I realize that its been quite a while since I updated the blog. I have been quite busy, and its taken me a couple of failed trips to the internet café in Edéa to realize that after lowering the prices, they also disabled all of the disk drives, thus eliminating my upload capability! Needless to say, I'm not happy about it. I am continuing to write my blog in its somewhat extended format, however, and will upload it when I visit places that have that capability. That likely means that I'll update this less frequently, but when I do, I'll try to upload all the updates so that each posting will probably be rather lengthy. I know this isn't optimal, but I think its better than sitting here in the hot, crowded internet place trying to be witty and thorough at the same time. Its not as easy as it looks...

I will probably be in Yaoundé in a week and upload everything then. I did have a very nice Christmas with about 15 of my friends here in Nkongsamba. We ate, drank, were merry, and even had a makeshift Christmas tree made of large cedar branches that some kids cut down for us with blinking lights from the Chinese store. I hope that each of you had a wonderful holiday and best wishes for a happy 2004!