27 months

It’s been almost two months since I moved out of the humble abode in Sandpit that I called home for two years. The old place was smack in the heart of the noisiest and most active part of the quarter, bordered on two sides by bars which regularly competed for the loudest music and a busy street where a taxi was usually only seconds away. Food was always close at hand as I had a small weekly produce market, container shops, an omelet man, fish mamas, soya grills and even a pork roaster just outside my front door. In the evenings, the journalists and staff of The Post, whose office was just beside my house, would drink and talk politics into the small hours of the morning. Roosters, taxi horns and wailing babies were my alarm clock in the morning. Sleep was only possible with earplugs, but I didn’t mind.

While I miss the activity, noise and friends from the old quarter, I’m glad to be in the new digs. The new neighborhood is quiet and bucolic by comparison, located a short stroll from the forest at the foot of Mt. Cameroon. It’s also within earshot of Buea’s biggest mosque; a fact that I’m reminded of with the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer each morning before dawn (I’m told that the first prayer of the day includes the line “prayer is better than sleep”—I’m not convinced). So I’ve traded one wake-up call for another.

My friend Michael suggested that I plant a banana tree in the yard to christen the new place. It’s something of a tradition for Cameroonians to maintain small farm plots to cultivate their own food, so why not? Just as I went scouting in the compound for a suitable place to break ground, I found that I’ve already got a plantain tree—sort of. I’m no expert in plantain propagation, but I’m guessing this one’s got some time before it starts producing. Just over the wall, however, my neighbors have a thick grove of plantain and banana trees. It seems I’ve got some catching up to do.

As a former console games devotee (I currently lack one) and resident of the continent, I took notice when Sony released its latest title Afrika for the PS3 this weekend. Not only does it look spectacular (check out the trailers on YouTube here and here) but it also made me wistful for my safari trip to the Masai Mara in Kenya last year. In the game you assume the role of a photojournalist getting assignments to shoot various animals inside a fictitious national park—with Sony’s line of Alpha digital SLRs, naturally. Shameless product placement? Check.

There’s no debate that Afrika is the most realistic representation of African wildlife in a game yet and will likely remain so for awhile. The title is also surely a departure from most console games in that it has no shooting, little action and no winning or losing. It’s anyone’s guess, however, if hardcore gamers will lay down their guns and drop $54 for an opportunity to peacefully explore a virtual Savannah. A big part of the excitement of a real safari comes from the anticipation of finding a wild animal around the next bend. If Sony is able to convincingly recreate this sense then they may have a hit on their hands. The price of a PS3 and Afrika is still less than round trip airfare to Nairobi and a week in the park, and if it builds some awareness of wildlife conservation along the way then so much the better.

The game is only available in Asia for now and oddly re-titled Hakuna Matata (“no worries” in Swahili) outside of Japan. As the hook for a Lion King song, one has to wonder how long it’ll be before Disney decides to sue. Sony hasn’t announced a release date for North America or Europe. Or Africa, for that matter.

To help promote the new title, a Japanese hotel is running an Afrika themed campaign where guests get to play the game in their room on a hi-def screen. An optional “Savannah plate” picnic meal is available for a mere ¥4,000 ($36) that includes a hamburger, grilled seafood and a salad. Hmm, this sounds oddly familiar.

I made a couple of enhancements to ye olde blog worthy of mention. First, I finally got around to retroactively tagging my posts with keywords. This may sound like drudgery, but it was actually quite easy with the help of Simple Tag, a WordPress plugin which has a feature that allows for tagging posts en masse. What’s the point of this? Beyond providing another useful layer of descriptive, non-hierarchical metadata, it enables the sort of oh-so-trendy tag cloud (see sidebar) popularized by sites like Flickr, del.icio.us and others. As the blog continues to grow this provides a means to visually track popular themes.

Secondly, after a month-long hiatus from posting I decided it was high time I added the Twitter Tools plugin to bridge the gaps between full posts with micro-blog updates. Twitter, with its 140 word updates called “tweets”, is the sort of emerging web app that people either love or hate. Critics who denounce Twitter and its ilk as hipster narcissism often argue that it’s impossible to express in a 140 words or less something that is not stupefyingly banal. On the other side, proponents like Clive Thompson see Twitter as a tool for enabling “social proprioception”—that is, the sixth sense of knowing where your friends are. Still others, such as Dave Parry, have found innovative academic uses for it.

