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!!!