I keep waiting to write entries for this thing till I have a good story to tell, but then I pick my head up and it’s been a week or more and I realize just how much has happened. And now I’m stuck with too much to say. I’ll try to keep it brief so you all have an excuse to email me.

Apparently I make it rain baby boys in this country cause my friend Jibo's wife just had a second one. I'm actually on my way to the hospital after I finish up here to see him and try to push "Timothy" for a name on them, that or "Han Solo".

When I was working on this earlier, I had just got home from watching the Cameroon-Egypt match at my friend Elijah’s place. It was a real heartbreaker which went into extra periods where we gave up a really dumb goal and got cheated out of another to go down 3-1. Oh well, bring on the World Cup.

A week ago I was in Bamenda for a regional volunteer meeting and more importantly Austin’s birthday which we celebrated in what I’m foreseeing will become “true Northwest style”. I’ll save the details for an outlet not frequented by my family (just kidding), but needless to say it was a blast. The highlight by far believe it or not was the single most insane game of Cranium I’ve ever “played”. It lasted 2 hours though I think we only got through 2 rounds and 3 of us lost our voices. All I can remember is screaming “It's a Spellbound!” over and over again. Apparently I had taken over the moderator role, surprise, surprise. Anyhow, good times.

This weekend was fun of an entirely different kind as Jibo and I took a trek out into the hills and spent the night with some of his relatives at their compound. Jibo and his family are Fulani which is the Muslim ethnic group. The Fulani generally live in the north of the country but I have a lot of grassland around me and they are traditionally herdsmen so there's a pretty strong community in the hills. I don't know how far we walked but it could have been a good 10 miles. It's unfortunate it's the height of the dry season because everything is brown or burned by brush fires set by the herders. And with all the smoke in the air, it really put a damper on what would have been some spectacular views. But definitely check out more of the pictures.



The piece de resistance was definitely this massive cliff face that is the remains of a huge hill which half of just sort of fell out of the sky. It seemed like a half-crater.

With all the cows came lots of dairy products too and for the first time in five months I had milk and yogurt. 5 months off the stuff must have really given my lactose intolerance a boost cause I was stuffed up like mad, my nose that is. The whole trip was great though and I'm definitely welcome back at the compound whenever I want to ride horses and supposedly there's a group of chimps not far who they live near a bat cave so that's freakin' awesome.



God, what else... I bought a fridge (thanks Mom and Dad). Should come in handy for not getting dysentery from leftovers. Like I said, I have so much to talk about, but I've gotta run.


Signing off… oh and here’s a pic of a frog I grew in my nursery

The big news these days is the Africa Nations Cup which you’ve probably heard kicked off the way any decent African event should, with an attack by insurgents. A bit ironic to me that it was Togo since when we were staging in Phili, the PC Volunteers going to Togo were also there. It’s a shame what happened but definitely the right call for the team to pull out. Cameroon should just follow suit since that horrid display against Gabon. I caught the game at bar down the road with some of the kids in the neighborhood. My sportslife (like a lovelife but more interesting) has really been on a steady decline the past few years. Teams I root for seem to take it as an insult.

Work is really picking up. I’m starting to think I was right to feel overwhelmed before, there are just so many opportunities for projects here. Some things are already lined up, like the medicinal garden at the health center. On Monday I revisited the Presbyterian Rural Training Center in the area and picked out some species I’ll be adding to the garden once the rains come. Then on Wednesday I took my counterpart Charles to meet a man in a town to the north who runs an ag center. Charles is an exec at the farmer’s union in Bambui that I’m trying to push forward. The other man, Emmanuel, has a very successful operation going on with fruit tree propagation, apiculture, pigs, medicinal plants, and garden farming. I’m hoping it can serve as an example for Charles and the others but I’m beginning to see that funding is going to be crucial. Emmanuel says the World Bank is about to drop a 7 year funding project in the region, but it’s tied in with government groups which has Charles sounding skeptical and can’t say I blame him. This is the government after all that I’ve heard floods the market with free-bottle-winning beers right before election season to subdue public unrest. You might assume the opposite effect, but Cameroonians are far more docile drunks than Americans.

I also started my home nursery with a modest 75 plantings, a mix of various agroforestry trees that I’ll use in demonstration plots and donate to farmers. It took approximately 5 hours for a chicken to sit on top of it and put a hole through the roof, but I persevered and rebuilt. Aside from these few small projects though, the possibilities are wide open, something I fully realized yesterday when I met with the Fon. The Fon is essentially a chief, the area’s traditional ruler. It’s funny; before yesterday I had been avoiding going to see him since, to be quite honest, I find the whole state of affairs to be quite stupid. These guys are all over the country, they inherit or it seems are randomly chosen to live a life of sitting around, accepting gifts, marrying an inordinate number of women and fathering an endless stream of children. They love their power which extends primarily to people groveling at their feet and they love to make people wait. Yesterday I waited 3 hours, sitting halfway in the garden, halfway in the open-air thrown room until he had finished breaking up a fight between the town’s traditional healers. Well, my opinion of the man himself wasn’t changed by the meeting, but my impression of his usefulness and the usefulness of the “office” did. To my surprise he seemed generally glad to have me there and eagerly rattled off a list of projects he’d like to involve me in. One seems a bit out my range, being an attempt for the town to generate its own power with a hydro plant, but the other two, teaching sessions at the technical school and most interestingly, protecting a water catchment by replacing the Eucalyptus forest with trees much more water friendly, have really sparked my interest. It’s funny though, he really does think I’m the key to the hydro power project and that’s a sentiment I’m beginning to see everywhere here; that my being here, honestly, being white, it’s assumed that I am tremendously educated and connected. Emmanuel mentioned a similar thing to Charles; that my involvement in the union, simply my presence there, my endorsement basically, is a ticket to success. It all ties into a situation I’m still adjusting to, that is, being the center of attention and suddenly, after years of being a very small fish in a very big pond in Chicago, I’m the only white man in a village in Africa where everyone knows me as the guy who’s supposed to fix things.

Signing off for now,

Bonne Année

First of all I just have to express my congratulations to my brother Dan and his new fiancée Katie on their engagement! Before the news I didn't really think I'd be getting back to the states within the 2 years, but I'm not going to miss the wedding, so you can probably count on seeing me back home sometime next spring. Funny that this time last week I was rushing to get to a wedding here. That was a hell of an experience. 500 something people crammed in a small reception hall all of them holding gifts that they each had to personally present to the couple, in a time-lapse conga line down the aisle mind you. And so many speeches, and songs (note: Cameroonians are comically awful singers). I didn't think I'd ever get out of there, but thankfully the drinks were flowing and I was with my friend Elijah so we made the best of it. Since we last spoke I've also learned how to tap palm wine and of course rang in the new year on the smoke-filled, neon lit streets of Bamenda. You're probably wondering when the whole "volunteering" thing will kick in. Well have no fear, I'm slowly getting started with work. I'm developing a medicinal plant garden started by my predecessor at the health center, and this week meeting with the farmer's union to flesh out goals for the year. I'm also finally breaking ground on the small tree nursery at my home. So things are coming along, all be it slowly, but that seems pretty par for the course here. Taking their time, I'm realizing, is a fine art that Cameroonians have perfected over generations of intense, dedicated procrastination.