the most important food groups and are thus considered a “complete food.” There is a surprising variety of starches available in Cameroon, and they’re all prepared in their own unappealing way. Cassava (French: manioc), which contains cyanide, must be leeched, dried and then cooked in a lengthy process to make it edible. Popular preparations include the batôn de manioc, which is cassava flour wrapped in banana leaves in a log shape and boiled. Then, the batôns often sit around for a few days, during which time they ferment. It’s like eating a soured glue stick. I am not a fan. Couscous de manioc, which is another common preparation, is not what you think of as couscous. It is just cassava flour boiled in banana leaves, a little less firm than the baton and unfermented. This is often eaten with sauces such as fish and peanut butter sauce. Finally, popular among bachelors for its ease of preparation, but slightly toxic, is the whole boiled cassava. I am not a fan of cassava. Taro is an interesting starch that makes a paste similar to what you would get if you mixed talcum powder with water. It is the starch in a strangely delicious dish called achu. Like a sneeze. Achu is taro paste made into the shape of a bowl, into which a yellow sauce is poured. The yellow sauce has as one of its main ingredients ground limestone, which sounds awful but is actually pretty good. The sauce has various other spices and sometimes fish, and I can definitely recommend it. All the other starches listed are usually boiled. Couscous de mais (corn) is another staple. Plantains I have come to love. The trick for me was to stop thinking about them as a bad banana and to think about them as a good potato. The quantity of starch that Cameroonians eat at a meal is astounding. Jessica, my four-year-old homestay sister would routinely eat more rice than me at dinner. I’m talking three to five cups of rice. Meat (1-2 servings per day): Common meats include beef, goat, chicken, rat, pig and fish. More exotic meats include monkey, lizard, cane rat and rabbit. Fathers should make sure to consume all the meat in a meal before their growing children can get any, to show them who’s the boss. Cameroonians don’t eat a lot of meat with each meal, but most meals contain at least a little. ALL organs are eaten. Beef skin is very popular as a meat all to itself, even though it is nothing more than a 1/2cm layer of fat. The hair is singed off the skin before cooking, making for terrible smells. Large piles of intestines can normally be found on top of the various grill stalls around town, which is unappetizing to me. The beef is uniformly low-quality, but it is very cheap, around $2 a pound. Chickens are bought live. Killing, de-feathering and gutting them is an involved process which is not fun at all. Rat is another very popular meat, which I’ve had twice. The first time, my neighbor cooked it, and it was wretchingly awful. It had an extremely strong, gamey taste. It’s possible that the animal sat dead in a trap for a few days before being cooked. I swore it off completely until just last week, when my other neighbor invited me to eat with him. I was insufficiently cautious in accepting before finding out what was on the menu. Of course, it was rat, purchased from the woman who sells hot meals at the junction. This time though, it was cooked in a good sauce and was only moderately gamey. I came close to enjoying it. It is not something I’ll seek out, though. Rats are prepared by singing off all the hairs, and then cutting it into seven segments, the head, each leg, and two rounds of torso. I don’t think people eat the tail, strangely. Rats are obtained two ways: first, people set traps in their field. I stepped into a jaw trap once and my foot smarted for days! Luckily I was wearing my hiking boots. The other method is to set a brush fire and have a hunting dog chase them down as they flee the fire. Fish is very popular, both smoked and fresh. The smoked fish is not delicately smoked, dill-infused lox. They are whole fish that are smoked at high temperatures which chars the outside. Infrequently, there are maggots inside. Fresh fish is caught by giant Chinese trawlers, processed and frozen on-boat, and then sent to Cameroonian markets. The entire fish is eaten, including the head and skin. The local fishing industry has been destroyed by the Chinese, who obtained the fishing rights at bargain-basement prices with a wink and a nod and hands moving discreetly under the table. Monkey is a very highly prized meat owing to its rarity, as most of the monkeys have been killed for their meat. One day during training, the health volunteers went to the restaurant that they normally took lunch at. The woman opened up the pot, and there was a big hairy monkey head staring out at them. Nobody was sure if they were deliberately trying to gross them out or if they really thought that the Americans would be enticed by the hairy monkey head covered in sauce. Lizard is a meat that I have yet to try, although one day I was in the market and I saw a huge, maybe four foot long, black and yellow lizard. The guy wanted $12 for it, and I considered buying it, but then I realized I didn’t know what I would do with a thirty pound lizard. Spaghetti Omelets (1-2 servings per day): Although these could be considered part of the meat, starch, and palm oil groups, most Cameroonians will agree that they deserve their own special group. For maximum health benefits, be sure that the omlette actually floats on the grease while being cooked. Serve with bread for an extra boost of starch. Sprinkle with Maggi Arome before serving. Yes, the venerable spaghetti omelet, the  fast food of Cameroon. They are pretty delicious, especially when the spaghetti gets fried a little crispy. Don’t call them spaghetti omlettes, though, as you may not be understood. A conversation my friend had at an omelet shack: “I’d like a spaghetti omelet.” “We don’t serve that here.” “What do you have then?” “One or two eggs spaghetti.” Fruits and Vegetables (use sparingly): Vegetables should not be consumed in excess, as this takes up space in the stomach which could be used for more calorie-rich foods such as palm oil. When possible, vitamins and minerals should be thoroughly boiled out of vegetables before serving. Fruits, while an expensive treat. are not actually considered food. While a wide variety of vegetables are available here in the Western highlands, people consume very few vegetables. Onions, carrots, leeks, peppers, tomatoes and celery are not considered vegetables in their own right, but are instead called “condiments”. These are pulverized in small quantities and added to sauces, but they’re never cooked and prepared by themselves, and most certainly never eaten raw. The main greens that you can find here are cabbage (normally fried), amaranth leaves (fried or boiled, and absolutely delicious), what’s called huckleberry in the English-speaking regions and simply “legume” in the French regions, and bitter leaf. The last two are very bitter if you don’t boil them with baking soda in at least three rinses of water. As a result, they have almost no nutritional value. So that’s my explanation of the Cameroonian food pyramid. In upcoming weeks I’ll make a post about some specific Cameroonian dishes with recipes. That’s it for now though. If you got the impression that I am not a fan of Cameroonian food, you would be only partly right. I do like a variety of the dishes, but nothing so much so that I would want to cook it at home. Many of the dishes that I like also involve hours of preparation for only a moderate payoff, flavor-wise. Some odds and ends:   The big news these days is that the rains have started, and so agricultural activites have really picked up. At APADER, we’re getting ready to install contour bunds, or “bandes anti-erosives”  on 1/5 ha. of land, which is no mean undertaking. The contour bunds will consist of two rows of trees each, one row a N-fixing tree like Acacia, which will also be good for beekeeping, and the other row various fruit trees. Today I helped to weed the coffee plantation until I learned that my co-workers had just sprayed the plants with fungicide and insecticide. I looked at the fungicide packet, which said in case of poisioning, “There is no known antidote. Treat symptomatically.”I decided to stop.  In other exciting news, I got a kitten. His name is Franz. He’s named after either Franz Fanon (he’s all-black and brooding), the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, or the “stun guitar” player for The Scorpions. It really all depends on who I want to impress. He is very affectionate, almost too much so. I find it unseemly for a cat to beg for affection, and I normally prefer more independently-minded cats. But he is a good mouser, which is why I got him, and he cheerfully eats anything I give to him.

