The view from my porch
Times are winding down on my time in Africa. It’s the hour of reflection on how I got here, what I did, and what I’m going to do next. I’m not the same person I was before I left America. It’s not surprising. Everyone knows they will change. The exciting part [...]
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A tiny surprise showed up on our front porch a few nights ago. We think she looks just like Linus and have concluded that she must be his offspring. Before we got him fixed, he was going out at night and surely impregnating the neighbor’s cats. I couldn’t get a great picture of her because [...]
Last weekend we wanted some chicken nuggets. So step one in making chicken nuggets in Cameroon is to buy a live chicken. I didn’t want to spend too much time with it while it was alive, for fear of becoming attached. So I got my friend to buy it for me, and he also did [...]
Bamenda is really becoming a developed city. You know how I know? A cake and ice cream store opened up in our quartier! The maker of the cakes, Relindis is my new best friend. The first day she was open, she just had a few small cakes in her little glass case and a newly painted [...]
Mexican food is good. I’m challenging myself to make everything I crave and miss from the land of infinite variety and food availability. I think almost everything can be accomplished with somewhere between 4 and 12 times the time and effort, depending on the complexity and the level of authenticity desired. Tuesday I made an [...]
The Indomitable Lions
Traditional dancers at the Lions game
Waving the Cameroon flag
We have a camera again so now we can share photos again. Studies show that blog posts sans photos are 23% less exciting. I just made that statistic up.
A couple weeks ago I was in Yaounde taking the Foreign Service Officers Test. The same weekend, [...]
We are doing lots of transitioning these days. Transitioning from our old job to our new job, from our old house to our new house, from living in a francophone region to living in an anglophone region, and from having a store with good cheese be 45 minutes away, to being only 15 minutes away.
While [...]
I’m happy to report that Gabe and I are both parasite-free after our mid-service medical exams. After a few weeks vacationing in the decadent land of available cheese and hot showers (Europe) with our amazing friends who met us halfway around the world to bring me Junior Mints (among other things), we are back in [...]
I’m happy to report that Gabe and I are both parasite-free after our mid-service medical exams. After a few weeks vacationing in the decadent land of available cheese and hot showers (Europe) with our amazing friends who met us halfway around the world to bring me Junior Mints (among other things), we are back in [...]
Peace Corps Cameroon Tropical Disease Bingo!
We’re in Yaounde this week for Mid-Service Medical, during which they give every volunteer a physical and test our bodily fluids to see if we’ve acquired any fun new tropical diseases. To commemorate the occasion of being in Cameroon for a whole year, I made an official Peace Corps Cameroon [...]
Quiche dinner in the transit house
Those of us who are helping with training this summer/rainy season are in Yaounde this week and next for the TDW (Training Design Workshop) and TOT (Training of Trainers). Gabe and I are here designing the technical training sessions for the 5 incoming computer literacy trainees as well as working [...]
Project T shirt slogan
The intense fundraising phase of our regional project in the West has drawn to a close, and we are happy and excited to announce that our project has been fully funded! Thank you to all those that contributed to our project–our success in reaching our fundraising goal is due to your immense [...]
Ridev Website Homepage
Here’s a quick preview of one of the projects I’m working on that I’m hoping to finish next week. RIDEV is an organization supporting development and promoting the protection of human rights, based in Bafoussam, the capital of the West Region.
In addition to designing and building their website, I designed a new logo [...]
Students working during open lab hours on Saturday
The second term has ended and after a nice two-week break, we began the third term last week. The second term went relatively well. Our students’ test scores improved, we’re learning the system, improving our teaching methods, and developing better relationships with our students. Teaching here can be [...]
Moto drivers in West Cameroon
Cameroon has one of the largest HIV epidemics in Sub-Saharan Africa, with almost half a million adults living with HIV in 2005.* It should be noted that these are only counting the people courageous enough to get tested. If you think HIV is a touchy subject in the U.S. or other [...]
Image from Core77.com design blog
I saw this pretty cool article on Core77.com’s design blog about a project that aims to help improve the sanitation problems that particularly affect developing countries. Peter Thuvander, co-designer of the Peepoo Bag summarizes the problem:
To let you in on the numbers, approximately 2.6 billion people lack sanitation. The consequences of [...]
Mountains during the rainy season-clear and beautiful
Mountains during the dry season can hardly be seen, if at all
Yesterday afternoon, after Thryn and I ducked into an omelet shack to avoid increasing raindrops, we knew that the rainy season is finally on its way. We felt relief sitting there eating our spaghetti omelets watching the downpour [...]
Duck, Duck, Goose by Kevin Meadows in Namibia
One of my best friends, fellow adventuring volunteer teacher, one of the “best men” at our wedding, and more importantly a stand-up photographer, Kevin has entered the awesome photography competition “Name Your Dream Assignment” in which photographers submit their ideas for a dream assignment, and the winner receives [...]
Yaounde-a view of the stadium
A big topic of discussion this week is the pope’s visit to Yaounde, Cameroon. From a recent article in the New York Times (discussing Catholicism in Africa) and a report released by Reuters, to announcements on local radio and television, the visit is naturally getting a lot of attention and is [...]
