March 2006
How eh dai? I am slowly starting to learn pidgin the main language spoken in my area. It is a VERY broken form of English at times I can’t even pick out a word spoken. I still try to speak some French but have difficulty because not much French is spoken in my area. I have enjoyed these past few months tremendously. I have been very sick a few times not with malaria, but some stomach virus I think. But lately I have been healthy.
I have enjoyed the dry season a lot and even started playing basketball with some locals in Tiko. It is funny the court always has a vast amount of languages spoken at all times, Sometimes French, pidgin, English and other patois.
The bird flu has made it to Cameroon and Peace Corp is keeping an eye on its development. There are chickens running around everywhere here so we have to be careful and make sure all the food is cooked thoroughly.
The second term is almost finished for my school. There are 3 terms and the third term is the shortest of them all. I have been working hard to try to apply to the British High Council for funding for Computers at my school. It is a tedious process and I am still waiting to see if we will be approved. I am optimistic and think that we will get at least 10 new computers. Right now I am working with six, two of the hard drives died on the older computers. So they are really not worth fixing, I am considering them totaled and to be buried.
In Cameroon they have a youth week here. During Youth Week you prepare the students to play sports, Chorus, Traditional Dance against other schools. Since my school is very small we did not win but were very competitive in every category. The traditional dance I thought was excellent. It was so good it could be a Broadway show, very entertaining and unique.
When I have free time on the weekend I usually go to the beach with friends in Limbe. This place is so naturally beautiful you could never get tired of it.
I thank everyone for the packages, letters and emails. I enjoy all them very much. I wish everyone good times and health. Talk soon.
posted by Ada @ 7:05 AM
1 Comments:
Hi,
I've juste discovered your blog and I found your pictures and stories excellent. I lived in the South of Cameroon for 7-8 months when I was a child (around 7 years old between 1984-85) and it brought back a lot of memories. I'm french and my father worked as an engineer, inspecting the building of new bridges for the "transcamerounais" railroad. I was living in Eseka, a town between Douala and Yaoundé. I only regret that I was too small to understand everything about that country, but I've got a lot of sights, sounds, tastes and smells deeply in my head. At that time, there were no TV channel in the country (first Tv channel appeared in dec.85), the only computers I saw were brought by foreigners, so the only link with Europe were newspapers or LW radio, and you could listen to the news from Radio-france, kind of surrealistic feeling hearing reports about life in Paris while eating fresh papaya in the dark night of Cameroon. From time to time we could watch a VHS-movie on somebody's videorecorder. There were a lot of canadians (from Quebec) with their families, but no school wich means that we had to follow correspondence school. But it was great for young children like us having free afternoons, enjoying a small open-air swimming pool (with some nice insects sometimes ;) or playing games.
I also have good memories of Limbe, it was frequently called by its old colonial name Victoria. The cooler climate and the completely different landscapes and volcanic sand beaches were great. Sadly, I didn't saw a lot of the north of the country, it wasn't easy to travel for my parents with two children of 6 and 10 years old. But we had the opportunity to make trips to Douala, Yaoundé, Edea (in the middle of a big hevea/rubber plantation area), Kribi the nice beach-resort and even some Pygmée-village called Lolodorf! (funny name with the german "dorf" or village root).
Yann
(Mick is short for Mickjagger my internet nickname ;)
Post a Comment
<< Home