27 months

Reddit.com, social bookmarking site par excellence, is putting a creative spin on online donations during the holiday season. Rather than asking for monetary donations, they’re encouraging people to donate their time instead. Interested volunteers provide information about their skills which is entered into their aptly named “Database of Awesome.” Volunteers are then matched up with a project from a pool of non-profits.

People who give a minimum of 2 hours of their time are eligible for some great schwag (read: prizes) from their partners. From FeedANeed.org:

Around this time last year, we were busy partnering with xkcd to raise over $3,000 for the EFF, a non-profit chosen by you as the recipient of our fundraising efforts.

This holiday season, reddit.com is launching its first Feed A Need project. Instead of asking for monetary donations, we’re asking people to donate a few hours of their skills & energy. So if you are a programmer, designer, artist, lawyer, geology professor, bacon cooker, or anyone else with a few hours to spend for a good cause please consider participating in this year’s Feed a Need charity drive.

To participate, fill out this form with as much information as possible. Your information will be entered into our “Database of Awesome”, and you will be matched up with a project for a needy charity. See the list of non-profits here, vote up your favorite or submit one of your own. You needn’t volunteer in order to help us choose the charities whose needs we’ll be feeding.

I’ve been a devout follower of Reddit’s irreverent, bacon-loving site for a long time. Now I’ve got just that much more reason to love them (sorry, Digg—what’s this about enhancing your revenue stream with another ad product? I’m afraid it’s over between us.)

Clearly, Reddit is onto something here. They already have a huge pool of tech-savvy users, and with the downturn in the economy, layoffs and budget tightening all around, what better way to give without hitting the pocket book? Kudos, Reddit.

My only suggestion would be to make this a year-round endeavor.

A new meme is making the rounds in the African francophone blogopshere and is now gradually spreading through the anglophone zone. It was begun by Théo Kouamouo, a blogger based in Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire). Théo asked bloggers to reflect on why they blog about Africa and tagged a few friends to get the ball rolling. Their responses were collected by Global Voices in this post. He offered this answer to his own question (translated from French):

I blog about Africa with joy because I believe that it is from our individual and mixed voices that the African renaissance will sprout, which will come as surely as Martin Luther King’s dream became a reality forty years later. I read African-oriented blogs with joy because they give me a less monolithic and less doomed image of the continent and its inhabitants.

I began blogging about Africa (or, more precisely, my corner of it) as a way to keep my friends and family in touch with my daily life here as a volunteer. Over time, the focus shifted away from my personal experience to the stories of the people I met in Cameroon and elsewhere on the continent. In the process, the blog became much more conversational and, if the traffic numbers are any indication, interesting to a broader audience. Just one recent example is Roland Boula’s podcasting story and the ripples it sent through my online social network.

Another reason I blog about Africa is because I’m intrigued by the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship I see here in Cameroon and the continent as a whole. I’m passionate about technology, and I truly believe we’re on the verge of witnessing a Renaissance that will largely be fueled by ICT and led by pioneering young Africans. It’s an exciting place to be, and blog about, for this reason alone.

I can’t resist propagating a good meme, so with that I’ll tag an interesting mix of Cameroonian bloggers:

Mambe Nanje Churchill
Our Man In Cameroon
Camerooned
My African Father

This post was largely inspired by the views of Ken Banks, the man behind FrontlineSMS and Kiwanja. I only recently discovered him via Twitter, and feel that I’ve met a kindred spirit. His essay on anthropology’s “technology-driven Renaissance” is something everyone engaged in development should read, whether or not your interest lies in ICT.

I took my bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Washington, with a healthy dose of computer science mixed in for good measure. Lucky for me, I was able to convince my advisor—a young, open-minded Dr. David Tracer—to let me try applying genetic algorithms to modeling the theoretical evolution of cooperative behavior. Computer models of macroevolutionary processes were still relatively new then, and genetic algorithms were exotic animals to a hacker, so my independent study with him was a rare gift. I’ve never forgotten it.

