Home Sweet Limbe!

Hayley wrote the title; she is crazy. What she means is we are back in Limbe and it feels so much more familiar than Bamenda. We had a lousy 7 hour bus ride so we are treating ourselves by checking into a seaside hotel with hot water! It's to the orphanage tomorrow.

Hi Everyone! Well it;s official... we have changed our flights. We are cutting the trip short just by 3 weeks. We will spend the the last week and a half in the orphanage and then make the long journey back to NJ. Time moves slower here, the pace of life is so different so it feels like we have been away for longer than we really have.

On Monday night we will attend the Rotary meeting to present Dr. Anyangwe with the CURE kit. He runs a very respectable clinic in Bamenda and there is no doubt the medical supplies will be put to good use.

Talk to you soon,

Hayley

One Month

We have offically been away for a whole month now. Bamenda is much cooler than Limbe, there is a nice breeze. However, it is a little harder to get around Bamenda by ourselves than it was in Limbe. Luckily Christopher and his children have been so nice to us and have been taking us around. He has a 22 year old neice, Susie, who lives with him and then a 12 year son and 5 year old daughter. We didnt realize we were living with Royalty either! Christopher is the son of the Fon (chief of a village)and Susie is the daughter of a Fon as well (different village) so she is technically a princess. They do not make a big deal about it here in Africa though, because Fons have many wives and therefore tons of children so there are many many princes and princesses. Susie really does carry herself like she is a princess and not at all in a concieted proud way, just in a regal lady-like way. She is so nice and sweet and she is also a wonderful cook! On Sunday she took us to Bafut Botanical Gardens. Bafut is one of the villages around this area. The Botanical Gardens is really just like a big park. She also has introduced us to Nollywood, Nigerian films, which are hilarous and very entertaining melodramas. Susie loves them.

Next week we are going to head south the Buea to stay at the orphanage run by the Dutch woman, Crystal. We are going to help teach the children English there.

We have finally gotten through the culture shock, but we still miss you all so much and we miss the good old U.S. of A.!!!

Happy Belated Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day Gooma! Cameroon doesn't have Mother's Day so we completely forgot it was yesterday. The internet cafe's are closed on Sunday anyway.

Hi Mom sorry we couldn't write yesterday. Also, for some unknown reason we don't have your personal email.

This is a picture of the Wardens home at the school we taught at. Finally got a picture up!

Hey, everyone! We're still trudging along here. This will be the third installment to this blog since the last time I wrote. Something always happens before I can post it and then Hayley posts and my info becomes second hand. Anyway we are now in Bamenda. We kept hearing from everyone in Limbe how great Bamenda was and how everyone came from here. Everyone talked about their village. So I expected to find this virtual Garden of Eden with people living in little grass huts or something. It's not like that at all. It's like a bigger, slightly more organized, much quieter version of Limbe. The people are nicer. Here at least no adult has called us "whitemon", to our face. Some children have though. My last blog I was trying to paint a picture in words of what it physically looked like... you won't believe this but we were actually able to post a picture. So you see every time I write my info gets to be old news.

I'll tell you about our crazy 6 hour bus ride. We arrived at the bus station at 9am and waited as they loaded all the luggage on top of the bus and strapped it down under a tarp. We sat around and a man that works at a little food place said Rosemary was his mother. I guess I should mention that she rode here with us, as she is taking weekend classes at the University near here. Well the man is not really the warden's son, but he did ask her if he could marry Hayley. We soon departed and stopped what seemed like every 5 minutes to pick people up, pay tolls, or be questioned by customs. Luckily there was a police commissioner riding with us so we never actually got searched. We really lucked out because we were traveling with all the medical supplies. The police and custom agents have a license to annoy people at will. But if you're in trouble, don't call them because they are not in the business of protecting the citizens or keeping the peace. Only the Lord above does that here. And I'm not being facetious. God save us if the people here had no faith. There certainly are no laws, as far as I can see. Anything goes. I seriously thank God every day for all the brave missionaries that came before. You've no idea.

Back to the bus ride: We bounced around for a few hours looking at the stunning scenery; mountains, banana plantations, rubber tree farms, palm trees, etc. The next thing you know we're slowing down to pay a toll and all the local people are rushing up to the windows of the bus trying to sell you things. They offer granuts (peanuts), fruits, things that nobody could tell us what they were and the farmers don't really speak English, so they didn't understand my question. It's a much smaller version of the people who descend on you when you cross the border in and out of Mexico. I bought some granuts for the trip and later pineapples and carrots to bring to our hosts. Then we were all treated to a show of sorts from the insane travelling salesmen/traditional medicine pushers that just jump on the bus at various stops. We had two, though not simultaneously. The first guy was selling ginseng from China. First he got all our gullible fellow passengers attention by asking them simple questions and then giving them candy for the correct answer. He spoke in English but the accent was very difficult to decipher. Therefore, when he claimed that the ginseng would cure malaria, AIDS and typhoid fever I had to ask him to confirm this claim as I repeated it. He said this was true and he had no problem with me questioning this. With this, even Hayley, who usually tells me to mind my own business, piped up and disputed this charlatan’s claim. Would you believe that most of those people defended this guy? They weren't nasty about it. It was all civil but pointless to argue with them as I have learned since being here. So I just said, "Well if you can believe that...". This made a few people laugh. But a few people bought this stuff and later the same people bought more illusion in a little glass bottles from the second travelling sales shyster. It reminded me of the musicals, "Oklahoma" and "The Music Man", well a little anyway. The trip ended uneventfully and our host, Christopher, picked us up in his SUV. He is a very nice, intelligent medical doctor who runs a clinic.

