Cameroon

Well, I haven't updated on Isaac and myself's Cameroon travels as originally planned, but I'll try to fix that a bit. To catch you up to speed...

As most of you know we were in the "Extreme North" (one of their regions) of the country along with a group from the Orthodox Christian Mission center. Metropolitan Gregorious, the Orthodox bishop of Cameroon, Chad, Central African Republic, and a few other countries has really done a lot of amazing work here in Cameroon since he got here only 3 years ago. Most of the work that he is doing is in the Extreme North, where he has built many churches, ordained clergy, built schools, wells, and medical clinics, amongst many other things.

The original purpose of our group's trip here was to help in the construction of a large barn that the Orthodox community in Tchatibali will use to raise cattle as an income source for the church. We didn't end up helping a whole lot with the construction (they had a lot of local workers), but we did have an incredible time seeing the area, visiting many churches, and getting to know the people. Needless to say, I could write for hours about that experience, but I won't because I only have 15 minutes left on this computer. To see some pictures that our fellow teammate, Kelsey Lourie, took, you can go to:
http://www2.snapfish.com/share/p=56431194079956806/l=318212195/g=110513022/cobrandOid=1000001/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB

Hopefully that will work.

Anyway, since the team flew home a couple of weeks ago, Isaac and I have been traveling together to see and experience some other parts of the country. I'll try to get you a bit up to speed.

We 1st took a bus from Yaounde to Douala, the got a ride with a friend of one of the priest here to Limbe, a nice town on the ocean at the base of towering, volcanic Mt. Cameroon. We spent a few days in Limbe, relaxing some but mostly trying to get our bearings and figure out how things work here in Cameroon. We visited the Botanic Garden ("the relic of a once great botanic garden") complete with empty fountains, broken down playground equipment, and crumbling greenhouse. As the guidebook put it, "a relaxing way to spend an afternoon". The Limbe Wildlife Center was better, with lots of good displays of local primates, including one friendly chimpanzee who expertly hucked a large, softball-sized rock over the fence at us. Luckily, we dodged it. In retrospect it would have been fun to have caught it and thrown it back over, but I'm sure the keepers wouldn't have appreciated that. We also spent an afternoon trekking our way to one of the local beaches outside of town.

One of the most interesting experiences was sitting down for dinner at an outside grill, being overcharged immensely, and being talked up by our new "friends", brothers Santana and Anderson. They are in the palm oil business, their father has died, and are trying to figure how they can export palm oil to the U.S. We had to regretfully inform them that we knew nothing about the palm oil business. So, if anyone needs tons and tons of Cameroonian palm oil for cheap, let me know. I have Anderson's cell phone number. Oh, yeah, they also wanted to party with us, take us to the beach, and acquire cheap prostitutes for us. Maybe another time, guys.

Umm, so my time is about to run out on this computer, so I'll post more later about climbing Mt. Cameroon, getting swindled in Kumba, crazy bus rides where we had to help hold the bus upright, and our current situation in Bamenda. The computer next to me right now has an email with a monkey exporting scam to Mexico. Ahh, Cameroon.

Peter