Although my focus was more on the computational/physical side of anthropology, my coursework on its sociocultural foundations left a deep mark on me. Learning to understand social groups from “within”, as the anthropologist is trained to do, is something that’s stuck with me ever since. Classic works by Boas, Malinowski and Lévi Strauss along with ethnographies like Smadar Lavie’s The Poetics of Military Occupation were as influential as Code Complete, The Pragmatic Programmer and my O’Reilly books on Perl and C++.

It’s surprising how often this training came in handy later during my years in the software industry. Exchange their culture, artifacts and language and there’s striking functional similarities between a Microsoft product group and, say, a group of Kalahari bushmen, or a forest tribe from Papua New Guinea. This isn’t a value judgment—it’s simply human nature. That’s one of the great goals of anthropology, after all; by studying the contrasts between human societies we’re able to subtract the differences and, ultimately, glimpse what it means to be “human”.

It’s interesting to note how often anthropology falls in and out of vogue in the eyes of the tech world. Though it mostly catered to professional, PhD-holding anthropologists (which I am not) for many years I followed a Listserv devoted to job-seekers in the field. In retrospect, I wish I’d archived the posts so I could graph the trends in technology companies looking for anthropologists to study a small segment of their market. For example, Nokia once sought to understand how 12 to 16-year-old girls in communities of a given size used their mobile phones.

What Ken Banks advocates is an integration of the modern practice of anthropology into development work. This isn’t a new argument. In fact, it’s an idea that’s been supported by both academics and practitioners for some time. One of the great oversights of Western aid in the developing world (eloquently treated by William Easterly, among others) is the failure to measure both the positive and negative impacts of these efforts on their target communities.

Borrowing the previous example of Nokia, why not turn this study to users of mobile phones in the rural areas of Cameroon’s Northwest province which, coincidentally, is affected by the highest rates of HIV infection in the country? Imagine the impact a human-centered ICT development project might have if the social groups inhabiting these regions were regarded not merely as passive recipients of top-down Western aid plans, but rather as “customers” in the traditional business sense.

In order to apply a technology like SMS, social media, or whatever to its full potential in the betterment of other peoples’ lives, it helps to first understand what the intended beneficiaries need or want from it. It sounds like common sense, and there’s surely much emphasis placed on “needs assessments” prior to implementations in development work, but too often this seems (in my experience) to be an afterthought—a solution looking for a problem, as it were.

To be truly effective, the 21st century development worker stands to benefit from some old-fashioned lessons in cultural relativism, structuralism and participant-observer fieldwork.

Thoughts on this? Comments are welcome.

[Edit: As it happens, this post coincides with the 100th birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the greatest thinkers in anthropology. Happy birthday, Mr. Lévi-Strauss.]

This post was inspired by Steve Jackson’s “Journey to Work” Flickr video that he posted last week. He encouraged others to participate, so this is my contribution.

The place I call home, Buea, is a scenic mountain town sandwiched between Mt. Cameroon and the Atlantic Ocean. It’s unique for many reasons, not the least of which is a gloriously pothole-free, four lane slab of asphalt with a center divider that stretches from the forest at the mountain’s base to the car park at Mile 17—a rarity for Cameroon. This road is built on one long, continuous hill and is bordered on both sides for its entire length by gutters that are a meter deep in places.

As an aside, these gutters have an odd habit of attracting unwary white men into their depths. I’m lucky to have never suffered a gutter fall, and I hope to keep it that way.

As African highways go, it’s a wonderful piece of engineering—and a cyclist’s dream. My house is near the top of said highway. This means I can (and often do) roll out of bed, slurp my morning coffee, push my bike out the front door and, after a few pedal strokes—coast all the way into the office. Time from home to work: less than five minutes. Carbon footprint? Nada.

Before I could shoot a video from the bike, I first had to find a way to attach a camera to the handlebars. Steve suggested strapping the camera to my head, but in the end I opted for a solution that made the best of what I had on hand. So without further ado, here’s my morning bicycle commute to work:

Needless to say, climbing back up this hill on the return leg takes a bit longer and makes for much less interesting viewing.