I’ve been taking it pretty easy at work the last few weeks and not getting involved in too many projects, but the one’s I’ve been working on are particularly fun. My goal last week was to build a beehive out of raffia “bamboo” and document the process with pictures so I can later create a howto guide. Raffia is a kind of palm that produces fronds with hard exterior coating and a very soft wood, similar to balsa wood, on the inside. One can cleave it very easily and easily whittle tacks to hold the pieces of bamboo together. It is an ideal construction material for poor farmers in developing countries because it requires almost no tools (I built the hive using just a machete, a pocketknife, and a hacksaw blade tensioned by a bent tree branch), very little expertise, and the fronds themselves are available for free in your local swamp. On top of that, raffia is the source of palm wine at higher elevations. What a plant! Anyway, this is the hive body that I built. It’s a standard Kenya top-bar hive design that will fit thirty top bars. I need to contract out the construction of the top bars because one needs a table saw to cut each one to exactly 32mm and then cut a dado down the middle to put starter wax.  I started construction of a roof for the hive, but I’ve run into some engineering difficulties, and I’ll need to rethink my strategy before continuing that. I’ve also assembled a bee suit (complete for $14!), and I’m going to harvest honey from the two existing hives at APADER this week. I think I’m getting to one of them too late, though; it looks like they’re about to swarm because of lack of space in the hive. Another exciting project that I’ve been working on with my friend and fellow PCV Alec last week is a survey of the experimental farm. Alec is a computer whiz who teaches IT at the university in Bangangté. He is currently writing a GIS program in Java that we’re going to use to manage the survey information. (GIS – Geographic Information Systems, organize data taken from GPS units and other sources, such as photographic satellites). It’s an incredibly complicated program, involving lots of calculus and such, and I’m very impressed with what he’s done in the last two months. Last Saturday, we walked around the perimeter of the APADER farm, taking GPS waypoints which Alec then imported into the computer. The goal of doing the survey is to better understand the topography and hydrology of the farm so that we can design our experiments better. I’ll post more updates on this and a map when we have a workable version. Yesterday, I had a total blast climbing Mt. Batchingou with some other volunteers from the West. I can see the mountain from my house, and it is quite an imposing sight. Mount Batchingou is (I believe) the tallest mountain in my division at 6600 ft., and as one would expect there are great views to be had from the top, although the haze of the dry season obscured our view somewhat. It was a pretty easy hike that took about four hours round-trip.  The  change in the vegetation between the valley floor and the mountain is quite dramatic; In Batchingou and environs, the natural vegetation is a mixture of highland forest and grasslands, but on top of the mountain the vegetation is strictly scrubby grass, with bushes and trees appearing only occasionally in gullies. To the right is a picture of our ascent. Kareen, the volunteer who lives closest to the mountain, invited her counterpart along on the trip. He’s the one carrying the shotgun and wearing the Barack Obama shirt. He was very knowledgeable in medicinal plants of the region and other bits of natural history, and it was great to have him along. He didn’t get to hunt anything, though, because we made far too much noise. Here are some views from the top of the mountain. My camera never does pictures like this justice, but you’ll get the idea. I brought my binoculars, which I definitely don’t regret, because there were amazing things to be seen all around.   Left to right: Ben, Sequoria, Alec, me and Kareen On our way down, we walked through a Bororo settlement. Mt. Batchingou and surrounding mountains are sparsely inhabited by the Bororo people, whom I believe are actually not nomadic here in the West, although they are in other environs with less rainfall. They are cattle herders, and the trails that we followed were cattle paths.  As I explained in a previous post, the Bororo will set fire to the grasslands to make the grasses sprout new green growth for their cattle. This was certainly the case on Mount Batchingou, as large swaths of the mountain had been recently burned. Much of the soil is so severely eroded, though, that very little forage will grow on it. Below is a picture of the secondary succession of ferns in a recently burned area; ferns like these dominate the vegetation here in areas of extremely poor soil fertility. On our way down, we stopped through a Bororo settlement. Luckily, Kareen’s counterpart spoke Fulfulde, so we were able to communicate with them. Below is a little house on the prairie type settlement that I found particularly aesthetically pleasing. Anyway that’s all for now. I finally got my mail from Yaoundé after two months! Thanks everyone that’s been writing me! I’m busily writing responses.

So for the last few days I’ve had 3G wireless internet at my house courtesy of my work. No joke, I don’t have running water, and my electricity is around 75% at best, but I do have high-speed internet access. Anyway, while wasting time on the internet, I found that Google Earth has relatively good aerial photography of Bangangte and surrounding regions. Unfortunately, my house missed the cutoff by about 1/2km for high-res photos, but the experimental farm of APADER just made the cut. Here it is… (click for enlargement)   Between the thumbtacks that say tree nursery and experimental fields, you’ll see the horizontal rows of trees. Those are our contour bunds. They are bands of trees and earth that follow exactly 0 degree slope around the hill. These prevent surface runoff and erosion, as well as promoting water infiltraton. We plant them with nitrogen-fixing species of trees, and then prune the trees severely (so they don’t compete with crops) during the growing season, and turn the leaves in as fertilizer. Acacia angustissima and Calliandra calothyrsus have other uses in beekeeping. The puffier trees to the right of the nursery are some mango and avocado trees. The eucalyptus plantation is about twenty years old, and was planted by the father of APADER’s founder. We have an alternative lumber wood culture right next to it, manly Grevillia robusta.  Here is downtown Bangangte, the big town about 8k from my village.The biweekly market is the one I photographed in a previous blog post, from the top of the triangle. Chez Pierre is the bar that trainees would hang out at afterhours. Finally, I would like to share this wonderful graphic I came across. Props to whomever made it. I’m happy to report that the only confirmed chip on my board so far is the middle one, but I’m going to take some de-worming medication this week just in case. (many Cameroonians do so three or four times a year.)

…is in decline. I don’t know why, but I don’t feel like writing anything extended or coherent, so I’ll post some pictures and write some blurbs instead. I ate Christmas dinner with my former trainer Elvis and his family. Most Cameroonians are not indifferent to photos. They either are very excited that you have a camera and want to take many pictures with you, or they are convinced that cameras are soul-trapping devices that can be used to put curses on you via the local witch doctor. Elvis and his wife are in the first category of people, as you can see. Just today, I had a 20 minute photo op session with a farmer in his fields of hot peppers and tobacco. Then, sitting at the local bar/beigneterie/MSG store, I had someone come up and show me two pictures that he had taken of me and his family when I went to visit his cacao plantation. That is the endearing side of pictures and the Cameroonians who love them. On the other side is the motorcycle taxi driver who took a bunch of pictures at the Celine Dion dance party that I mentioned in a previous post. Then, months after all was forgotten, he pulled up to me and my friend Lauren, and showed us the photo album of the party that he had gotten printed (at a considerable cost) and carries around with him AT ALL TIMES.  This is a drum circle at a funeral that I attended for my host father’s mother, who died in 2001. Funerals are a grand affair here, put on years after the person dies. The family will save for years to throw a huge party in the deceased’s honor. By my estimate, this funeral was attended by over 700 people. People like to dress in matching outfits for big events, as you can see in this picture and the picture below of my host mom and sister. Anyway, the drum circle, like many things in Cameroon, is completely backwards from an American drum circle. a) The drummers are in the middle of the circle, and people call/response sing and dance in a tight circle around the drummers. b) The drummers are talented. c) The dancers do not dance in rhythm exactly. Instead they form a complimentary, and at times competitive, rhythm, expressed by metal janglies on their ankles. This makes keeping rhythm with them nearly impossible for me, and I have learned to not even try. d) It’s  not a bumpin’ drum circle without a PA system. Within minutes of getting going, someone had mic’ed the drum circle and cranked it to 11, which was wholly unnecessary because they were already the loudest thing for miles.. Then, a competing drum circle got started, and a seperate PA system materialized for it in seconds. So one was left with two insanely loud drum circles playing over individual PA systems, audio on full blast and clipping terribly, on top of the Cameroonian pop music playing over the catering company’s PA, on top of 700 people singing or eating and talking. It was a wild time. The drum circles here tend to go on all night which is either a blast or infuriating, depending on how much you want to sleep. I woke up this morning, made coffee, started walking to the farm, looked up and oh man solar eclipse! I took this picture at 6:45 this morning.  It took me a got fifteen minutes to get the aperture, shutter speed, etc… right on my camera to take a direct picture of the sun, but I did manage to get one good picture before the eclipse ended. I guess there was a full eclipse in France, but because of the latitude difference, ours was only partial. Brush fires have been a regular motif in my days for the last few weeks or so. It’s the height of the dry season and, true to form, it is very dry here. Just how dry? It hasn’t rained a single mL in nine weeks. Just a week or so ago, somebody lit a brush fire RIGHT OUTSIDE my house. I heard it burning and ran outside. I stood there for a few minutes, watching this fire grow and thinking “Oh shit, what do I do, oh shit this is not good.” While I stood there paralyzed, some of my neighbors also saw the fire and ran up and put it out with sisal leaves, and I felt like an utter fool for not having the sense to put a wildfire out while it was small. Then, not more than an hour later, a fire started on the hill next to mine! Not wanting to be the incompetent American again, I rushed to go help put out this fire, which involved a) finding a branch with green leaves  b) beating the fire with said branch until it goes out. Despite the method’s simplicity, it was quite demanding work, and I was definitely the greenhorn of the fire crew. Cameroonians are COMPLETELY nonchalant about putting out brush fires, and they do so almost at a leisurely pace. The burned landscape above is the aftermath of this fire. As you can see, the fire burns so quick and cool that even grasses with thicker stems survive uncharred. So far, I have heard three stories about how the fires are started, and I’ll repeat them in descending order of probability: 1. Farmers too lazy to clear their feilds. This is almost certainly who has been setting the fires near me. 2. Bored children. 3. The Bororo, a Muslim herding tribe that came from the North a few centuries ago. They’re a favorite punching bag for the dominant Bamelike here, so I was unsurprised to find more than one person blaming the Bororo, even though their settlements are fairly far from here. The accusation has a basis in fact, however; the Bororo do actually set fires to get fresh grass to sprout for their herds. 4. “Le rat – voilà sa troue!” Many people blamed “the rat” for the fires, and then proceeded to point me to where his supposed den is. I think there’s something behind this explanation, but I have yet to figure it out. So I did my first “animation”, or training session on Monday! I went to Bandrefam, about an hour away, where Julie, an agro volunteer, works with a group that does beekeeping. The beekeeping project was set up by a previous volunteer, and she inherited it. We were going to harvest honey for the first time, but the hives that we worked on had ant and termite problems and were weak as a result, so we didn’t end up harvesting anything. I was quite nervous going into the animation, because it would also be my first time working with the (notoriously aggressive) African honeybee, but everything went fine. We worked at dusk, (no good pictures were taken as a result) and the bees were exceptionally calm. Nobody got stung, even though there were six people in bee suits. It was really great to work with and teach an enthusiastic group of farmers, and I’m excited to work with them again, especially if it means honey.   Our oyster mushrooms have started to fruit at APADER! I don’t even like to eat mushrooms, but I love everything else about them. Fungi might be my favorite kingdom, if I was really pressed to pick one. The spawn strain and the training for this project were provided by the World Agroforestry Center, and this is the first production run that APADER (the NGO I work for) has made. The culture medium is a sterilized mixture of sawdust, ground corn, and lime. After the fungus completely colonizes this substrate, the mushrooms poke through the bag, as seen below.. Above is a picture of a (slightly over)developed mushroom, a warm-weather subspecies of the oyster mushroom found all over the US. I’ve been reading a ton about mycology, and I’m extremely excited to learn and experiment with this cultivation system. Somebody that deserves special mention on my blog is my friend Joseph. I met him on the first day that I moved to town, and he has been a saint to me ever since. He built me mosquito screens for my windows, tells me when somebody is trying to rip me off, and has been a wonderful friend in general. On top of that, he speaks passable English, which helped me navigate the first few rough weeks at post. Thank you Joseph Kenfack.   A pretty morning with some clouds rolling over the mountain I live on… The elusive hornbill again, at least this time in profile, but still blurry. I’ve had some amazing bird sightings in the last month. These have included an African cuckoo that I observed for a good twenty minutes, calling and eating caterpillars off of trees (they are quite rare in these parts). I also saw a hornbill perched no more than ten feet away. Other highlights include a pair of yellow white-eyes, an African harrier hawk, yellow-mantled widowbird, and a to-be-determined (and magnificent) woodpecker. It’s getting past my ten o’clock bedtime, so that’s all for now. I have yet to get a post office box here, so send mail to Yaounde. Mom and dad, I got the package you sent me. All the volunteers in the West are very excited about the cinnamon you sent in such great quantities, and the underwear could not have arrived a minute too soon.  