More recently, Steve Jackson, a VSO volunteer due to arrive in Bamenda, suggested using Twitter a means to connect the expat community in Cameroon. I think it’s a fine idea, even if Internet or SMS isn’t always reliable enough to enable a sense of where my expat pals are at the moment. For me, a quick micro-blog (while it’s also been argued that Twitter isn’t a micro-blogging tool, strictly speaking) is a good stand-in for when I don’t have something worthy of a full blog post. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I’m here. If you’re new to it, here’s a newbie guide.

Okay, enough blog-speak for awhile. I’m off to find some goat pepe soup. Perhaps that last sentence should’ve been a tweet.

As an American in my adopted country of Cameroon, I’ve had some time—just over one month—to process some thoughts on the impact of my Peace Corps service, of the agency as an instrument of development and my motivations for remaining here to continue my work as an independent volunteer. “Independent volunteer” is, perhaps, a convenient if not disingenuous label. Expatriate, freelance Africanist, reluctant RPCV, or in these, the waning years of Pax Americana, “21st century refugee” might be a better moniker. Despite the dollar’s precipitous slide, $4/gallon gas at the pump and multi-billon dollar federal bailouts of US financial institutions, living in Africa remains relatively cheap and easy for a foreigner. But I digress.

I will preface this by saying that I’m grateful to Peace Corps for introducing me to Cameroon and for the support provided to me during my two years of service. That said, I must confess that I’m no longer the enthusiastic, flag-waving advocate of Peace Corps that I was when my service began in 2006. I’m proud of my service and accomplishments, particularly of the small successes. But I harbor no great illusions as to the long-term, sustainable development impact of the work I or my fellow RPCVs performed, or to how far I went in fulfilling the three goals set forth by John F. Kennedy in 1961. A question I received from last year’s Q&A post went straight to the heart of the matter: who benefits more; the PCV or the host country? I gave the best answer I could then, a qualified one, but the seeds of doubt I held about the efficacy of my service—and more so, of Peace Corps itself—had already been planted long ago.

Since I began my service in September 2006, I’ve learned a great deal about the successes and failures of international development, reflected on a number of Peace Corps memoirs from Africa (from the classic to the questionable), and kept an open mind while considering the well-publicized criticisms [2] [3] of Robert Strauss, my former country director. Also during this time, I had an opportunity to witness the workings of the agency as an insider, and to see the strengths and weaknesses of Peace Corps.

Now, as an RPCV in Cameroon, I must add my voice to the growing number of concerned individuals who see Peace Corps as being guided more by historical inertia than by a clearly articulated development strategy. This is truly unfortunate, for I believe that Peace Corps has the potential to be among the best development agencies in the world. I’ll attempt to address the latter in a follow-up post. From this post’s title proud RPCVs and supporters of the agency might take this to be a vitriol-laden polemic, or worse, an unpatriotic attack on the sanctity of mom and apple pie. In reality, it’s neither. Nor do I wish to dampen the spirits of current Volunteers in Cameroon or elsewhere. Like most things in life, Peace Corps service is what one makes of it—and there are undoubtedly many dedicated volunteers doing valuable work at their posts.

Peace Corps as a Diplomatic Tool
Recently, a number of congressmen, all former Peace Corps Volunteers, sent a letter to the Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and related agencies to request $400 million in funding for the Peace Corps in the 2009 budget. The letter, which was supported by a bipartisan group of 73 Members of Congress, makes reference to “foreign policy and national security interests” and calls Peace Corps “one of the best programs we offer…to reverse negative opinions about the value and character of the American people.” Rep. Mike Honda (RPCV El Salvador, 1965-67) said that, “the Peace Corps continues to be one of the most effective forms of American diplomacy.” Periodically, US Presidents and other political figures have echoed this phrase, nearly word-for-word, at press appearances for departures of new trainees. Few Americans, I think, would disagree with this sentiment. The agency, after all, is thought to embody the best that America has to offer.