For those with an interest in bikes, here’s how I built mine in Cameroon (start at the bottom). If any gear heads are wondering about the “fixie” claim when I mention coasting, I’ve since traded-up to a fixed/free flip-flop hub. Life is good.

This is a follow-up photo post to my previous entry How to Light An African Village. I’m enthusiastic about the innovations my housemates from Green Step observed in their recent foray into the village, so I wanted to highlight some of their discoveries. They completed a trip from Dschang to Bafoussam, Bamenda, Kumbo and Mbouda back to Buea in 60 hours—that’s travel through four provinces on some very unforgiving roads.

Along the way they made stops at three Cameroonian-founded and staffed NGOs dedicated to building renewable energy solutions from local materials. The work these groups are doing is nothing short of astounding. I’m far from being an expert in the field, but as an engineer of a different sort I’m able to recognize the sound application of appropriate technology when I see it. With a locally-built wind or water turbine the notion of a Cameroonian village lit with LED light fixtures isn’t so farfetched.

Scroll down to the bottom of Green Step’s blog entry for more details about their trip and the Cameroonian entrepreneurs they met.

My housemates Connie and Johannes of Greenstep are getting involved in some very cool project work these days. After spending most days behind a computer, I find myself a bit envious of their trips to the remote village of M’muock (just getting there is an off-road adventure in itself) and of the time Johannes spends in our garage fabricating new gadgets to try out with their renewable energy project.

Recently, I found Johannes testing his prototype LED (light emitting diode) fixture made from a handful of components and a tuna can. The idea of using LEDs to illuminate African villages isn’t a new one. In May of this year an event called Lighting Africa drew more than 300 delegates from around the world to Accra, Ghana. An initiative of the World Bank Group and International Finance Corporation (IFC), Lighting Africa was geared toward brainstorming business opportunities for providing non-fuel based lighting services to the continent. A large focus was placed on the promise of bringing LED lighting to Africa’s rural communities.

In simple terms, an estimated half a billion people do not have any electricity whatsoever in Africa. Thus the majority of the continent’s inhabitants are dependent upon kerosene lamps and candles for lighting at night, with some spending as much as 10% of their income on lighting alone. I can testify to the fact that kerosene lamps often end up producing more smoke than light, and there’s the ever-present risk of a lamp getting knocked over and setting one’s house on fire.

By contrast, LEDs are highly efficient and relatively cheap. A typical LED light fixture uses only a very small amount of power. The model Johannes built consumes only about 0.8 watts, but produces enough light to read by. He estimates that the total cost to produce one of his fixtures is less than 2 Euros (about US $2.50). The LEDs and resistors are readily available from shops in Buea and Douala, and the remaining parts can be sourced from local (even scrap) materials. Built correctly by a trained craftsperson, they have a usable lifespan of 5-10 years.

These LED fixtures have the advantage of being recharged mechanically with hand cranks, pedal power or—in the case of Greenstep—an open source wind turbine design. An off-the-shelf car battery provides storage for the system.

AfriGadget fans take note: Greenstep’s latest blog entry catalogs a half dozen or more Cameroonian renewable energy inventions built with local materials (scroll down to the bottom). Examples include an award-winning improved charcoal cookstove, a solar cooker, solar dryer, and both water and wind turbines.

For the second interview of this series, I had a chat with Mambe Nanje Churchill, the young CEO of the AfroVisioN group here in Buea. In the short time AfroVisioN has been in business, they’ve put together an impressive portfolio that includes an outsourced project for a Swiss company.

Besides his strong grasp of current and emerging web technologies, one of the things that impressed me most about Churchill is his dedication to introducing young Cameroonians to computer programming. His offices double as a training facility by day where he starts his protégés off with PHP fundamentals. Later in the afternoon, he switches gears into a production software shop where he leads development work on any number of client projects. Churchill preaches like an evangelist when the conversation turns to ICT and the potential it has for creating jobs, providing access to information and ultimately alleviating poverty both in Cameroon and across Africa.