The Birthday

Thanks for all the Birthday wishes! My birthday was actually a terrible day. It started out ok if you don't consider the monsoon like rains. We went to use the internet and we're there for a while when everyone started running down the street. Someone told us there was a fire. We went down the street to see too. Just down the hill there was a house completely engulfed in flames and a giant cloud of black smoke rising in the sky above. There was a large crowd in the street watching. My mother turned to someone and said, "Where is the fire department?!" The woman just shook her head. It was then that I remembered something Walters had told us when were climbing the mountain. He told us the only fire department in Cameroon was where the president lives. I wish I could show you the pictures of what the houses look like here but maybe for now you should just picture something a little nicer than Slumdog Millionaire. You can image how terifying a fire is once it starts and how quickly it can spread! Most of the houses are cement but there are still many that are made of wood and sadly this house was. Luckily they were able to put it before other houses caught but the house burnt to the ground along with everything in it. Fortunately no people were injured and no one was home, but as we later found out the house was occupied by a mother and her four children, three of whom are students at our school. To our knowledge no one has come to inspect and there are no government programs to help the family.

After the fire when we finally got back to the house, the youngest girl, Honorine, told us she had to go out to the morge to support two of her classmates who had lost their parents only this past weekend. Her tone was very matter of fact and neither her nor her friends knew what they had died of. It was only more dreadful news!

However, life goes on. My mother and I went to get something to eat down the street and then picked up a cake from the bakery which we had ordered the day before. When we got back to the house everyone sang Happy Birthday and despite the events of the day the air was cheery and festive! Everyone but my mother and I enjoyed the cake as it was the weirdest taste ad consistency. It only seems appropriate that I spent the rest of the night vomiting. Before I fell asleep my mom said, "Hayley I hope that all you birthdays will forever be 100% better than this one."

Well it has been a crazy couple of days! But it seems that each day here brings it's own challenges. We have decided that we will continue to write our stories and experiences on the blog, but that people should keep in mind just that... that these are just our experiences and one point of view. We also will be more careful in using the names of organizations and individuals. We apologize to LUKMEF a wonderful organization who obviously does great things for the community here. We have always thought highly of them and their volunteers. Again we are writing about our experiences and responses. However in regards to a particular member we will just have to agree to disagree. The German Clinic as well is a fine establishment and we want the best for all of them and of course the people of Limbe (otherwise why would be here). Also we have been somewhat naive to the fact that so many people were reading this!

So we will pick up where we left off. On Saturday we climbed Mt Cameroon. We met our guide, Walters, whom was recommneded to us by the Peace Corp. volunteer in Buea which is just a short bus ride from Limbe. Walters is a 20 year old Cameroonian and has been super nice and helpful to us. He goes to high school but also works in his spare time as a mountain guide. It takes two days to reach the top and he has done it 30 times! (you camp overnight). Now you are probably wondering how we did this and the answer is we didn't. We went about 1/3 of the way up. We hiked up for 4 hours and down for 2 and we never even made it out of th forest and into the Savanah, but still it was a beautiful trip. Walters told us about a friend he has who runs an orphange. She is young Dutch woman and often takes in volunteers to work with the children. He suggested me meet her and so we did! We were at first preparing ourselves for what we thogught would be heartbreaking as neither of us have actually been to an orphanage, but it was actually one of the best times we have had so far. There are nine children total so to us (especially for my mother) it was more like a family. The house was so nice too. It was big and airy and all the rooms were painted in vibrant colors. Mom said, "It looks like the Brady Bunch" when she saw the girls bedroom. The kids were adorable and very well behaved. The woman who runs it has really done an amazing job. She had the house built and they even grow their own vegetables and fruits. She also has to collect water when it rains, which it did last night, because their plumbing doens't always work (bad plumber). They have a dog and two cats which they actualy treat like pets. Walters goes there on weekends to help with maintaince around the grounds. Many of the orphans came from the Francophone area of Cameroon so she is loking for someone to help her teach them English beside what they are learning in school (they are a little behind in their English). Walters is a very nice kid. His dream is to finish high school this June and then move to the United States to join the marines. He has told us that once he is a marine for two years he will become a citizen.