Monday, October 27, 2003

This is so exciting ! I can’t believe I’m writing this on our new computer ! Its hard for me to explain what a huge deal this is. Maybe if I put it in dollars... The entire budget for the entire year for the cooperative is about $5000. The sole employee makes about $70 per month, and rent and electricity is donated by the State. The single largest expense each year is Provisions for Bad Debts which is budgeted at around $800. This computer with printer and scanner- a last minute decision- and UPS to guard against frequent brown/black-outs cost about $1200- a quarter of the entire year’s budget! Needless to say we had to get special permission to buy it. The President, being a palm oil plantation owner and not the least bit technically inclined pushed the Board of Directors to decide that the purchase of a computer for the cooperative was indeed a decision for the entire membership. A special meeting was convened on a Saturday two weeks ago and the plan was presented. I had done, with some help of the manager, a cost-benefit analysis to show that the computer would pay for itself in less than one year. They approved it and finally after some additional research and talking to my friend, Gabriel who runs the largest supermarket/general commerce store in town, the President and I went to Douala on Tuesday morning to close the deal. We took the bus up and met with our regional auditor, Mr. Wifoke, who accompanied us. We took his pickup, found the store I had been to almost a month beforehand when doing research, and went upstairs to discuss the deal in private with the owner. Mr. Khodor is a fairly young Lebanese muslim- I’m not sure why, but there’s a sizeable lebanese population in Douala- and was very generous in giving our small cooperative a very good price, and significant reductions from the list prices. As a thank you gift for coming with us- and explaining to the owner the finer points of micro-credit banking in Cameroon, we bought him a new mouse with scroll- something he’s been wanting. To celebrate our purchase, and the fact that the computer was going to be delivered the next day to our door for free!, we went across the street where the President had chinese food for the first time- curry shrimp and ginger beef- yum!

I’ve spent the last couple of days developing some templates in Word and Excel as well as beginning the development of the database I designed to run the cooperative. My favorite incident thus far was yesterday when I put together a schedule of payments for credits of varying lengths and interest rates with equal payments each month. This is something that he calculates anew for each customer, and has been known to make minor mistakes and takes him about ten minutes. Now, we’re down to 30 seconds. He stared at it for a long time and made me explain the formulas over and over. He’s happy now, and has already begun to fully embrace the computer’s capabilities.

Other great news, I found a new house and will hopefully be moving in the next couple of weeks- I will likely be paying for two houses for the month of November, but it’ll be worth it. A little background, and Mom, please don’t worry... I’ve been having a bunch of little problems in and around my house. First of all, the house is simply too big for one person. Its a big white house on a hill and overlooks the surrounding, much smaller houses containing large families. Others seem to feel the same way at times. I have been asked for money several times by different neighbors in a “I’m hungry” kind-of-way. Additionally, I still have not gotten used to the noise and routinely wake up at 5:30am thinking that the neighbor unlocking his door is actually my door- his door and mine are about equidistant from my bed. Also, I had two incidences where one or more of the mischevious teens tried to open my lock in the middle of the night, but failed- when I’m inside, each door has a lock and at least two bolts, so its very hard to get in. And lastly, someone somehow got into my room and took my portable CD player- I’m very sad about that one. I’ve deduced that it must have been the guy who came to fix my door after the lock was broken the first time, but its not to my benefit to accuse him since he’s a member of the cooperative and generally looked upon as an honest, hard-working man in the community. The only other choice is my housekeeper, who, when I told her about it, became very upset that I would even consider that it was her, and said it would be stupid for her to take something so soon after starting work. She does really good work, so I reluctantly believe her and told her that if anything else goes missing, she’s history.

Anyway, the new house is within the grounds of the Aluminum factory in town where a number of French families live currently. The house has a yard and is air-conditioned! There is also a guard 24 hours a day and only lets in employees and approved visitors. All of this for the same price I’m paying now. The only catch is that in two weeks, I will begin teaching english after work for four hours a week to little kids at the Alucam-sponsored school. I figure that should put a fun mix into my work, so I agreed.

As a follow-up to the story about the guy who cornered me in the bar demanding a loan... the next week, he came in and the manager and I went out to see his house. It seems that he needed money for aluminum sheeting for the roof of his “retirement house” in a far quartier of Edea. When we got back, we looked at his situation and, after some haggling back and forth, he got his loan of a little over $1000. Needless to say he was frustrated but in the end pleased with the result.

Other things have happened- connecting with a world-studies teacher in Charlotte through the Peace Corps World-Wise Schools program, a trip to Cameroon’s Ocktoberfest festivities complete with brautwurst, saurkraut and a German band, a night out at a Douala nightclub with Gabriel, and the return of Hortense, but this is already quite lengthy. I’ll just finish with a quick book report. I finished James Clavell’s “Tai-Pan” and although the written-in accents of British and Portuguese sailors was a bit tough at first, the story was fast-paced and interesting, and I enjoyed the historical aspect of the creation of Hong Kong as a British trading outpost. Recommended. I also finished William Goldman’s “The Princess Bride”. Yes, its THAT Princess Bride. The book was written ten years before the movie, so I figured it should be good, and it was. It was at least as funny as the movie, and there were passages which much better explained some of the events in the movie that I have always thought were a bit incongruous. A very quick and enjoyable read. Two-thumbs up. Next up: “Picture of Dorian Grey” by Oscar Wilde.

A mail update: since moving and changing mailing addresses, regular airmail takes only about 9 days to get to me with packages only slightly slower. I LOVE packages (recent faves included mac&cheese, m&ms and US Magazine!), but if you send one, please seal it very well. Two packages I received recently had been “accidentally” opened, although I think all the contents made it more or less intact.