Sorry about the lack of posts as of late. I’ve found it hard to get to use the internet. You’ll notice that there’s another post right below this one that I composed a long time ago, but which I never posted… until now. That post is far more interesting. The time between Thanksgiving and swearing-in was a blur of activity, but we made it! Agro volunteers are still fifteen for fifteen through all of training, and don’t we look good… There was typhoid, there was malaria, there were intestinal worms, there were chiggers, there was amoebic dysentery, there were grave puncture wounds from bikes,  but we kicked ass and took copious notes. And here’s the health volunteers. I don’t mean to be separatist about it, but my big group picture came out blurry. So we swore in as Peace Corps volunteers. There were dignitaries. There were photo-ops. There were certificates, oh my were there certificates. There were speeches courageously given in French, Fulfulde and Pidgin. We then showed our appreciation for certain members of the community with certificates, and then some other people received some certificates. Then the ambassador administered the oath of office, and we took more pictures. Then BUFFET TIME!!! There’s me with Madame la Ambassatrice la Honorée Janette Garvey and my host family, sans Carole, who had to be in school. There isn’t really very much to be said about the whole process; it was just like a graduation or some other ceremony, except with loud Cameroonian and eighties American pop music playing over the PA system. My chef was there, and he might of gotten best-dressed with his three-piece tweed suit and matching tweed fedora. After the ceremony, I rushed home to pack, and then rushed to the party that we had at Hotel Djenne, the third nicest hotel in Bangangté. At 7 the next morning we all went our separate ways. I arrived at my post that night, after making a trip to Bafoussam to go to the bank, buy a non-stick pan and olive oil, and eat French fries with mayo. When I arrived at my house, the dead guy’s picture was taken down from the wall, which just made the house even more empty. I lied before when I said there was nothing in my house… it turns out that there are seven raffia bamboo beds, although my mattress is too large for all of them, so it makes a U-shape on the frame. I turned one room into my kitchen by putting my stove in there, but my living room is still completely empty. The Peace Corps has, I should say, up until this point kept us quite adequately monied, but the move-in allowance that I received was wholly inadequate for opening a post and furnishing a house. With the money, I bought a kitchen counter and cabinet (on order at the menusierie), a mattress, a gas stove and tank, a voltage regulator, some small sundries, and a bamboo dresser, and this put me 35% over budget. I’ll stop griping, but if anyone wants to send me a couch or even just a loveseat via airmail, it would be greatly appreciated. Until then, no sitting allowed at my house. Despite the lack of furnishings, I’m settling quite nicely into my house. I have a west-facing porch, so I can catch the evening sun, filtered through the leaves of the banana grove, and read on my front porch until dusk. I just finished reading Dune, which I can highly recommend. Speaking of Dune, my water situation is better than I had expected. That there to the right is my well, which is only about seven or eight hundred feet from my house. It was much to my embarrassment that I couldn’t figure out how to use my well at first. Every time I lowered the bucket, it would float on the surface of the water and not draw any. I tried loading a bunch of rocks to one side of my bucket, which did tilt the bucket so that it would take on water, but when I hoisted it, it stayed tilted and all the water ran out. Then I struck upon the idea of putting a few heavy rocks in the bottom of my bucket and dropping it from a significant height. This indeed did work once, but on my second attempt the weight of the rocks smashed through the bottom of my bucket upon impact with the water. Dismayed and a bucket down, I consulted Zara, Kim, Kareen, and other friends via telephone, hoping someone would have an insight so that I wouldn’t a) die of thirst or, worse, b) have to ask my neighbor to explain to me how to use a well, on par with the wheel and fire as one of the simplest technologies mastered by primitive man. Unfortunately, nobody had any answers. The next day though, when I was trying some various other methods that were equally ineffectual, my neigbor came across me and was quite kind in assisting me. You tie a rock on a string to one side of the bucket to get the bucket to tilt into the water, and then when you pull it up, it hangs agreeably to the side. Genius! I went on a very sporting bike ride the other day to visit Bangou, a town about 7km away where the closest volunteer lives. I very stupidly forgot to do my Peace Corps Bicycle Repair Manual-recommended pre-ride inspection, which ended in disaster. Having transported my bike to Bamena via taxi, I had removed the wheels. When I re-mounted them, I forgot to re-engage the brakes. So I jumped on my bike and started coasting down the hill outside my house, seen here from different directions. It was only when I reached unsafe speeds that I realized that I did not have the ability to regulate my speed. I hesitated for a few seconds, but then decided that my only course of action was to jump off my bike, which I did, skinning my knee in the process. The rest of the ride was gorgeous, though. Bangou looks out over this very imposing mountain, Mount Bangou, actually. I’m very excited to climb it, as Kareen, the volunteer, tells me that it gives wonderful views of the entire department. I tried to take pictures, but the dusty haze of the dry season foiled my efforts. Here are some other pictures I took recently, though: This is the eucalyptus plantation that is on the ridge by my house. Eucalyptus poses pretty grave environmental problems for Cameroon for two reasons: a) Eucalyptus secretes poisons into the soil to discourage competition and b) one eucalyptus tree, depending on the size, consumes eleven liters of water a day, and a eucalyptus plantation can dramatically lower the water table of an area. The plantation pictured here isn’t too offensive; it’s at the top of a mountain, away from arable land and any wells.  One area that my host NGO is working in is alternative fast-, straight-growing timber trees such as grevillia robusta that don’t have these drawbacks.   Here is the valley that is at the base of the hill I live on. I took this picture while on my way to the market yesterday, which occurs very confusingly every eight days. I discovered yesterday that I live pretty far out from the center of town, about 45 minutes by foot. I think I’ve probably posted enough landscape pictures that you guys have a pretty good idea of what the West looks like, so I’ll stop posting them unless there’s something particularly compelling. While I was at the market, I met a rather loud-mouthed but well-meaning carpenter cum tree nursery manager who was eager to show me his farms, and I was happy to make his acquaintance. I have no shortage of people who want to be my friend here, and I find that number climbing even higher after I buy my first friend a beer. Everybody wants me to bring a tractor to Bamena which, while completely unrealistic, at least isn’t as unrealistic as the guy in Bangangté who wanted me to build a hydroelectric dam. I’m certainly happy to be at post, but it is definitely a little lonely compared to training, when I had 31 other Americans and Cameroonians who spoke great English to talk to. I’ve been writing a lot of letters which I’m going to drop into the post on Monday. Also, I’m going to open up a new post office box in Bangangté next week (for LETTERS ONLY, no packages), so stay tuned for my new address. What a predicament that now that I have all this time to write new blog posts and letters and such, I have so much less to talk about, as my life has slowed down considerably since arriving at post. Note, though, that I’m NOT complaining about the last point. In upcoming weeks: a mini lesson in Pidjin English (mostly the few funny words I’ve picked up), some info on Cameroonian cuisine (think starch and oil), maybe some pictures of my new village friends and haunts, and who knows what else… Wish you were here!

