Site Visit

I am back from Western Adamawa, aka the forgotten region of Cameroon. We are pretty much a mixture of everything, but don’t really belong anywhere. We have the culture of the Grand North (conservative and mostly muslim), but it’s closer to do banking in the West region and our geography and climate is more like the West. It’s beautiful because I live right in the mountains, but the roads are terrible (not paved, even though it’s the major trucking highway) so it takes forever to get in or out. I am replacing a current volunteer, Anna, so my house is all set up for me and it’s adorable. I’ll post pictures after I move in and make it my own. Anna is very active, so she has a lot of projects that I can continue with, mostly youth group activities, but we’ll see what I end up doing. Peace Corps encourages us to take the first 3 months easy, so I’ll probably just start out with some observations.

Where other volunteers live in relation to me

Here are some of the highs and lows of site visit:
1. We left Bafia with at least 20 people packed into a 15 passenger van. There was a goat strapped to the top that cried the entire way to Bafoussam.
2. The Golden Center hotel in Bafoussam has the most amazing shower ever.
3. The volunteer in Bankim, Kate, made us pizza and pancakes. Delicious.

Hunter and Jackie with pizza

4. We had to take motos on the worst road ever to get from Bankim to Nyamboya. Jackie burned her leg on the exhaust pipe. I almost tipped over in a mud puddle.
5. After our Halloween party in Mayo Darlé my new post mate, Kaitlyn, and I realized there was a bat in our room. I’m pretty sure we woke up the entire village by screaming.
6. I have a cat, Mi-Hao, which just had 5 kittens 4 weeks ago. I am going to keep one of the girl kittens, name TBD. They are so cute.

My new babies

7. Baptist missionaries live in Banyo and gave me a cinnamon bun.
8. It took me 10 hours and 27 minutes to get from Banyo to Bafoussam, which is apparently good time. I will be banking very rarely. My bank in Bafoussam is called Afriland.
9. I miss cheese. We only have laughing cow triangles in Bafia, so I spent more than I should have on a block of Gouda when we got back to Bafoussam.
10. We watched a countdown of 30 Urban Hits music videos (African and American) in the hotel on the French MTV channel—Trace.