Finally, since I will now be prewriting the blog updates, I want to start a series of observations/thoughts on various topics. So, if you’d like to send suggestions, things you’d like to know about here, send them to: pbine@yahoo.com

Thursday, October 23, 2003

I'm alive! Sorry for the long absence, but things have been nuts around here. Plus the fact that every time I started to go to the cyber cafe either sunspots were blocking the satellite reception or the power was out (living in Africa, thats a regular occurence). I do have good news though, my cooperative finally agreed to and bought a new computer! So, I will be prewriting my posts from now on, which should mean higher quality reading henceforth. This will start on Sunday when I visit the cybercafe in Kribi- yes its a beach weekend folks! Really folks, life is hard here, but people don't seem to believe me...

Sunday, October 05, 2003

I'm in Douala at the moment and had a few minutes left on my credit, so here's another update. I'm still trying to make up for the several weeks when I wasn't able to write anything.

My friend, Isabelle, who is based in the village of Melong near the city on Nkongsamba, made it down on Friday afternoon to visit and see the town. Isabelle is one of my friends that I had previously done a lot of traveling with, including my trips to Bamenda and Foumbot. Anyway, we had a really nice afternoon and evening, except for when we went to a bar to have a drink and one of the members of the cooperative was there. He's been very upset for the last week or two because he applied for a loan and was denied because he wanted too big of a loan with no collateral. So he caught me in the bar, after I had already sat down and ordered a drink, and started telling me that if I couldn't give him the loan then he was going to take all of his money out of the cooperative and bank somewhere else. I really don't know the details of his file, but I did tell him that if he came down on Monday morning, I would look at his file and discuss it with him further. The funny part was that he lied to me and said that the President of the Board had told him that I was the one who made all the decisions and that not only was I in charge, but I was managing some amount of money that the American government had given to the cooperative. Not only would the President never say such a thing, its so far from the truth, that he obviously made it up all by himself. Monday should be fun.

Saturday morning, we got up and walked to Akbar's place, a great place for omlettes, on our way to the bus stop to go to Douala for the day. After eating, my friend Gabriel just happened to be out in the road and saw us- not that I'm that hard to spot and identify, mind you. He offered to have his driver for the day take us up to Douala and drop us off, so we got a ride in a brand new Toyota Land Cruiser! Well, that was only the start of the extravagances for the day. We met with Isabelle's friend from DC who lives here now and works for the american company, AES, which owns all the hydroelectric power plants here in Cameroon. She lives with her boyfriend, a brit, who works for the company expanding the cell phone network here. Needless to say, when we got to their apartment, it was a whole new world. Their deck overlooks the port and river Wouri, and has a separate hot water heater for each of the three bathrooms and kitchen. They even had a washer and dryer, which is very rare here- you can hire a woman to wash your clothes by hand cheaper than buying the machines. Anyway, they wanted to go to the "club" for the day, which, having no other plans, I was happy to go along. When we got there, it was just like Michael Jackson's Neverland- or as close as it can get here. The man who owns one of the largest breweries here built this huge complex which almost no one uses! It has a grass soccer field, large swimming pool, go-kart track- which we tried and had great fun, and it was several times faster than anything in Myrtle Beach and thus probably somewhat dangerous. There's also a carnival-type section with electric bumper cars, several other carnival type rides, an electric bronco, and a video game hall. All of this was staffed and powered up, but there was no one there but us! We had a really great time though, just the four of us, plus two of their british friends.

After, we had a fabulous steak dinner at a restaurant here, and I ended up staying the night. Not a typical Peace Corps experience, but that's part of the fun!!!

Thursday, October 02, 2003

There is one interesting story that I forgot to include in my last post- which was really completeed on the 30th of September, and begun on the date of the post...

My friend from training, Kelly, is a 33 year old single but strangely engaged woman from Denver. I say strangely because I'm not entirely sure how someone who's engaged could up and join the Peace Corps for two years...
She's a nice woman, but occasionally a little emotionally erratic. So, several weeks ago, I received a text message- thats how most of the volunteers communicate with each other here since calls are so expensive- that said "I'm about two seconds from going home, please help". Well, of course, I returned the text with a 'what's wrong?'. The response I got back was "I can't stop crying. I can't get anything done right and am out of money. I have pissed off 3 of 5 coworkerss and haven't even started work yet. I feel completely worthless". Well, at that, I felt a call was necessary to figure out what was going on, and if I needed to go and try to help sort things out- she was probably closer to me than just about anyone else within a day's drive of her.

I finally decided that I needed to go to her post of Bafia, which had been previously labeled the "seventh ring of hell" by a volunteer who's been here for a while. After riding on two buses and two taxis, I finally arrived six hours after leaving Edea. She was quite happy to see me, needless to say. The basis of the problem was that she had given money to people to do work for her new house before the work was completed. In this country, that's inviting trouble, especially for a single white woman. I spent almost three days there, but finally was able to work out some of the problems and convince her to just forget about the money for now. She has stayed, and today told me that she is enjoying work. I have to admit though, that the people of Bafia are not nearly as kind as most other places, and the heat is a bit intense- but without the humidity of Edea!

I neglected to give the 'book update' in the last post. I have completed George Orwell's "Coming up for Air", which was interesting from a historical point of view, but not all that great of a novel, I didn't think. I'm now knee deep in James Clavell's "Tai-Pan". It was a little rough at the start, mostly because of character accents, but I'm really getting into it now, and HAVE to see the movie at some point.

My friend Isabelle is coming down from her small town of Melong to visit tomorrow, which should be great fun! I love having visitors!

An update on Gabriel- I finally met his girlfriend the other night. She seems very nice and yesterday made a very nice lunch for the two of us. I think this may be one of those relationships that thrives on stress and hightened emotions. Supposedly we're all going to a nightclub in Douala on Saturday night, so I should be able to make a better analysis then.