Most recently, AfroVisioN created quite a stir by undercutting the local market with an unheard-of 50,000 cfa (about $100) flat fee for custom website design, domain registration, one year of hosting and 24/7 tech support.

This dialogue is only a glimpse of Churchill’s vision. I encourage readers to take a stroll around his blog or follow his Twitter feed to get a sense of what he’s up to. Here’s our conversation:

Tell me a little about yourself.
“I am Mambe Churchill Nanje the President, CEO of AfroVisioN Group Cameroon, an IT firm I founded in 2006 and serving technology to Cameroonians and Africans.”

How did AfroVision get its start? Where do you hope see it in 5 years?
“AfroVisioN Group was conceived while I was teaching at Trustech Institute of Technology in 2005 just after taking my Macromedia Professional Certification, I realized there was more to computers than just checking of mails and chatting like we use it here in Cameroon. So I started researching on ways this technology can be used to improve and change things here in Cameroon, I started the project AfroVisioN. First I had to look for guys who will understand what I want to do, so I can work with them and make a great impact, since then we have been working and doing alot of things to change the way people look at Internet here in Cameroon. I see AfroVisioN Group as a leader in web and enterprise solutions in the West African marketplace in the next couple of years.”

What services do you offer now? Which technologies would you like to capitalize on in the future?
“We offer the following services:

• graphics and multimedia design (Flash, Photoshop, Fireworks)
• web design (Dreamweaver, HTML, javascript)
• Web development (php, asp.net, codeigniter, java)
• software developement(java, C#)
• online marketing of websites.

We capitalize on open source technologies like Apache, Mysql, Java, J2EE, C# (mono) PHP. So that we can cut down cost of our solutions to suit our African market.”

Give me a picture of AfroVisioN’s primary clients. Where are they located, etc.?
“Our primary clients are small and medium size enterprises, NGO’s, CIGs and mostly startup firms who need web presence and small software solutions to manage their operations. Most of them are located in the South West and Littoral Province and right now we are working on serving all the other 9 provinces because there are groups and business’ there that need our services to grow bigger.”

What are the challenges of operating a small IT enterprise in Africa?
“Bill there are a lot of challenges and I will make them in point form and also point to an article. I wrote about this on my blog.

First the fact that our business in young and we are Africans, most people think we are not qualified to deliver the technology solutions they can rely on.

Some people think since we are made up of young guys though professionals, we can not tax them at a high cost so they all try to minimize us and want to pay us little or nothing for our work.”

More of the problems can be found on my blog post here:
http://mambenanje.blogspot.com/2008/06/problems-faced-by-young-african.html

Do you see Cameroonian software developers as having a competitive advantage in the African/global marketplace? If so, why?
“Yeah I see a lot of advantages we have in the African and global marketplace in terms of our culture, the languages we speak and the cost of living and operating a business here in Cameroon and Buea especially.

Cameroonians are the most bilingual people on earth and we have the culture of most African countries: be it French countries or English countries. For instance I can sell a product or offer a service to a Nigerian and a Senegalese, a Frenchman and an American without a language barrier and I won’t need anybody to translate, because I grew up with both French- and English-speaking Africans. So I am a hybrid and this also means I can understand how the French Africans will use a system and how English Africans will use it and I can then make it better for them. And since Africa is mostly French and English speaking, then Cameroonians like me have a great advantage to cover African and global markets.

Since our cost of living in Buea and Cameroon is somewhat low, we can do a great deal of offshoring and compete with the Indians with lower cost and better output. I am saying this because I see a lot of Cameroonians understand how important it is to be educated and whenever they are into learning they go for it 100%. So Cameroonians with the zeal they have to study can follow the latest tech trends, understand and implement it at a very fast pace while living at the lowest cost possible. This is what I did for the first two years of running AfroVisioN Group.”