Two years ago Niels Marquadt, the former US Ambassador to Cameroon, administered the Peace Corps oath to us at our swearing-in ceremony. The event was held on a grey August morning at the place de fête in Mbalmayo before an assembly of Cameroonian functionaries, local officials, PC/Cameroon staff, trainers, homestay families and we, the 39 newly-minted Volunteers in our matching pagne outfits. In his address, Amb. Marquadt called us “mini ambassadors” who were being dispatched to the far corners of Cameroon to represent the optimism, hard work and can-do spirit of America. We’d be doing the sort of grassroots diplomacy at the village level that embassy staff, sequestered behind their razor wire-topped compound walls in the capital, were unable to perform, he said. After a carefully measured pause, the ambassador asked us to stand and hundreds of pairs of eyes fell upon us. In the solemnity of the moment, right hand raised, repeating the words of the oath, I felt an unexpected swell of pride and patriotism. Less than an hour later I bid farewell to my homestay family, changed into a t-shirt, shouldered a backpack and boarded the first of several local busses which would eventually deposit me at my post.

In the ensuing months of my service, a much different picture than the one painted by the ambassador began to form. The vast majority of Cameroonians I met in Buea (better than 90%) knew something of Peace Corps, or at least professed some familiarity with the agency. With rare exceptions, however, almost no Cameroonian (or European, or anyone else, for that matter) was aware that the Peace Corps was an organization sponsored by the US government, or even vaguely associated with Americans. An all-too-typical exchange, either in French, English or Pidgin, went something like this:

Cameroonian: So, what has brought you here to Cameroon?
Me: I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer. I teach computers.
Cameroonian: Ah, yes—Peace Corps. Mr./Ms. [insert name here] taught me English/math/science in secondary school. So…you come from which country?

I was surprised to find that, of the 90% or more who knew something of the agency, fewer than 10% made any connection whatsoever with the United States. What astonished me most, perhaps, was not merely how common this exchange was in Buea, but that this profound disconnect seemed to cross social, demographic and geographic lines. Over the course of my two years of service, I’ve explained the American origin of the agency to a diverse lot of village farmers, students, teachers, university professors, journalists, prefets, district officers, police commissioners, provincial delegates, mayors, parliamentarians and various Cameroonian functionaries in nine (of the ten total) of Cameroon’s provinces I visited during my service. In the case of government officials, one might expect these people—at least through peripheral contact via official channels—to have some inkling of the national origin of the agency which has served their country for nearly half a century. In reality, almost none did.

Instead, what I later discovered was that “Peace Corps” is a generic label typically applied to predominantly white, Western foreigners who come to Africa performing various acts of volunteerism. All too often, upon hearing I was a PCV, a Cameroonian would respond by saying that they once knew a Peace Corps who started a Baptist mission in their village, ran an orphanage, arrived in a plane to distribute relief supplies, or (best of all) assisted in training their military. All of these acts, of course, fall completely outside the functions of the agency. Equally nonsensically, I once attended a send-off for a Japanese volunteer who was remembered fondly as “their Peace Corps.” It was at this same occasion that, after a second glass of champagne, a Cameroonian shared with me the public knowledge that “all Peace Corps are spies for the CIA” whether they know it or not. After a time I learned to bow to the absurd and gave up trying to correct Cameroonians on these misconceptions. In the presence of other PCVs during these moments, we’d exchange glances and subtly shrug our shoulders as if to say, “oh well.” So much for diplomacy.

If, after 46 years of service to Cameroon (among the longest continuously running Peace Corps programs in the world) the average Cameroonian hasn’t the vaguest notion that Peace Corps is even an American agency, I have to cast serious doubt on the value of its diplomatic mission. Best and most effective? Not by a long shot. I’ve often wondered how the public (mis)conception of Peace Corps here in Cameroon compares with the agency’s efforts elsewhere in the world. Am I alone in this assessment? Part of me wishes it were so. The better part of me, however, has no choice but to conclude that the Congressman’s and Ambassador’s assertions of Peace Corps as a diplomatic tool falls terribly short of their vision.

Comments are welcome. More to follow soon.

If you think you’ve got a tough work commute, check out the drive to Nguti here in the SW province. Roland Musi, the director of Link-Up, took these photos last October toward the end of the wet season. He was on a mission to distribute foodstuffs and pay school fees for orphans and vulnerable children in the village through Link-Up’s Guardian Parent Association (GPA). By then, the “road” is little more than a swath of thick red mud cutting through impenetrable jungle on either side. Bush taxis can make the trip during the dry season, but after the rains begin in earnest it’s only passable with the stoutest of 4WD vehicles. Even then, the trucks can get stuck for days or weeks at a time.