I have been just the busiest guy since my last post. There are a hundred stories that I could tell about what’s happened in the last two weeks, but I don’t want this blog to be like reading my journal, as that would be terribly boring. So, I’m just going to post random bits that come particularly to mind. I just processed a bunch of pictures, so my memories will inevitably be skewed toward the events which I photographed, but what I photographed was pretty rad. I’d like to start out by acknowledging two very special groups of people who have been reading my blog: 1. my cousins’ second and fourth grade classes. I look forward to writing with you guys, and I hope you send mail my way soon. And 2. all the moms in the states who are reading my blog because their children are with me in Cameroon but they don’t write often enough. Please keep reading my blog; I’m not creeped out, but your children are embarrassed. Also, they miss you terribly but they are extremely lazy. All the agro volunteers are on a VACATION (!), ahem, educational field trip to the Northwest provence of Cameroon this weekend, and all of the health volunteers definitely have reason to be jealous. I thought that the West was beautiful, but the Northwest definitely is even more striking. Not only is the geography beautiful, but it’s also very nice to be able to speak English to everyone. That said, I have grown very accustomed to having speaking as loudly in English as I want to about any topic around anyone, without the slightest worry that I am being understood by non-Americans. I think I have embarrassed myself in at least one instance on account of that. For those unaware of the political geography of Cameroon, the Northwest and Southwest provinces of Cameroon, which border Nigeria, were formerly under British control between 1917 and 1960, and as such they speak English, whereas the rest of Cameroon speaks French. For reasons not understood  by me, this has alienated much of the people in these provinces from the rest of Cameroon, and has made the Anglophone regions hotbeds of political dissent, but that’s a whole other story. I don’t understand how so much political animosity could have developed over 40 years of colonial rule, but I’ll report back if I gain any insight, as this is one of my main unresolved questions about Cameroon. Anyway, I’ve digressed quite far from my intent. The mountains here are quite severe and imposing. Every time I wake, I defy the day to show me a farmer cultivating an ever steeper slope, and I am rarely disappointed by the day’s end. On this trip, we saw farmers that had tilled (in horizontal bunds, at least to their credit) on slopes between forty and fifty degrees… It’s a nightmare by any soil conservation standards, but population pressures are so strong in the Northwest and West of Cameroon that farmers have little choice but to grow on whatever land they can find. I’ve talked too long though… Check out some pictures… That’s Barbara, my favorite French instructor and all-around #1, and Antoine, the chief of Batie, our driver, and medicinal plants instructor. The first night, we stayed at this swell nursery and agroforestry training compound called MINEPCIG, because Cameroonians love very obtuse acronyms. I ended up buying two passion fruit vines from their nursery, which I’m very excited to plant at my house next week. There was a nice stream running right beside the dorms, mountains on all sides, grass huts for us to take our meals in, and some extraordinary demonstration gardens. They were certainly the most well-manicured gardens I’ve seen in Cameroon, at least, with hedges and nice foot paths. The hedge in the foreground of this picture is an edible green Cameroonians use to make a plate called njamma njamma. Behind that are onions, three papaya trees, and trellising on the far right are black pepper vines. The next day, we visited an agricultural research station where they are working on improved varieties of tubers. The coolest thing was learning about micro germplasm propagation techniques. Seen to the left (blurrily) is an Irish potato plant cultured on agar medium. The research station gets varieties of potatoes shipped from all over the world, particularly from Peru, which is the birthplace of the potato and which shares a very similar climate and geography to this area. If a variety of potato does particularly well, they can take the vegetative matter from the plant, cut it into very tiny pieces, and culture it on agar medium. In this way, they can get hundreds of clones from one potato plant. Each internode (where a leaf joins a stem) contains the necessary meristem cells for a new plant to start growing. Once the seedlings get a little bigger, they are removed from the agar medium and transplanted to a screen house, seen here,  for further development. All the soil in the screen house is autoclaved (read: heated in a stew pot over a fire for a while)  and there are double doors as well to keep pests out. Finally, the potato plants are transplanted to a field 12km away, where the mature plants are harvested and shipped to farmer-leaders who can then propagate and distribute the seed potatoes to their community. But now I’d like to come to what I consider the centerpiece of our trip. We spent last night at  the Saboga Botanical Garden outside of Baham, Northwest that was absolutely perfect… too perfect in fact. Our first impressions were great. The lawns were immaculately manicured, and the plant displays were amazing. For instance, there was a wonderful orchid garden where all the orchids were grown suspended from logs… After the initial walkthrough, some things seemed slightly amiss, however. For instance, there were many, many multiple tributes to the founder of the center, one Dr. Ngwa Che Francis Ntehnda, who had died two years previous.  Throughout the trip, I counted one bust, two devotional paintings, many pictures, and many assorted things – plazas, trees, rooms - dedicated to his memory.  On first brush, he seemed like a pretty interesting guy… a botanist by training who had founded the center to promote environmentalism in the Northwest. Digging a bit under the surface, the story becomes a bit weirder. This sign introduced us to the purpose of the center… You will notice the M.L. King Equality Centre referenced in the above sign. This is the diorama contained in the M.L.K. equality center, in which Dr. Ngwa Che takes, probably fairly, a quite dim view of the imperialist legacy in Africa. See if you can catch the subtle symbolism…   Luckily, Dr. Ngwa Che had a plan for world harmony, clearly explained in the following diagram. My favorite bullet point is undoubtedly “Reckless space exploration – Leave God’s world alone”. Most of the ideas were either environmentalist or Christian in nature, and admittedly many of them are good…. Then I found this picture of him, the first of many. The man had ONE EYE. Up until this point, I was debating whether or not the man was an eccentric but well-meaning environmentalist, or a cult leader. For some reason, learning that he was missing an eye left no doubt in my mind of the latter. Then we found the cross-shaped baptism pool, the bamboo maze, the caged monkey, the dozens of taxidermied animals, and the abandoned biological research lab. (Does anybody watch Lost?) And then there was this: a ten-foot high platform looking out over a grass plaza, with a desk at the top. I don’t see much other purpose other than addressing minions from a commanding height, but that might just be my imagination running wild. Also, there were some traditional thrones placed seemingly haphazardly throughout the compound. As you can see, they were clearly the seats of the dearly departed doctor. And that is a dessicated hawk above my head. At this point in the afternoon, I imagined a few possibilities: 1. At dinner, the groundskeepers lock the compound gates. Then a young man, bearing an uncanny resemblance to his father Dr. Ngwa Che, steps out of the shadows where he had been sitting unnoticed. He apologizes, saying that dinner had not yet been prepared. He is evasive about when dinner will be ready, but to pass the time he takes us to his armory and shows us his immaculate collection of hunting rifles. Following this, he takes us around and show off all of the taxidermied animals, recounting the stories of how either his father or he had killed each. But, he explains, he had lost the joy of the hunt. The big game animals of Western Africa are all but gone, and none of the animals that one can find in Cameroon can come close to matching the intelligence of the hunter, all but one that is. At that point, he announces that he must excuse himself to change into his sporting clothes, oh, and he forgot to mention that we have a fifteen minute head start. 2. We have an uneventful night, and when we awake, we find out that one of us is missing, but there are some freshly-stripped bones in the monkey cage, and the bust of Dr. Ngwa Che has mysteriously moved to the top of the platform overlooking the plaza. 3. Various other scenarios involving gladiator deathmatches, being chased through the bamboo maze by a mysterious ball of dark energy, volunteers becoming posessed and doing the crabwalk Exorcist-style, arcane rituals involving the baptism pool, etc… 4. I am awoken at five in the morning by someone banging a gong in the distance. Then, scared witless, I lay in bed for an hour listening to what I think is a large crowd cheering in the distance, but which I eventually decide is a cacophony of roosters from a nearby large-scale poultry operation. We have a completely uneventful night, though, and awake to a breakfast of coconut-flavored bread with margarine and extremely weak coffee. Then the whole staff is extremely congenial as they see us off, and we return to Bangangte. As you might have guessed, this last scenario is what actually happened. Anyway, so that was our trip to the Saboga Botanical Gardens, a place that I will never visit again so long as I walk this earth. On a cheerier note, let me finish this post by writing quickly about how our Thanksgiving went. It went wonderfully. The host father of Henry, one of my fellow stagieres, went to Bafoussam and bought us two turkeys. Henry and Patrick, pictured in the rear below, killed the turkeys, and Patrick and I gutted them.We brined them overnight and roasted them to perfection the next day, even though we had to cook one in a marmite pot on the stovetop, propped up by tomato paste cans. We then walked quite haughtily and triumphantly to the training center…   With my friend Carl,I prepared the dressing, of which we made two kinds, pork sausage and cornbread stuffing, and cassava bread stuffing. Everyone else made a dish, and all the language and technical trainers came. It was a blast. It did make me quite homesick, though, and I think that I’ve really started missing the U.S. some for the first time since I arrived here. I of course expected this to happen, but I do miss home. Oh my this post has gotten too long, I believe. Thanks for reading this far, guys. Next week, we’re swearing in as volunteers and leaving for our posts. The ambassador comes on Wednesday to conduct the ceremony, and then we leave the following morning. That means that after next week, I’ll probably have a lot more time to write blog entries and letters, and also a whole lot less to write about. Au revoir! Appendix A: Various photos.   Pretty flower.   Sad monkey. Strange tree. Cameroon dance party. Motorcycle chassis converted into bicycle.