What role do you see the Internet playing in Africa’s future?
The internet comes along with a lot of things that will help Africa come out of poverty and make life better and living standards get higher in the African continent. With the internet a young African who just left university can setup a blog, a website, or get outsourcing projects from elance.com and make a whole lot of money while staying in his or her room. This means we can stay in Cameroon and make money from America or Europe. We get paid and live here in Cameroon with better and higher standards.

Normally when students graduate here in Africa, all they do is either job hunting (which are not available), or they go abroad for greener pastures. They never think of maybe starting up a business because they believe its a waste of time and there are no investment opportunities. But with the internet, with little or no investment from say your family or pocket allowance you can start an internet business, make money and get investors from and out of Africa and you grow really big. I think this alone answers what the internet has done for us.”

Other thoughts?
“Well there are a lot of things I am thinking with regards to information technology and poverty alleviation in Africa. But I really like to capitalise on Information Technology Awareness which will lead Africa into a whole lot of new opportunities and help us reduce the ills of our African society like corruption, lower living standards, low life expectancy, just by using the internet properly.

Learning and copying what is happening abroad and implement the best in our locality is the way forward for the African society.”

When one thinks of ICT (information and communications technology) leadership in Africa, it’s often the established hubs in Kenya, Egypt, South Africa and Nigeria that spring to mind. There’s no denying that a healthy mix of talent, ideas, infrastructure, market opportunity and favorable business climates exist in these regions. A casual stroll around StartupAfrica or any of the well-known African tech blogs reveals a whole host of pioneering mobile apps, open source software projects, web platform solutions, backyard tech, ICT4D initiatives, technology-focused enabling NGOs and the like. Each is geared toward African consumers and beneficiaries; many are already competing on a global level. Predominantly, though surely not exclusively, the bulk of these innovations stem from one of these aforementioned nations.

Where does Cameroon fit into the picture?

Within the last few months I’ve had the pleasure of getting acquainted with some inspiring young leaders in the ICT space right here in Buea and neighboring Douala. They range in expertise from a netentrepreneur pushing the web’s future in Africa, an outsourcing and custom software company CEO, a group engaged in social entrepreneurship to build community telecenters and wired schools all over Cameroon, to the youngest of the bunch who—a smallbiz wunderkind still in his teens—is already creating jobs as a cyber café owner, with aspirations to become a regional broadband ISP.

Rather than present their stories in one big post, I’ve decided to devote a separate interview to each one. So for this, a series of four profiles of ICT entrepreneurial leadership in Cameroon, we’ll lead off with “FEE” of Kerawa.com. I had an opportunity to catch up with him recently. Here’s our dialogue.

Watch for parts 2-4 throughout this week and next.

Tell me a little about yourself.
“I am FEE. Co-founder of Kerawa.com”

Where did the idea for Kerawa.com come from?
“Kerawa.com was created to establish another link between demand and supply; by providing an online tool that will promote various offline transactions.

An online classifieds, in simpler terms.

We realised that somewhere out there, just around you, there is always someone who needs what you have and who has what you need. This is especially true in our African communities.

You see, you might want to purchase a used car. By chance, someone around your neighbourhood could be selling his at an affordable price. You get to know about this offer on Kerawa.com and just walk over to the seller’s residence, inspect the car, and buy it with real cash. You may even end up gaining a friend in the process.

Commerce should be this easy.”

What new features can we expect from the next release of Kerawa?
“Kerawa.com presently is principally a C2C friendly tool. The next iteration of Kerawa will be geared towards including some B2C and B2B components, making Kerawa more enterprise friendly.”

What’s next after Kerawa?
“Nothing in mind. There are still lots of things to be done in Kerawa. A lot of room for innovation and excitement.”

What are the challenges faced by African entrepreneurs launching web startups?
“Where other countries already have an internet market, we African netentrepreneurs have the hard task of actually creating the internet market itself. We still have a low percentage of users who use the internet, or who are even aware of its potentials.