Starting in July, I’ll be taking a much more active role in Link-Up beyond my advisory position on the board. One of the many hats I’ll be wearing is coordinator for international volunteers. So here’s my shameless plug: if you or someone you know wants to contribute your talents to an organization that’s doing incredible work in Cameroon, visit our volunteer page or drop me an email. We welcome short- or long-term volunteers with unique skills, but a willingness to roll up one’s sleeves and get involved is just as vital. Link-Up was recently approved as a Peace Corps partner and has received national attention for their work, so you can rest assured that your volunteerism will go toward a worthy organization producing measurable results. /shameless plug

Hans had been more secretive than usual in the past several weeks. My near constant companion in Buea had become conspicuously absent, with clandestine trips to Yaoundé and extended stays in the capital becoming the norm. On the phone he remained vague on the precise nature of his sojourns; his original alibi of having some odd carpentry work had long since worn out. I know Hans well, and it was obvious when he was being evasive. He sensed that I was onto him, too, and would bust into his characteristic belly laugh saying, “Oh, Bill—my bruddah! Don’t bother. All ting de fayn.” I had my suspicions, but didn’t let on to his game.

I knew that Hans’s elder cousin, Kingue, maintained a second house in Yaoundé. Kingue is a bona fide big man in Bakweri Town, with a sprawling, neo-colonial wedding cake of a house and a gated compound to prove it. Once, I was invited for an impromptu visit to his place with some friends and we were received by his fashionably attired wife with snifters of Courvoisier all around. We sat awkwardly on luxurious imported sofas in our t-shirts and sports sandals while Cameroonian men in pinstripe suits, shiny satin ties and alligator shoes regarded the televised soccer match in the opposite corner of the parlor. On other occasions Kingue would host lavish outdoor BBQ’s—African style—and slaughter up to four goats for his guests, along with the requisite crates of bottled beer stacked head-high in the compound yard. For these events Hans was often recruited to procure jugs of freshly-harvested palm wine from his contacts in Small Soppo (see “An Ode to Matango”). Government officials, functionaries, magistrates, police commissioners and other prominent local figures rounded out the guest list. It wasn’t conspicuous consumption of the Western variety, with ostentation and displays of wealth merely for its own sake. This was different.

Kingue belongs to that rare class of made Cameroonians who are able to travel freely between their village and their government jobs in the US. With a posting as a treasurer to the permanent Mission of Cameroon to the UN in New York City, he possesses a diplomatic passport (identified by its brown cover, as opposed to the usual green) with the most sought after item to so many of his countrymen affixed to the inside: a multiple-entry resident visa for the United States of America. Kingue’s two houses in Cameroon, therefore, were not so much status symbols as the just rewards of an African whose ship had come in. And his success, in keeping with tradition, was shared among his extended family back in his village, including Hans.

I met Hans at an outdoor bar on the dusty outskirts of the Omnisport stadium in Yaoundé during my visit there last month. He could barely contain his excitement and I knew there was no need to press him on his secret. He would spill it all on his own. My suspicions from the start had been correct; Kingue had pulled some strings and landed Hans a job at his office in New York City. In a few short days he would have the same diplomatic passport and visa and, not long afterward, a government-sponsored flight to the US with a guaranteed salary waiting for him. For nearly as long as I’ve known him, Hans has worn around his neck a pewter medallion depicting the twin towers in Manhattan—a gift brought back on a visit by Kingue. It was a touchstone for an almost universally held African dream; the prospect of leaving the continent for a better life abroad. Hans’s wish had come true—he was finally a made man himself. I shared his enthusiasm as we toasted with rounds of Castels. At the same time, there was a bittersweet edge to the occasion, since we both knew he’d be leaving his village, family, friends and me behind indefinitely.

Some days later Hans returned to Buea and his family’s house in Bakweri Town with passport in hand. I agreed to guard his secret until he’d safely left Buea and visited him often until his return to Yaoundé for his flight out of Nsimalen. He’d spent his final days gathering all the items any self-respecting Cameroonian would take on an international voyage: enough dried fish, eru, bitter leaf, gari, Maggi cube and assorted market spices to fill a large suitcase. He packed just one change of clothes. I wondered what a US customs official would make of the fragrant, exotic cargo upon inspection. We had a small send-off for him in the house with kwacoco, chicken and champagne. And then Hans was off to America.

