Merry Christmas Eve’s Eve,

So I didn’t really do a whole lot of Peace Corps work this week, but I definitely did stay busy running errands and visiting with people. I did start off the week with a visit to Banyo (bigger town about 4 hours up the road) to finish up all my protocol with the head government and military officials and now that’s finally done J The trip was pretty uneventful but the rides there and back were very entertaining. For those of you who know me well, you know that I used to suffer from a fairly severe case of nervous passenger syndrome (I blame all those years of driving with my father… love ya dad), but no longer! Public transportation in Cameroon has completely cured me of that, and I am convinced that there is not a driver or car left back in the states that I couldn’t handle now. So here’s an example to illustrate my point: the morning I left for Banyo we started off with 8 adults in a small 2-door Toyota hatchback of some sort and it was a tight squeeze. We had only been on the road for about 20 min when we stopped to pick up a family of 5. I kept thinking you’ve got to be kidding me, but no, no they were not kidding and 10 mins later I had reached a new personal best for public transport in Cameroon; 10 adults, 2 children, 3 chickens and all our luggage, all in the same 5 passenger 2 door compact car (but to be fair one of the guys was sitting on the hood of the car, so he wasn’t technically in the car as much as he was on the car). So there I was with 11 other people, and livestock, and a baby with mashed bananas all over it’s hands and face sitting on my lap, and I started to laugh. The guy next to me asked me why I was laughing so I looked at him and said, “What else can I really do in this situation?” We rode like this for about an hour on dirt roads.

On a different note we’ve had some changes to the compounds population. First the devil roster is gone. I can’t remember if I’ve written about him yet, but the short and long of it is there was a roster in the compound that I’m pretty sure was the spawn of Satan himself. He had it out for me. Every morning since I’ve been here he would stand right under my window and start crowing at 4:30. I’m a firm beliver that 4:30 is an ungodly hour no matter what species you are. That bird is the sole reason I had to resort to sleeping with earplugs and now I can’t sleep without them. Anyways I got the last laugh because we ate him last week, and let me tell you revenge never tasted so sweet (pun intended). With the roster gone I guess word got out that there was a livestock vacancy at my place and we quickly inherited a new four-legged friend, a baby sheep named Stacy (after the volunteer before Ralph). I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this yet, but my neighbor is a vet and apparently when I was gone at work a big heard of cattle and sheep came through and there was a newly born sheep that couldn’t keep up with the rest of them so he was given as a gift to Abdulihi. It is so so so cute, if it wasn’t so dirty and buggy I could totally get behind sheep becoming the new dogs, but alas it is dirty and buggy so I enjoy watching it form the porch. When Stacy the sheep got here it wouldn’t eat anything so Hahu and I cornered it, grabbed a hold and bottle feed it some Bouie (hot corn milk stuff) I don’t care for it much, but it did the trick and now it’s eating on it’s own.

Let’s see what other things did I do this week? Oh ya I decided to put in a little manual labor of my own, so I put on my boots, barrowed a shovel and started to dig a hole for compost. The ground was really hard because it’s the dry season and when my neighbor came over to see what the crazy white girl was doing she tried to convince me to wait and try again when the rains come. I really didn’t want to wait 4 months so pushed on and it paid off. After about an hour I had a textbook looking compost pile I even went and cut down some palm fronds to cover the hole with and keep the animals out. All my agro buddies would have been proud ;) About 5 hours after that, (I was still feeling pretty good about my little compost project) I went out back and caught Stacy the sheep eating the palm leaves. Oh well it was a valiant effort. Anybody got any ideas on how to keep my four-legged friend out of my compost?

Nothing else terribly important or funny happened for the rest of the week except that I did finally get to do a computer skype chat with my mom and dad. We got the video streaming up and running so that was pretty cool. Though I did have to explain to the other Cameroonians in the room why I was talking to my computer and how it was talking back to me, but once they understood they thought it was pretty cool too. One of my co-workers even got a chance to say hello to my mom and dad, and he’s been talking about it to anyone who will listen all week. At the moment I have forgotten my skype name, all it says is Kate Millman, but once I figure out what it is I’ll let you know.

I think that’s all for this week. I hope that everyone has a wonderful Christmas. See you next week, same time, same placeJ

Peace,

Kate

*** Devil Chicken and Stacy the Goat... I feel like i live on a farm :)