This weekend we went back to Banganté to celebrate International Women’s Day with our host family from training. Our host mom is the president of the Réseau des Femmes and was busy organizing all of the city-wide celebrations. With everything she had to manage, she still invited us to come celebrate with them, had clothes [...]
Linus Petit Chat
Many of you have already seen photos of Linus on flickr, but I thought it was about time he was formally introduced to our readers. He was born in Bangangte, Cameroon sometime in July, he has a broken tail (it came that way) and he is bilingual. Here are the top 5 reasons [...]
In just about a week–the 8th of March–the people of Cameroon will be celebrating International Women’s Day, a day to honor women’s achievement around the world. It is a day of parades, singing, and local leader’s will give speeches to their communities. Every year a new pagne design is released advertising Women’s Day, and Cameroonian [...]
Chop Fayner means “Eat Well” in Pidgin English, and is also the name of the Peace Corps Cameroon cookbook. The cookbook is put together by volunteers and so it’s catered toward cooking in Cameroon, with all of its many challenges. The biggest challenges of cooking here are the limited availability of some ingredients, we certainly [...]
Just a small corner of the market
The true center of our town is the market. It’s the size of a few city blocks, always filled with people, and it’s where you go to buy anything from fruits and vegetables, herbs, fish, meat, goats and chickens, rice, flour, to pots and pans, clothes, pagne, school supplies, [...]
View from Bamboutos
Recently, we had the opportunity to go on an adventure, hiking to the summit of a famous mountain right here in the West Region. Mount Bamboutos. It all started with a mundane visit to the local Camtel office where we pay for our Internet service each month. A friend of ours who works [...]
Students in the multimedia center
We just returned from a week in Yaounde where we had some committee meetings. Gabe and I are both on the Ed Steering Committee which attempts to steer the Education program. We develop and update things like the newsletter, the toolkit which contains many digital tools for Ed volunteers, and the [...]
Recently, I was in the office of the Multi-Media Center at school and there was a knock on the door. I opened it and found one of my Form 3 students standing there. He handed me this note:
Note from an eager-minded student
Please I wanted to ask you a question. Please sir, who discovered the Internet [...]
Don't have a real photo to go with this post, so here's one of me weilding a machete
After IST is usually when peace corps volunteers dive into secondary projects, now that we’re bien intégré and have successfully navigated the Cameroonian education system for a full term. Gabe and I have started laying the groundwork already [...]
My Form 2 class is divided into two sections, A and B, with around 70 students in each. For some reason, Form 2B has always had more discipline problems than Form 2A. It’s like B is A’s evil twin–while the students are the same age, the classes are seriously like night and day. I even [...]
Christmas Eve dinner with Tess and her mom!
As we approached our first holiday season to be spent away from home and the company of family and friends, we of course had mixed emotions like sadness, relief, and excitement. Yes, we would miss everyone back home, but at the same time we had a lot of [...]
A relaxing boat ride at the end of our week in Kribi
We just got back from a week-long trip to Kribi, a beach town in the South region, for In-Service Training. We stopped and visited our host family from pre-service training on our way there and on our way back, and also enjoyed a few [...]
Living in Cameroon, we’ve become accustomed to frequent power-outages. It’s a way of life here. Usually once or twice a day, the electricity will go out and the surrounding area will get quiet and dark at night. We like it when the power goes out in the middle of the night, because living in the [...]
Last Saturday, we attended our first funeral with the Proviseur of our lycee and his wife. Funerals here (particularly in the West) are very different than in the States. They usually take place several years after the person’s death and they are huge celebrations, perhaps 3 days long, and include much feasting, dancing and music. [...]
Masked man dancing
While we most certainly wished we could see our families this Thanksgiving, we were able to get together with a few volunteers and put together a delicious Peace Corps Thanksgiving dinner that we shared with some Cameroonian friends. They sampled our menu of traditional Thanksgiving food, including mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, creamed [...]
The quiet road is sometimes shared by a variety of animals
Every weekday morning, at around 06:30, Thryn and I head off on a mile-long walk to the school. We pass the bustling intersections in the middle of town, and all the merchants with all types of produce and products balanced on their heads who are [...]
A busy intersection
Living here it’s very true that something new, exciting, weird, or all of the above happens to us just about every day. And we love it. The trick is to just go with the flow. One of several places at which we dine regularly near the school is owned by a nice lady [...]
Yes, we can.
Wednesday morning Gabe and I woke up just as the poles were closing on the West coast of the U.S. Having already cast our absentee ballots weeks before, as Gabe said in his last post, we could now finally find out who will be our next president. At school, in the market, in [...]
Casting the vote
We hope that everyone at home had an alright time navigating the lines at polling places this November 4th 2008. This election season has been an historic one at an important time for our country between two very determined presidential candidates. Thryn and I have been following the news as best we can [...]
A few weeks ago a new friend of ours (a very nice man who was friends with the previous volunteer at our post) invited us over for dinner. His wives (he’s polygamist (which is legal in Cameroon)) made delicious koki, my absolute favorite Cameroonian dish, for which I fast all day so that I can [...]
Carnets de Notes
We left off last week with a partial list of random Cameroonian teachers, in search of the elusive report booklets, or Carnets de Notes so we can fill in our marks for the first sequence. A few days later, we talked to the vice principal of the anglophone section, and he said that [...]
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