The Books for Cameroon sorting got pretty massive, pretty fast, and though Spring Break started, I hardly even noticed — I was still in the lab every day that I wasn’t helping to sort. It got kinda tense because time was running out: Cristina and I had COS Conference, and the ceremony of giving of […]
Back when I was putting games on the computers in my lab, I noticed that I had a bunch of French SNES games amongst my collection. Oddly, the kids don’t seem too interested in them; most of them are RPGs and those require a greater commitment of attention and time than they’re willing to make. […]
The arm-bands are nice and all but the first sign I saw of things changing on Zhen was militias drilling. It was the second-most surprising thing that happened that day. The first-most surprising was that Morgan called. I was so stunned that for a second I answered the phone. "What’s up?" I asked. She was […]
This is the blog post I wanted to write two or three weeks ago, when I was still hip-deep in it, but it got pushed to the side. My postmate Cristina inherited this Books For Cameroon project from our predecessor, a lady named Wendy. Cristina recently succeeded in bringing a French bookstorm to Cameroon. Over […]
St. Patty’s Day is one of those holidays that we celebrate a lot because it reminds us that we’re Americans. We gathered at Yaya’s/Eric’s posts to play frisbee and drink. A lot could be said about this party but won’t be. A picture is worth a thousand words. I had a good time but I […]
[I’ve been "studying French" for two years and I still don’t know the word for "coincidence", for what it’s worth. I’m not even sure about "destiny", which seems to be either destin or destinée..] I joined the Church because of a coincidence. Most of us do, of course. I guess with the benefit of hindsight, […]
Club Informatique and I have been starting work on constructing our local-area network (réseau local) with the materials we got from the préstataire a month or two ago. First, I "hired"/invited a technician from Aladji Informatique to come give a talk about how to sertir (we’d say "crimp") an Ethernet cable. That was Wednesday. It’s […]
Yaya found this amazing research paper on the different impacts of British versus French colonial policy, which she produced to support my assertion that Anglophone Cameroonians are just better in general than Francophone Cameroonians (more polite or respectful, more engaging, or just better people). It’s been sitting on my hard drive for a couple weeks, […]
You may have a hard time believing that her parents really named her Bulimia, but most Zhenae don’t believe that your parents really named you a word that translates as "cloaca", so it’s perfectly plausible that she be a volunteer here, in this same village as me. We are drinking for the whole usual litany […]
It is the end of a Monday and I am just getting out of 2e, nominally 13h50-14h40 but typically 13h50 until I can’t cope any more or all the students are gone. Today that hour arrived at 16h, which is kind of early. I closed the lab on the last student after I got tired […]