Last Saturday I returned to Bangangte, which means “The Town Name Constantly Misspelled” in Medumba, after spending a week at my site. Well, actually I didn’t spend a week at my post in Bamena, but I circled around the town for seven days before spending all of two hours in the town itself. First, I spent three days in Bazou with David and Caitlin Hansen. I’m sort of replacing David as the local agroforestry volunteer, although my post is moving 20km down the road so that I can be closer to APADER. Then, I spent the next three days in Bangouwa, about 4k on a dirt road from my village, with my host-country counterpart Cinquante. Yes, his name is Fifty. If I were a real-estate agent in the States trying do describe his house, I would probably call it a "quaint, charming fixer-upper, with well-matched floor [dirt] and wall [mud brick] motifs and a lively atmosphere [chickens and mice inside, with the occasional goat making an appearance.]" The only thing that managed to wear thin on me were the baby chicks under the bed when I was trying to sleep, though.  As Cinquante is a divorceé and as females do ALL of the cooking here, the cuisine was a little lacking… boiled yams with a side of boiled yams for dinner two nights in a row. Cinquante does have a very picturesque tree nursery though. Take a peek… His business is mainly selling grafts and marcots of improved varieties of fruit trees. The nursery that he’s organized is actually a cooperative that he runs with his neighbors, including a few women, which is fairly unusual for here. His grafts have about an 80% success rate, depending on the species, whereas of the fifteen grafts that we volunteers did, one took. Haha. I worked with him one day potting on two hundred avocado plants to be used as grafting stocks, which was fun. On the last day of my site visit, I finally got to visit my house, and it’s pretty nice. It’s on top of a mountain, so there are excellent views. I really wanted to take pictures, but it has been too cloudy the days I’ve been there. Being on top of a mountain also means that water isn’t pumped up that high, though, so there’s no running water. I do have electricity. Also, being at the top of a mountain means that my bike ride from Bangangte SUCKS. I did it yesterday, and I had to pull over no less than three times to cough and wheeze. The total elevation gain is about 300m over 10km, and it’s pretty much uninterrupted ascent. Luckily, the road is paved the whole way. The ride back to Bangangte is FUN!   So that’s my house, with my neighbor/landlord Mr. La Maire, who, despite his moniker, isn’t the mayor as far as I can tell. Strangely, I have a flush toilet to go with my no running water, so if I want to flush, I have to pour two gallons of water in the tank.. I think I’ll just be using the latrine. The bathtub under the gutter is my rainwater collection system and mosquito hatchery. Since I’m the first volunteer to live in the house, it is completely empty. The only thing in the whole house is a four-foot-tall picture of the guy that died in the house last year. His bedroom is sealed off, but I also have four other bedrooms. One of the bedrooms is going to become my "cuisine moderne” though, since the current kitchen is a fire in an out-building. One of the best features of the house is the little garden out front… Right now, my landlord has maize and taro planted, but he said I could plant it however I wanted. In the foreground of the picture is one of my two avocado trees. Behind it are my four banana trees, and then to the left is my mango tree. Not a bad assortment of fruit trees, I must say. I don’t really feel like writing much else, but I’ll put up some more pictures… ANTS!   A very old papaya tree… normally one prunes a tree before it gets this big because it’s impossible to harvest the fruits when they’re this big.             The one even marginal picture that I’ve been able to take of a hornbill, and it turns its head just before I take the picture so that you can’t see its horned bill. Blast.         Me and a farming community group, having just constructed a composting pit behind their piggery, which is a word in Cameroonian English. Something really creepy that my 3-year-old host sister handed me. A bientôt!

  (EDIT: I deleted some pictures from this post and made others smaller because the internet is VERY slow today.) Yesterday, we received our post assignments, and we’re all leaving for our post visits on Sunday. We’re all anxiously wondering what their village will be like, but not me! My post assignment is in Bamena, the very same village in which they handed out the assignments, and about 15km from Bangante, the town that I’m currently in.  (If you notice that there is a theme in Cameroon of town names beginning in “Ba”, that’s because Ba means “the people of” in most of the over 100 Bantu languages spoken here.) Even though I won’t be traveling very far, I’m still very excited about my post and I’m happy to be staying in the Western highlands. Above is a rather mediocre picture of an great vista in Bamena.My camera has the inexplicable ability to make the most striking landscapes flat and boring (see the photo of Bamena above), but trust me that the mountains are absolutely beautiful here. Bamena is at an elevation of around 3500ft., and it can get downright cold up in the hills.  I’m also really excited about the work that I’m going to be doing. My host-country counterpart works for APADER, the NGO that I blogged about effusively in a previous post. I’m probably going to work there at least three days a week. My tasks will probably include nursery management, teaching classes on grafting and marcotting, apiculture, and designing and executing experimental plots to test various cropping systems. I really could not be happier about the work that I’m going to be doing, as I will be learning so much during my tenure there. I will report back more details and I will have a lot more pictures to post of my site when I return from site visit next Saturday. In other news, we were issued our Peace Corps bikes last weekend! Here’s a picture of mine.  Ain’t she a beaut!? Eucalyptus frame and fork, with all-mahogany wheels and a coat-hanger kickstand. Built entirely by hand, as well. My bike mechanic was considering building me a fixed-gear bike, but he decided (and I agree completely) that pedaling is for poseurs, so he did me one better and completely removed the entire power train! Take that, hipsters! Okay, so I’m lying. The above bike actually belongs to a middle-aged man in Bamena, who is inconceivably adroit at riding it downhill, although I don’t know what he does going up. My bike is a Trek 4000 steel-frame mountain bike with a hard fork and a new set of wheels. It’s nothing special, but it’s a workhorse, and it’s certainly quite nicer than any of the other bikes I’ve seen around here. It turns out that three of the volunteers in the area are bike mechanics (actually, two of them from Portland), so they fixed them up real nice-like for us, although mine still has some derailleur issues. We went on a nice, leisurely ride as a group last Saturday which was actually a little embarrassing. Some background… The week previous, the health volunteers were issued their bikes and they went on the same ride, which involves going on some pretty rough dirt roads. Apparently, they didn’t handle it so well, with four or five of them falling off their bikes multiple times. One volunteer actually fell off her bike and punctured her (very) inner thigh on her brake lever (don’t ask me how someone ends up with their brake lever in their crotch). Anyway, the wound was pretty severe, with adipose tissue oozing out and such, and she had to be rushed to the hospital for stitches. So as a precaution, the Peace Corps arranged for us to have a vehicle escort for our bike ride. SO we were the ten blancs riding single-file with our helmets on while a truck emblazoned with American flags followed close behind us at 5-15km/hr. Hahaha. I’m happy to report that the agro volunteers had a 0% mortality rate. I went on a pretty grueling ride the next day, but I haven’t had a chance to ride since. The hills around here are killer, so I’ll be returning to the States a pretty strong cyclist. I finally got around to taking some pictures at the market the other day, which I think you’ll enjoy. There were a lot of great shots to be had, but people will demand money to take their picture (one woman wanted the equivalent of $20!), so a lot of the best pictures went untaken. Mom and Dad, do NOT show Grandma the picture of the butcher stall. The market takes place every Wednesday and Saturday, and you can find a surprising assortment of vegetables here, owing to the very temperate climate of the highlands. I’ve found: carrots, cabbage, celery, tomatoes, onions, garlic, peppers, chiles, potatoes and leeks, in addition to all the tropical staples you’d expect to find. Below is a picture of the stall of a really kind woman who had all sorts of goodies for sale, and from whom I purchased carrots to make a spring vegetable soup (it was delicious.) To the right is my friend Andrea, who is off to the deep lowland rainforest of the South provence. You can also find all SORTS of meat, including rats (dried or fresh), cane rat (which is like a GIANT guinea pig and is supposedly quite good), beef, fish of all kinds, goats, rabbits, chickens, and occasionally turkeys. Every organ of every animal is for sale without exception, and it can be a little gross to see a hundred flies buzzing on a big pile of cow intestine, but you’ve just got to grin and bear it (and cook your meat to well-done). The beef butcher area pictured to the right is actually one of the cleaner areas. I bought beef from this guy last week when I made chili for my family (send more chili powder and cinnamon if you love me.) Anyway, the occasion for this visit to the market was that I cooked my family some banana-chocolate pancakes, which were a big hit for me, but too sweet for the Cameroonian palette. Anyway, to end this post, I wanted to tell you guys about a really sweet field trip that we took last Friday. We went to the village of Batie, a little outside of Bafoussam, where we visited three different farms. The first farm was a fish farm in a valley, where they had a very cool setup. They had a hatchery, where they hatched and sold little fish to other fish farmers, and they also had a few fish ponds that were fed with manure from a pig house on the side of the pond. I think the idea was that the pig manure fed the algae that the catfish then fed on, or maybe the catfish ate the manure directly. I’m not sure, but whichever way it was, it was a neat waste-free system. We also learned how to artificially inseminate fish eggs. It’s really cool, but a little brutal. You inject the female with hormones the day before you want to harvest her eggs, and then the next day she’s chock full of them… around 3,000. Then you surgically remove most of the testes from the male fish (but not all, because they grow back if you leave a bit in), and you squeeze the sperm out. Mix with the eggs in a weak acid solution, and gestate in a warm water bath. The fries hatch in one to two days. I’m sad that I forgot to bring my camera along, mais on va faire comment?   The next place we visited was the farm pictured above, where the focus was on apiculture and “piggery”, as they call it in Cameroonian English. The farmer really had a nice farm going on, and he had obviously become very wealthy from his very small farm, as evidenced by his beautiful new house and quite a few pigs. He had an absolutely beautiful pruniere, or African plum tree, that was very old and well-pruned (eech… I tried to avoid the pun, but I couldn’t), so that it branched out in a dome with perhaps a 30 foot diameter. Unfortunately, all the pictures I took of it failed to do it justice. It was cool to see his hives, although his hive construction and management practices were severely problematic by my estimation. Here’s a picture of him next to an empty hive, holding a jar of bee attractant. The sugary solution certainly attracted a lot of bees, but they were all from his established hives, I think, and the solution did little to help his hive get colonized. It’s a clever idea, though. And everyone loves a picture of some cute pigs… The last place we visited on our tour was a medicinal plant demonstration garden which was in the back yard of the village chief’s house. It was run by a local women’s GIC (community interest group), and I was very happy to make some contacts there, as I would love to work with medicinal plants at my post. I was surprised to find that many/most of the species that they are growing were ones that I recognized from the States: wormwood, valerian, bee balm, lemon verbena, coneflower, dandelion, mugwort, lemongrass, mint, and chamomile, to name a few. To finish the trip, we had lunch at the chief’s house, which was a traditional two-story mud structure, and we headed back to Bangante. That’s all for now! Check back next week when I’ll post pictures of my site visit and my house.