If you happen to see a short, stocky Cameroonian with his trademark ball cap and easy smile on the streets of Manhattan, greet him for me.

This list comes from a recent Gmail exchange with a Cameroonian friend that was conducted entirely in Pidgin English. If I were to guess, I’d say that AdSense’s semantic analysis got hung up on the monosyllabic Pidgin words in our conversation and, lacking any other intelligible vocabulary, served up Swedish, Dutch and Vietnamese ads. For example, the Cameroonian Pidgin verb “na” (to be) is also a Vietnamese noun (custard apple), a Dutch preposition and a Swedish pronoun, which might explain some of the following:

Sponsored Links

1. Phim Han Quoc
2. Diabetes: Fucoidan Helps
3. Tin việc làm
4. Måla tak med Anza
5. Volvo Trailer Hitch
6. Liquid Fucoidan Seaweed
7. Jelly Jars
8. Hjärtklappning?
9. Kendo Martial arts in NJ
10. Kim Kardashian Is Hot?

Clearly, Google has some work to do before they’re able to effectively cater to this segment of their market (Volvo Trailer Hitch? Jelly Jars?). These Ad(non)Sense links got me thinking about Cameroonian Pidgin as a linguistic animal. Pidgins and creoles usually arise in circumstances with prolonged, regular contact between speakers of different language groups where there is no widespread, accessible interlanguage. Witness Hawaiian Pidgin, Papua New Guinean “Tok Pisin”, Sierra Leone “Krio” or any of the many variants of West African Pidgin, generally. Originally conceived as trade or “contact” languages, they served as a means for effective communication by borrowing simplified elements from different languages. Cameroonian Pidgin is derived primarily from English, but is also heavily influenced by French, Portuguese and African dialects. For example, consider the following Pidgin words in current use and their linguistic antecedents:

Portuguese
pikin — from “pequenino” (child)
dash — from “dache” (gift or tribute)
sabi — from “saber” (to know)
palaba — from “palaba” (discussion or conference)

French
gato — from “gâteau” (cake)
jandam — from “gendarme” (police officer)
kamyong — from “camion” (truck)
katsangkat — from “quatre cents quatre” (old Peugeot 404)
ku — from “coup” (to replace)

English
sidon/shidon — from “to sit, sit down”
husay — from “which side”
kotlass — from “cutlass” (machete)
motofut — from “motor + foot” (tire)
foseka se — from “for the sake of” (because)
lefam so — from “leave it so”

African vernacular
wahala — trouble
kwa —bag
kongosai — gossip
njamajama — vegetable greens
kwankanda — bachelor
nyanga — ostentation
ngondele — young woman, girl
potopoto — mud

It’s not uncommon to hear an exchange that uses vocabulary borrowed from all four of these sources. Reduplication is often used to represent superlatives, such as “smol smol”, “sharp sharp”, “qwik qwik” and so on. To make things even more interesting (or difficult to the outsider), the tones, accent, grammar and sentence structure are heavily influenced by African languages as well. As a result, spoken Cameroonian Pidgin has a very distinct accent or “cadence” that gives it a unique, African sound very much unlike English.

Despite being labeled as “broken English” or “bush English”, Pidgin is not English but rather its own language, rich with parables and African wisdom (see “More Pidgin Wisdom”). Pidgin English is usually treated as a curse by educators (see photos from the University of Buea campus, below). I’ve heard unsubstantiated claims of teachers beating students who use Pidgin in the classroom which, given the role of corporal punishment in the Cameroonian educational system, isn’t tough to believe. However, some notable Cameroonian linguists are bucking the conventional wisdom and suggesting that Pidgin is, in fact, an appropriate pedagogical language in urban centers.

I thought of reproducing some of the email conversation that begat this post, or a sample Pidgin dialogue, but it wouldn’t really capture the language accurately. Ideally, I’d make a recording with some of my Cameroonian friends talking over drinks at the bar near my house and post it. I don’t have a decent recorder, but I may be able to use the voice memo feature in my phone and transfer it with Bluetooth to my laptop. Stay tuned.

