Again I waited way too long between posts and I'm stuck with a whole host of stuff to write about. I shouldn't even try to do the last couple weeks justice because they've been some of the most memorable (for better and worse) I've had here. But I'll give you a run down anyway. Since we last spoke I've been really busy, both with work and socializing. Over the Valentine's Day weekend I traveled down to the West Province near Bafoussam with Jibo for the funeral of my good friend Jacky's grandfather. Funeral's not really the right word though as the guy died 6 years ago. That's generally the way it works here. The surviving family will wait to raise enough cash to throw a huge party that's more aptly dubbed a death celebration. From the pics you can probably get a good idea of what's involved, lots of dancing, food, people in all sorts of colorful finery, and of course homemade blackpowder rifles being fired constantly. It was probably the third or fourth I've attended, but definitely the biggest.

Things just seem to line up here, serendipitously, since I learned that there was a PC party happening in Mbouda, a town on the way back from Bafoussam. So I had the bus drop me off there and joined the party. Mbouda's a relatively large town. I had the my first real Cameroonian night club experience there and it was surprisingly western. It was honestly a bit disorienting when I walked outside later that night and found myself in Africa.

After all the partying I was actually glad to have some real work to do last week. NOWEFOR (Northwest Farmers Org), my supervising organization, had it's big annual general meeting (or AGM, Cameroonians looove acronyms) in Bamenda. My excitement quickly waned though after only a few hours in and realizing I had two more full days of pointless bickering and mind-numbing rambling to look forward to. At least Austin and Carl were there, the two other volunteers from Texas. And I did have a small moment of glory here as well when I caught a flaw in a change the delegates were trying to make to their election process. They wanted to vote in board members before voting for the president ensuring any other executive candidate not elected would have had no chance of even being on the board. It was nice to see they actually had enough respect that they listened to my observation. I didn't realize the effect my speaking up had actually had until a few days later when the guys from my town found me and bought me a round for "making Bambui look intelligent".

Once the meetings mercifully came to an end I decided it was time for another vacation and traveled up to Kumbo, near where Patrick from my stage is posted, to visit some folks including two of Tess's friends visiting from the States. I had always been warned about the ride up there taking forever, but I didn't expect to be ambushed by a band of Juju and subsiquently have our car break down three times. Juju are sort of like voodoo dudes who tend to spend a lot of time cursing people at death celebrations, sort of. Anyway, they jumped out in front of the bus, danced around a bit, and demanded money from the driver to pass. I'm not willing to say anything they were doing had any effect since I'm pretty sure they were just trying to make a buck, but about 5 minutes down the road the driver had to pull over. Long story short here but I actually ended up fixing the car each of the 3 times. It was a simple fix but it was pretty amusing to hear all the other passengers joking about the "whiteman's magic touch". Once I finally made it, the weekend was really a lot of fun and highlighted by horseback riding and getting stuck in the rain! Real rain! It's been 3 months but the rains are finally starting to return which means I should actually start having some work to do. And I can get to planting my vegetable garden.
Ok, so that was a lot more than a 'run down'. What can I say? There are many more stories that fell by the wayside. I'm probably way too lazy for a blog, but I suppose anything's better than nothing, right?

Until next time