NB: I wrote this post two weeks ago, but the internet was down for a week due to an underwater cable getting severed. I’m writing this post on a lazy Sunday morning. Yesterday, the Cameroonian soccer team, The Indomitable Lions, won their World Cup qualifying match against Togo. Bangante, and I imagine the whole country, completely shut down for the game. Cameroon won 3-0, and there was much gaiety and celebration. I went to a Celine Dion dance party last night. It was bumpin’. I also did my laundry entirely by myself for the first time yesterday, and I utterly failed to get my clothes clean. This morning, I made chili for my host family. Everyone liked it, I think, except for Jessica. I used fully half of my jar of McCormick hot Mexican-style  chili powder. Hot my ass! All the other ingredients I bought at the Saturday market; I was very proud of myself. I was actually able to specify, I think, that I wanted a half kilo of chuck, and I got it ground on the spot. The beef reached temperatures of around 90 degrees on the walk home and stayed that way for a long time, but I cooked the hell out of it this morning, and all was good. Two cubes of Maggi for that MSG magic topped it all off. MSG is the universal condiment here, and there are signs everywhere in French and English that say “Every woman is a star with Maggi.” Anyway, I’ve been talking a lot about being in Bangante, but I also wanted to write about my technical training and what I’ll be doing in the field.  Below is a picture of Christina and Elvis, our technical trainers. Christina is a lecturer in agronomy at the local college and has a doctorate in entomology, and Elvis is, I believe, an extention agent and nursery owner. Our training is specialized for the humid highlands regions of Cameroon, primarily in the West, Northwest, and Adamouwa regions. The volunteers who go to the more arid regions of the North and Extreme North get trained in alternate years, as the goals and methods for agroforestry extension in the semi-arid regions are very different. Overall, our technical training is gong okay. Sometimes it seems like there is a very scattershot approach, and we also get conflicting accounts of various topics. It seems like the Peace Corps training curriculum is designed to give us the barest minimum of knowledge in practically all applicable fields, so that we have enough of a start in them that we can decide which are appropriate for the local problems at our post. Then, the idea is that we do further research on our own. This seems like a good approach to an extent, but I wish that we could go much more in-depth on a variety of subjects. Our tree identification class was particularly disappointing in this regard. Other aspects of our training are very worthwhile, particularly our field trips. So far we’ve taken two field trips, one to an experimental agroforestry NGO called ADAPER, and another to a farmer’s fields in Bandrefam. Volunteers are going to be posted at both places, and I would love to work in either of the communities. At ADAPER, they have a lot of little test plots where they are quantitatively examining the benefits of various cropping systems. For instance, they are alley cropping maize in a field of leguminous Gliricidia trees and comparing the yield to an adjacent plot without any nitrogen-fixing plants. Additionally, they are doing lots of experiments with various erosion control species. The second aspect of the program at APADER is a production and demonstration agroforestry tree nursery. They do a lot of work with grafting and marcotting trees, and they also grow various species from seed. Above, you can see 40,000 coffee seedlings that APADER started as part of a government grant. Below is a picture of their demonstration nursery with a variety of multi-purpose trees. At the end of the field trip, we all drank palm wine with the director of the center. It was 11 in the morning. Palm wine is the sap of the palm tree, allowed to naturally ferment with whatever yeast or bacteria happen to be in the air. It comes in two varieties, up-high and down-low. Just like the name implies, up-high palm wine is tapped from the top of the tree, and is generally considered to be better than palm wine from the base of the trunk. Young, partially fermented palm wine is pleasantly reminiscent of kombucha. It’s pretty refreshing and low in alcohol, although it keeps fermenting in your stomach methinks, giving me all sorts of strange burps. Old palm wine, where all of the sugars have been allowed to ferment, tastes like hot socks. I must say, though, that the taste of hot socks is growing on me. Palm wine is very important in Cameroonian traditions, particularly marriages. When a suitor comes to ask the permission of a father to marry his daughter, he brings along a gift of palm wine. If the father approves, the wine is served, and then the father asks his daughter if he may partake of the wine. If she consents, then the deal is sealed and the new father and son drink the wine. The second field trip that we took was to this farm about fifty minutes away where a farmer has implemented various measures for nitrogen fixation and erosion control. Land is very scarce here in the West, and farmers often will farm on grades of 10% or more, with tons of topsoil being lost in the process. Compounding the problem is the fact that farmers will normally till against the contour of the hill. On this farm, though, the farmers (husband and wife, pictured to the right) had built a series of contour bunds (long mounds of earth that follow the contour of the hill, designed to retain soil and increase water infiltration) with multipurpose trees planted on the bunds to stabilize the soil.In the picture below, you can see this system in action. In the immediate foreground is a mixed planting of cassava and beans (the cassava is the taller plant with the marijuana-like leaf, red beans the short plants growing on mounds) Immediately behind those plants is a very young banana tree, and immediately behind that is the first of a series of contour bunds. On the contour bund is planted, from left to right, Calliandra, a leguminous nitrogen-fixing tree, a mango tree (with the broad leaves, lighter green at the top), vetiver, a grass with insecticidal properties, another banana tree, and acacia (with the white flowers) another leguminous tree that also is very good for beekeeping because it flowers year-round.   Another pretty picture of us passing under an arch that the farmers had built with a sweet potato vine… In addition to the contour bunds, the farmer was doing a lot of work with live fencing. Land disputes are a big problem in the West region because land is so scarce, so it behooves a farmer to fence off his land. The farmer whose fields we were visiting had built a live fence out of leguminous trees to demarcate his property line. It was really cool, especially so considering that one of his neighbors had achieved the same end by building a 10 foot high cinder block wall around probably two or three acres of land. No joke. Another exciting thing going on on this farm was some small-scale apiculture. Working with the current Peace Corps volunteer in Bandrefam and through a government grant, the farmer received last year the supplies to build ten Kenyan top-bar hives. If you are familiar with the Langstroth beehives that are commonly used in beekeeping in the States, you’ll notice several important differences between them and top-bar hives. First, there is cost. Whereas a Langstroth hive costs upwards of $100 to buy in the States, or requires precision power tools to build, the Kenyan top bar hive (KTBH from now on, because the Peace Corps loves acronyms) is far less labor intensive to build, and can be constructed with hand tools. Depending on the materials used, it can cost as little as a few dollars to construct a hive. To the left is a picture of an empty KTBH with the cover removed. Instead of comb being built on frames as with a Langstroth hive, comb hangs off the top bars, seen above, which have been baited with wax. The disadvantages to this method include increased propensity for comb to fall off of the top bar and the impossibility of extracting honey via centrifuging the frames. Instead, honey must be cut off of the top bars and squeezed out in a press. Nonetheless, the bars are so much easier to make than Langstroth frames, and are nearly as workable. The traditional methods of beekeeping in Africa, where they exist, focus mainly on log and skep (woven basket) hives. Since these hives do not have moveable frames, the bee colony must be killed to harvest honey. With moveable frames, honey can just be cut out of the hive, leaving the colony intact. This advantage, combined with the low cost of KTBHs, is the main reason why most apiculture development projects in Africa focus on KTBHs and why they have a much higher adoption rate among farmers than Langstroth hives. Above you can see a picture of one of the inhabited hives on the farm with its corrugated metal and raffia palm cover on top. Below is a picture of a really cool hive that’s built out of raffia palm bamboo and mud. It required no mechanical milling and cost next to nothing to build. Only three of the ten hives have found bee colonies to inhabit them thus far, but swarms are more common in the upcoming dry season, so the farmer hopes that his hives will soon find residents. I don’t think that people bother too much with capturing swarms of honeybees, since honeybee populations are thriving here, unlike in the United States. People certainly don’t buy bees. At the end of the tour of this farm, we drank palm wine at 10 in the morning. Notice a pattern? Well, I’ve probably bored you to death with all these details of beehives. Beekeepers tend to be able to talk about their hobby for far too long, and I don’t consider myself an exception. Do write me! I’ve been sending lots of letters to the States, but I don’t think that any of them have been received thus far. Also, leave comments on my blog! I check them every time I post. Bye, friends! -Richard