Having ready access to music, I’ve found, is key to weathering any number of trials in Cameroon. Over the last two years my trusty iPod has performed faithfully and helped me to maintain a measure of sanity through the worst of times. Stuck in the back of a sweltering, overcrowded bush taxi for eight hours? No problem. No running water, electricity or cooking gas for a few days, while your house is periodically flooded by torrential downpours? Meh. Rioting and police tear gas forcing you to remain indoors for awhile? Bring it on, I say.

The iPod has taken more than its fair share of abuse over the last two years here. The last trip up Mt. Cameroon (see “Mt. Cameroon Redux”) was especially rough on it. I suspect that all the jostling on the trail and subfreezing temperatures at Hut 3 marked the beginning of the end. Some time afterward the internals began making a perturbing noise, sometimes known as the “click of death” followed shortly by the dreaded iPod sad face. I ran several hard disk diagnostic utilities one of which revealed, in graphic detail, the bad news:

Well, only 89.5% of it is damaged, so I guess I should consider myself lucky. My 60GB iPod is now, in effect, a 6GB iPod—but not really. The disk is so full of errors that it spontaneously reboots and seeks through bad blocks so often that the battery dies in no time.

Fortune shined upon me, though, as PCV Debbie Schuld in Tiko got a free trip to South Africa on a medical leave (she’s fine) and brought me back a handsome little 4GB Nano. Good times are back again.

Regular visitors to this blog are surely aware by now that I harbor an obsession with bicycles which borders on the pathological. The fact is, I respect bikes of every shape and form whether they be workaday mules, neglected beaters, hand-built jewels, resurrected dumpster finds, vintage showpieces or average junk. Like pit bulls, there are no bad bikes—only bad owners. This obsession is not a profitable one, as it usually leads to good money being spent on things whose exchange value is often substantially less than their intrinsic value. Still, a bike is a bike—and in my book every bike deserves a fair shake.

So I got to pouring over my photos and realized that I had enough shots of bikes taken from enough interesting places (to my mind, anyway) from around Africa to warrant a bicycle-centric gallery post. So here it is. I’m actually pretty excited about this, since it represents bikes photographed in four different countries on opposite ends of the African continent: Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Bicycle aficionados will note that a fair number of these are variations of the ubiquitous black Chinese-built singlespeed. It would be absurd to claim this as any sort of canonical representation of Africa’s two-wheeled, human-powered transport. Rather, it is merely a sampling what I’ve found in my personal travels thus far (excepting Uganda—thanks Jessica). Enjoy.

Like most federal agencies, Peace Corps has a predilection for using an abundance of acronyms (RPCV Lindsay Miesko has catalogued the most common ones on the sidebar of her blog). The acronym “COS” has a double meaning: close of service and continuation of service. This was the focus of a weeklong conference held in Yaoundé for all the Volunteers who entered Cameron in June of 2006. For us, this meant a brief departure from village life to enjoy the luxuries of a 4-star hotel in the heart of the capital. Outside of sessions we indulged in buffet meals, hot showers, spring mattresses, free WiFi and other long-forgotten amenities impossible to imagine at post. Sessions were geared toward bringing closure to our two years of service and preparing for our eventual return to the US. Mostly, though, they involved wading through a huge collection of forms to be filled out before our final processing in June. One of the APCDs remarked that “getting out of Peace Corps involves more paperwork than getting in.” He wasn’t joking.

Back in November of last year I paused to contemplate my future (see, “Top 10: After Peace Corps”). During that time I gave even odds to setting off on any of ten vastly different paths after my service. Since then, the post-election civil unrest in Kenya has put my plans to settle in Nairobi on hold, at least temporarily. So here’s the big news: I’ve done a great deal of soul-searching over the last few months and have decided to extend my Peace Corps service for a third year. I’ve also applied for an open Peace Corps Volunteer Leader (PCVL) position here in the southwest province. The PCVL serves as a liaison between administration and Volunteers in the field. I interviewed with a panel of senior staff members in the Yaoundé office last week and should hear back with their decision by next week.

On top of the PCVL job, there is a lot of exciting potential for new projects during my third year. At least one is already in progress but I’ve elected to hold off on blogging it until later. All the same, I look forward to keeping you, dear reader, abreast of my goings-on here in Cameroon through 2009.

P.S. - 100th post!