Seven days, seven beds

Thankfully, I finally have both power and internet at the same time so that I can finally post. I just moved into the homestay where I will be for the first 5 weeks of training in a tiny village (aka about 15 houses), but when I first arrived there was no power. Power is pretty erratic here and cuts on and off at any time. Besides the internet, the greatest gift power gives us is crazy African music videos. We just watched a whole bunch of them while I ate dinner and I hope this becomes America’s newest import.


Where I slept
Tuesday: My own bed in Durham, NC
Wednesday: Holiday Inn at Arch St. in Philadelphia, PA
Thursday: American Airlines
Friday: Novatel Hotel in Brussels
Saturday: Jet Hotel in Douala, Cameroon
Sunday: Hotel Jouvence 2000 (cool name?) in Yaounde, Cameroon
Monday: My mosquito-netted haven in Nyamsong, Cameroon

It was a crazy journey to get here to our training site. We all met in Philadelphia for a day to meet and orient before we left for Cameroon out of NYC. Right before we began boarding at JFK (after about 7 hours of waiting… thanks Peace Corps for making sure we got there with enough time to spare) there was a freak thunderstorm that came out of nowhere. It rained really hard for a while, so our flight was delayed. Then it was delayed a little more because the line for planes waiting to take off got so long. Eventually we got to Brussels, but the gate agents wouldn’t let us try to make our connecting flight to Cameroon even though boarding wasn’t supposed to start for 5 minutes. PC paid for us to spend the night in Brussels, although we weren’t allowed to leave the hotel so don’t ask me how Brussels is because I don’t know. We had to get a new flight the next day, but it flew into Douala instead of Yaounde so we ended up about 2 days or so behind on orientation and had to jam it all in to get to our homestays Monday night. It has been rough being so nomadic and it feels like I’ve been gone months already instead of barely a week.

The group in Douala