OK, so I can readily admit that the title for this post is extremely uninspired, but I' hope to make up for it with my post content. To the right, as you can probably tell, is the reproductive structure of a banana tree, something I had never had the chance to see before until this week. The purplish-black pod that is hanging down is actually the flower. As the banana comes into bloom, the flower gradually opens it’s petals one by one, revealing the flowerlets (excuse my botany) which you can see ringing the top of the flower. These sets of flowerlets then get pollinated and create one bunch of bananas. Depending on how much rain occurs in the season, the banana will open its flower to a greater or lesser extent, resulting in fewer or more bananas. Ok, I’ve explained it to death, but it’s REALLY NEATO. As of today, I’ve been in Bangante, Ouest Provence for nine days. I will call this place home for the next eleven weeks of training, and what a home it is! Bangante is in the humid highlands of western Cameroon, and the climate is absolutely perfect: 70-80 deg F every day, with afternoon and evening rains. I think we’re about to enter the dry season, and it’s going to get a lot hotter, but right now it’s certainly more temperate than Alabama, even at four degrees north.That’s my host family that I’m staying with, or at least part of it. From left to right, there’s Rosine my mom, Carol my sister, Cyril my uncle, and Jessica my sister. Not pictured is my dad Yves. Carol is actually my dad’s little sister, but she lives with us, and Cyril lives right next door, as does much of the extended family. My mother, as you can see is quite young (actually younger than me) and beautiful, and I think my dad resembles quite handsomely a young Harry Belafonte. Jessica, as you will note, is absolutely adorable and quite impish. In this picture, we’re all sitting by the outside hearth where most of the cooking is done (although we also have a gas range.) My family has been extremely gracious to me since my arrival, and most importantly, they are very patient with my French. My mom is actually an English teacher at a local school, but she steadfastly refuses to speak English to me. My dad runs the local internet cafe, Cyber Cafe Medumbanet (Medumba is the local language). To the right is a picture of my house. My accommodations are a lot more posh than most of the volunteers and certainly nicer than my accommodations last summer in North Carolina: flush toilet, shower (cold), electricity, satellite TV, gas stove. You can see the laundry drying on the bushes out front. There is no such thing as a washing machine here, and I’m learning bit by bit to do my laundry by hand. My palms were sore until Thursday from doing my laundry last Sunday, as it involves a lot of pounding it against the ground. I live on the outskirts of Bangante, a relatively large town which is sort of like the county seat of the Nde division of the Ouest Provence. Across the street from me is the chefferie, or the lodging of the chief. In Cameroon, there are parallel power structures, the traditional and the administrative. Although the region has a prefect who oversees taxation, civil services, criminal court, and the gendarmerie, the chief exerts a good deal of power in the day-to-day lives of the people. For instance, if there is a civil dispute, generally it is the chief who settles the matter. I visited the chefferie the other day, but the chief was not in. I did however get to meet a few of his wives. I forgot to mention, the chief has twenty wives and over a hundred children, all of whom live at the compound with him! Polygamy is practiced to varying degrees across Cameroon. Below is a picture of the entrance to the chefferie. To the left is a picture of the lion that guards the entrance to the chefferie. I believe that the lion is the chief is the symbol of the chief of Bangante.   I know that a few of you are curious about what kind of food they have here, and I can say that it is very, very good, although it could just be the case that my mother is an excellent cook. Tonight, I had ndole, which is a kind of green, that is prepared with ground peanuts, onions, garlic, and some sort of meat (beef in my case) and served with couscous, which is actually really thick corn grits. It was fantastic! Another great dish that I’ve had was fish in a spicy peanut sauce with rice. The diet is very starch heavy, with lots of plantains, sweet potatoes, irish potatoes, koki (cowpea paste), unripe bananas, and yams. And then there is the fresh fruit;  the bananas are fantastic, as are the pineapple, as are the papayas, although I’m still not too fond of them. I had my first guava ever the other day, and it was truly the culinary highlight of my trip so far. When I broke it open, the smell was indescribably good. I had previously only known the guava flavor from artificial fruit juices such as the Fruitopia in my high school vending machine, and it was (of course) 1000x better to eat a real one. Much to my dismay, the one thing you can’t find here is a great cup of coffee. Even though Cameroon is a major exporter of coffee, there are almost no roasteries, and most everyone in Cameroon drinks Nescafe. I’m learning to like it, though, and it is certainly better than no coffee at all. The one thing that I think everyone here misses more than everything is cheese. Dairy products are nearly impossible to come by here. The other day, though, my dad did something very nice for me: I had mentioned that I missed milk,and he went to the market the very next day and bought a liter and a half of what he said was fresh milk, sold , as many things are here, in a reused water bottle. When I opened it and it fizzed, and then I poured it and it was much thicker than regular milk, I was a little bit skeptical. I realized though that the milk here is sold as cultured buttermilk, since there is the refrigeration issue. The milk was tangy and delicious, though, and I can’t wait to get some again! I also would rather have my milk be cultured anyway, because at least then the sugars have been consumed by a known bacteria, and not spoiled by whatever’s in the air. My French is coming along quite well I think, especially since I had never spoken to anyone in French before two weeks ago. I’m starting to understand my family better, and my language classes are great, if a bit long. There have been too many miscommunications to recount, but I will tell my funniest one. Other ones I have included in letters to some of you. When I first arrived, my mom let me put my room in order, and after she asked if my room had been arranged. I said I didn’t understand, and she replied “I asked if you have cleaned up your room.” Or, in French “J’ai demande, est-ce que tu as arrange ta chambre?” I unfortunately translated this as “I demand that you clean up your room.” So I returned to my room and promptly repacked a lot of the stuff that I had just unpacked, thinking that my mom thought that I had too much clutter. It was only the next day that I realized my mistake. Anyway, there’s so much more that I could write about, particularly about my agroforestry training, but I think I’ll save that for another post, as this one is already quite long. Cameroon is quite wonderful, but I miss you all. I’ve sent letters to MANY of you, so you should see those in about a month. PLEASE write to me! My address is in the left-hand column. All of my love. -Richard

After around 26 hours of traveling, the thirty two of us in our training group arrived at our hotel in Yaounde. Since then, we have been completely cloistered, spending all of our time in either the hotel or the Peace Corps compound. The official reason is that we don’t have Cameroonian ID cards, but I suspect that that isn’t the whole story; there are gaurds with Kalishnikovs posted on the bottom floor of the hotel. We’re stuck here until Thursday, when we go to our training site in Bangante, where we’ll have significantly more latitude. Our training group at JFK. I’m in the lower right.: Two views from the hotel:   This is the view out of my window, where you can see a freight train yard, among other things. I like to watch freight trains being built in the morning. Also, in the right, you can see a man driving some cattle through the freight yard. There is also some good bird watching out my window. I’ve been putting old bread out on my window ledge. I’d like to bust out my binoculars to see the birds in the trees in the foreground, but in front of them are some people’s houses, and I don’t want to be “le blanc” who’s spying on the locals below. You can see the soccer stadium in the background of this picture. Training has been necessarily boring. My arm hurts from my Hep A and Typhoid shots. I’m addicted to Bananagrams. I’ve found someone to play mandolin. I really miss being able to cross my legs (it’s rude here.) I unexpectedly tested intermediate low in French this morning. Thanks Rosetta stone! My French examiner was the very first person whom I’ve ever spoken to in French for an extended period of time. Everything else is fine, but I can’t wait to get out and explore. I do miss you, though. You know who you are.

Hello all. The time of my departure has finally arrived. Tomorrow, I'll report to the Race Street Hampton Inn in Philadelphia for Peace Corps staging. After an afternoon session and an early morning series of nasty vaccinations, I'll take a bus to JFK airport and fly to Yaounde, Cameroon via Brussels at 4:45 on Thursday.

Since I last posted, I've been hanging out in Philadelphia and New York, saying some last goodbyes to friends. I don't really have any other news to report.

Stay posted for my first posts from Cameroon really soon.

If I don't have your mailing address, please email it to me pronto. Mine is in the left-hand column.