Before becoming actual business men, we become preachers. Helping spread the wonders of new information technology and how it can aid our struggling African economy.”

What’s unique about software created in Africa? Should it be marketed differently from software created elsewhere?
“The constraints we face force us to approach software development differently. We have less skilled people, less money, less time, and less access to information.

But less is more. It forces us to develop simpler solutions. To focus on the essentials.

Marketing is twice as hard because our companies feel more comfortable with software developed overseas. This is paradoxical, because overseas companies are increasingly outsourcing their projects.

The fault is also partly ours. We need to create better software. Better products sell for themselves.”

What advice would you give a budding African IT entrepreneur?
“Just do it; the African way. It is our ability to transform our disadvantages into advantages that determine our success.

There is no excuse in life. You can either do it or you can’t. You either succeed, or you fail.”

Other thoughts/comments?
“We want to seize this opportunity to thank everyone for helping us cross our 10 000 ads milestone. It’s very encouraging.

Thank you too, Bill, for this interview.
Don’t forget to kerawise your stuff.”

I spent the night of November 4th like most Americans abroad—and indeed much of the world with cable TV, I suspect—watching the election results trickle in until dawn. We were a mix of Americans, Cameroonians and a token Canadian. Just after the networks projected Obama to be the president-elect, I began receiving congratulatory phone calls and text messages from Cameroonian friends and colleagues. This was around 5:00am local time. Shortly thereafter, the sun rose at the same invariable hour it always does at the equator. It sounds cliché, but the world actually seemed a shade brighter that morning. I walked out of the house bleary-eyed and exhausted, but feeling something I’d nearly forgotten—an undeniable sense of pride in my country.

I know many people who wept during Obama’s speech in Grant Park—cathartic tears of relief that come after witnessing the dream that was America run roughshod through two disastrous presidential terms. It’s clear that Obama represents a restoration of that dream; the ideal that America can still be a place which allows a person of modest origins to be freely elected to one of the most powerful positions on earth. It’s an immensely powerful narrative—the stuff dreams are made of.

Strolling around Buea that day, strangers and friends alike went out of their way to greet me with broad smiles and enthusiastic handshakes. Just as it was reported in Bamenda, cars with ancient loudspeakers strapped to their roofs roamed the streets blasting mostly unintelligible Pidgin with one word recognizable at intervals: “Obama!”

Over lunch at the bar beside my office, I ended up playing host to a large gathering of Cameroonians. Everyone wanted to share in the excitement, and having a “real live American” in their midst added to the fervor. I soon discovered that Mr. Obama can now add Cameroon to what is surely a growing list of African nations that are laying claim to his heritage. To wit: there’s a tribe known as the Ewondo in the center province of Cameroon which has a family surname “O-ba-MA”. Naturally, this is sufficient to establish the president-elect’s Cameroonian heritage, or at least a “spiritual” connection to him. In a similar vein, a Sudanese tribe has recently pointed out that Obama’s Kenyan father’s ancestry actually originates in the Sudan. Don’t be surprised if you see similar claims coming from Polynesians and Indonesians. It seems likely now that the Irish are jumping on the bandwagon.

What this demonstrates more than anything is Obama’s ability to tap into the spirit of the global everyman. He is not a product of a powerful political family, nor does he come from wealth, privilege or nobility. Cameroonians sees themselves in Obama, and perhaps even their potential to achieve great things.

I was pleased to find a quote from Francis Nyamnjoh, a Cameroonian novelist and social scientist, in this NYT piece. He sees Mr. Obama less as a black man than “as a successful negotiator of identity margins.” Through him, he says, Africans can once again see America as “the screen upon which the hopes and ambitions of the world are projected.” This sentiment is unequivocally borne out from what I’ve witnessed on the streets of Buea.

