Whew! I started writing this in February but (as of this writing) it’s already May and I still haven’t finished it. I started a few months after the last post because I still had things I wanted to say about our Middle East trip, and quickly wrote up a series of vignettes about our trip, […]
This is a long-overdue travel report from our time in the Middle East, which happened in July and I have put off writing about until just now. Some backstory is required first. You should know by now that our girl and queen of the photobombs Yaya met an Israeli boy after her service. When you […]
I was briefly in Europe for FOSDEM and to see some of my French coworkers. We flew into Charles de Gaulle and drove up to Brussels, where FOSDEM is, and then drove back for a few days in Paris. I’m on the flight back now. I’ve been working now for Mozilla for 9 or 10 […]
Here I am now in Yaoundé, at the case for what is probably the last time. I’ve spent the entire week juggling administrivia and Boris, who helped me down from post, and although I haven’t learned any Czech, written the last one or two installments of the fiction, found former Volunteer of my village Dinah […]
[Edit: the original title of this post was Sportif, which was also used on 2011 November 24, so I changed it to Habits, which means "clothes", or, in Anglophone, "dresses". Neither title really has anything to do with the text of this entry, just the pictures at the end..] Today I’m in the Baffice (pet […]
Some words are really difficult to translate into French (lately I’ve been thinking about "home", "acknowledge"/"acknowledgment", "mind", and even "get"), and at first "grateful"/"gratitude" gave me a hard time too. But if you open your trusty M-W French-English dictionary, issued by Organization Cameroon Headquarters in Yaoundé, to page 534, you’ll see that "grateful" is translated […]
As promised, here are some pictures of the telecentre. You can see it’s not a big place, just the four computers. Still, they’re pretty well-equipped — scanner, photocopier, printer, and UPSes for each machine. The girl in the shiny jacket is Cecile, she’s the "secretary" and somewhat-manager of the place. Like most people who know […]
After we got back was the Books for Cameroon ceremony, which I mostly avoided, playing gopher and otherwise trying to try to defray the amount of hassle Cristina was no-doubt going through. Pre-party. The beneficiaries. My proviseur is bottom-middle, looking directly into the camera. This is my neighbor, who makes wooden food (and apparently beer). […]
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 […]
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 […]