Hey y’all! The day of my departure is rapidly approaching, and I’m getting ever more excited/nervous. There’s lots of mundane stuff to do in preparation for me leaving, but nothing worth reporting.I said goodbye to my parents last week in Atlanta, and Cari came there to pick me up on our way to the coast (more on that in a bit.) For those who are interested, here’s my schedule until the 17th, when I fly to Cameroon: I’m in Asheville, NC until the 9th, and then I’m flying to Philadelphia. I’m going to hang out in Philly for a day or so, and then take a Chinatown bus to NYC for the weekend. Then I’m going to return to Philadelphia for Peace Corps staging. Anyway, the reason I’m writing this post is to tell you about an absolutely wonderful trip that Cari and I took. For a birthday present, Cari arranged as a surprise to take me to a place called The Hostel outside of Brunswick, GA. This “resort” is only a few miles from Jekyll Island, where J. P. Morgan and other early 20th century magnates docked their yachts and wintered, but it couldn’t be more different in temperment. The most prominent feature of the Hostel is that all the accomodations are in treehouses! Really. Here’s a picture of the treehouse that Cari and I stayed in. The accomodations were basic but quite comfortable. We had an electric fan, a bed. There are three shared outdoor showers and two composting toilets. Other amenities include a glass house for meetings and morning yoga, free shared dinner every night, a wide assortment of musical instruments for communal use, art and craft supplies, and lots of other great stuff. The hostel was started in the mid-seventies. A rotating cast of staff members handles the day-to-day operations, and the guests are expected to do at least some chores each day. The nerve center of the Hostel is a pair of geodesic domes, surrounded by a variety of outlying structures. The dome on the left is currently under construction, and will eventually replace the dome on the right. Currently, the dome on the right holds the kitchen, office, library and living room. Behind it is the screened-in dining room where we had dinner each night. Everyone seems to gravitate toward this structure in the evening. While we were there, they were also working on construction of an outdoor kitchen built of cob (a hay and mud matrix) with a wood-fired oven. It was really cool… Another great feature of the Hostel was it’s pristine CLOTHING OPTIONAL lake. It really was as clear as a swimming pool; you could see probably 12 feet to the bottom. I guess that the surrounding swamp filters the water to make it so nice. Ooh, I forgot to mention that this entire place is built in the Okeefenokee Swamp, and true to it’s name, it’s quite swampy. There are a lot of raised walkways to get you from structure to structure, and the one and only thing that I could complain about is the oppressive number of mosquitos. I’ve spent a good deal of time outside, and I’ve also visited my share of swamps, but never EVER have I experienced the number of mosquitos that this place had. Here’s a shot of one of the walkways winding its way through the swamp. Our hut, I think, was one of the best ones at the Hostel, although I have no basis for comparison. One of the coolest features was the fact that it overlooked a meditation labyrinth (“The third largest in the U.S., that we know of.”) I never walked through it, as part of it was underwater, but I certainly felt calmer just looking down on it from my window :) So, in conclusion, if you’re ever in Southeast Georgia or Northeast Florida, you should absolutely make a trip to the Hostel outside of Brunswick. At $25 a night per person, it’s a great deal, and the people and accomodations are wonderful. Thank you so much Cari. I had the most wonderful time. Here’s a link to their website: http://www.foresthostel.com/ Happy trails!

This last Saturday, I went with the Alabama Museum of Natural History to explore Ed Johnson Cave in Franklin County, AL, a few minutes outside of Russelville. It was a total blast. The cave is in a limestone bluff, and the creek that formed the cave drains into Little Bear Creek, right below a TVA dam. The story behind the name of the cave is that, in the 1850s, there was this eccentric old coot named Ed Johnson who loved to go exploring caves. One day, he decided to explore this particular cave, so he hitched his horse outside and strolled in with two torches. His plan was to go as far into the cave as he could until his first torch burned out, then light the second and head out. He made it to the end of the cave in about an hour, as it’s not a very big cave, and he lit his second torch, as his first one had just started to go out. There are many tight passages in the cave, and you have to shimmy on your belly through more than a few. He was shimmying through one of these spots when he dropped his torch in the water and it went out. The cave was pitch black, with only the slightest sound of water trickling. Undaunted, he decided he would continue to make his way out of the cave, lighting one of the few matches that he had left to get his bearings every so often. But he soon began to run out of matches, and soon after he used his last match, he became disoriented. Knowing that there was a dangerous drop-off near where he was situated, he became a little panicky and was afraid to move. The human mind does tricky things when it’s presented with a dearth of sensory input, though. After a few hours of no visual or auditory stimuli, most people start experiencing vivid hallucinations, and this is what happened to Ed Johnson. He became convinced that evil spirits were pouring out of the cracks of the cave, rushing past his body, surrounding him and tormenting him with their song, trying to steal his soul. He didn’t move for two days, convinced that if he did, the devil would steal his soul. On his third day inside the cave, a local stopped by and saw Ed’s horse tied to a tree outside the cave, and so he returned to town and arranged a search party. When the search party came upon Ed Johnson, he was completely hysterical. When they guided him trembling out of the cave and  brought him into the light of day, they were horrified to see that his hair had turned completely white. Ed Johnson lived, but he never recovered from the incident. At least that’s the way I’ve heard some folks tell it…   Some beautiful flowstone formations. I didn’t realize that the second was so magnificently colored until I looked at my photos later. I wonder what caused the color. Copper? Cobalt? Some other nice stalactites and stalagmites. Unfortunately, as you can see in the first picture, many of the geologic features have been broken off as souvenirs. In the last picture, Michael is examining a nascent stalactite. The last centimeter or so of it was a few drops of water encased in a transparent crust of just-deposited lime. It was beautiful. Unfortunately it didn’t photograph well. I blew on it to dislodge the drop of water, and the crystal was as thinner than paper.    The two examples of fauna that we found, other than some insects by the entrance, were this bat and this spotted salamander. Both were in abundance, and were distributed fairly evenly throughout the cave. What did the salamanders eat in the cave, I wonder? Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed your cave tour. Tips are always gratefully accepted. Watch your head on the way out.

I’m kicking around my home town of Tuscaloosa without a care in the world or a single thing to do. The waiting is agonizing, and I’ve been trying to rustle up some things to do to keep me occupied. The most successful outlet that I’ve found for my energy is going on a bunch of trips with the Alabama Museum of Natural History. As some of you know, I was on the staff of their archaeological expedition, so I had an in with the programs director. As it turns out, his naturalist just quit, so he was looking for help running some trips. So far, I’ve been on a fossil hunt, a tubing trip, and two canoeing trips. This Saturday, I get to go on a SPELUNKING trip. How wild is that? Anyway, here are some pictures from some of the trips I’ve been on. Me in a cypress swamp on the Sipsey River, Greene Co., AL. You can see the high water line on the cypresses right above my head, where the moss ends. The water is at this level for a few months during the winter. The Sipsey is the second largest undammed river in Alabama, and it is home to over sixty species of freshwater mussel, of which we found many. We also found many otter tracks around the mussel beds. A forest of cypress knees. Cypress trees form these projections from their roots for gas exchange, as the swamps that they live in have very low dissolved oxygen. An alternate theory that I just heard is that they also might exist to protect the main trunk of the cypress during periods of inundation, when much debris is moving through the wetlands. I think I’m partial to the former explanation, though.   University of Alabama regent Steve Johnson looks for fossils in Shark’s Tooth Creek, Hale Co., AL. From 65 to 35MYA, the area of Alabama around my home was in the ocean, and vast chalk deposits that are quite rich in fossils formed around this time. The fossils that we found were mainly sharks’ teeth. I also found a few choice sherds of Mississippian pottery.   So anyway, that’s what I’ve been getting into. In other exciting news, I got a little netbook computer that I’m planning to bring with me to Africa. It has an extended battery, so I should be able to charge it while I have access to electricity, and then run it off the battery while I am at my site. This will let me, I hope, stay in much better contact with people back stateside, as I will be able to compose emails and blog posts offline, and then come to an internet cafe and post them all at once. I would also love to collect snail-mail addresses, though. Send me yours! 

About two weeks ago, the Peace Corps informed all of the volunteers slated to leave for Mauritania in June that the program was going to be canceled, not merely delayed. Additionally, all of the volunteers currently in Mauritania were being given the option to leave. I don't know if this was a result of the Mauritanian government's intransigence, or because Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb recently killed an American for trying to convert Muslims to Christianity, or perhaps a combination of the two, but whatever the reason, it's no longer happening. I was inconsolable for about a week. Even though Mauritania seemed like a truly inhospitable place (climate-wise, that is), I had steeled myself up for going there and I was actually genuinely excited to live in the Sahara for two years. It was not meant to be.

The Peace Corps worked overtime to reassign us, however, and last Wednesday I received my new assignment in Cameroon! Training for this assignment begins September 19th in Cameroon. After much hand-wringing and concern for my future, I have decided to accept the assignment. The work that I will be doing in Cameroon is fairly similiar to what I was going to be doing in Mauritania - agroforestry extension - although the different climate will necessitate different practices and species of plants. If you want to know everything that I know about my position, click here to read my invitation in its entirety.

The more I think about it, I realize that I should be way more excited to go to Cameroon than Mauritania. Cameroon has rainforests, gorillas, amazing birdwatching, much better sounding food, beer, much better music, a bearable climate (like Alabama in the summer, only year round, as opposed to 120 degree summer highs in Mauritania), good communication networks etc... but for some reason I'm finding it harder to get as excited about going. I guess it's probably just because I had over five months to get very excited about going to Mauritania. I definitely remember thinking when I got my Mauritania assignment, "I signed up to do agriculture, and they're sending me to the desert?!?" Anyway, I'll keep you guys posted as I know more.