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,