Personally, Obama’s victory means that I can hold my head a bit higher as an American living abroad. On too many occasions, and on both sides of the African continent, I’ve found myself playing the unenviable role of apologist for my government. I’d explain that the decisions to spy on its citizens, torture Iraqi prisoners, sacrifice the writ of habeas corpus, everything—were not necessarily those of the American people. But Americans elected their President and Congress, who represent the will of the people, did they not? “Yes, but…” began my reply a hundred times.

Once, after my best diplomacy failed, I actually feigned Canadian citizenship to avoid a nasty scrape when my American identity was called out by a would-be attacker. I’m not particularly proud to admit this, but it makes for a funny story in retrospect.

I’ve even been in a position of explaining my motivations to diplomats. Two years ago, flush with my arrival as a new Peace Corps volunteer at my post, I shared a memorable car ride from Tiko to Buea with Syd Maddicott, the British High Commissioner to Cameroon, and his wife Liz. After he’d learned about my background, he posed the most direct question I’ve ever received about my decision to join the Peace Corps: “Why,” he asked, “does someone put their career on hold during the peak earning years of their profession to be an unpaid volunteer in Africa?”

Why indeed? I appreciated his candor and replied that my country had been good to me and this was my opportunity to contribute something, however small, to restoring its image abroad. To borrow an apt phrase from Steve Jackson (another famously candid Brit), I was part of the “Shame Drain” that spawned international volunteers from across the U.S., Europe and Australia. Besides, a history of military service exists on both sides of my family and this was a chance to serve my country—even if I didn’t agree with its administration on most counts. Thus did I accept and embrace my role as an instrument of soft power first, and as an agent of development second.

Times have changed. And while I’ve never been one to champion America as the “greatest country on earth” to non-Americans, I’ve discovered something unexpected with Obama’s election; there’s no need for me to do so. Like countless other global citizens, my Cameroonian friends handle that just fine on their own.

On the eve of this historic presidential election, I thought I’d post an entry about the lengths to which an expat goes to get his ballot counted—and of the people who proved to be indispensable along the way.

Awhile back I requested an absentee ballot online from the King County, Washington elections office. I wasn’t holding out high hopes for receiving it in time, but supplied their office with my local address in Cameroon and kept my fingers crossed. Imagine my surprise, then, when just last week a thick legal envelope arrived par avion at my local post office. The timing was auspicious, since I’d received it less than an hour before hopping a taxi to attend a panel discussion at the University of Buea entitled, “America Votes 2008: Who Wins and What’s In It For Africa?” The event was hosted by UB’s American Corner, one of three in Cameroon sponsored in a partnership with the Public Affairs section of the U.S. Embassy in Yaoundé.

While the panel passionately debated Africa and America’s post-election future, I quietly filled my ballot and signed and sealed the security envelope.

After the panel had wrapped up, I searched for an official who might carry my ballot back to the Embassy. Long story short: Richard Johannsen, the first secretary and public affairs officer of the Embassy, tracked me down through Dr. Al-Yasha, a visiting Fulbright scholar and panel member whom I know through my NGO. Now, when I say “tracked me down” I mean that he actually drove around Buea without so much as a cocktail napkin sketch searching for my office, which is further complicated by the fact that our signage is almost non-existent. Found me he did, though, and left me with assurances that he would take my ballot into his care.

Richard explained to me that the Consular Section of the Embassy is able to accept sealed absentee ballots for federal elections from Americans in Cameroon, which then securely transmits the ballots to the U.S. via the Embassy’s diplomatic pouch. At least, that’s the process which is normally followed.

Since we’re so close to election day, however, he told me that my ballot (and others) are actually being hand-carried to the U.S. by an American diplomat who is leaving on Friday (today, that is) who will then deposit my ballot in the mail system so that it can be postmarked by November 4th. Just in the nick of time.

So, my thanks go to Richard Johannsen of the U.S. Embassy, Dr. Al-Yasha and the unnamed American diplomat who is making space in his/her luggage for mine and the others’ ballots. By the time it reaches King County in Seattle, my absentee ballot will have traveled to Africa and back through many, many helping hands.