Solange asked me to accompany her to the Department of Social Affairs (DSA) this week, which oversees the orphanage. We were walking through the parking lot and to both the left and right there were copy machines set up. If you needed a copy of something, you just walked up and asked the person behind the machine to make you a copy or copies of whatever it was that you needed. Of course, the copy machines all looked as if they were from the 80s and probably were that old.
When Solange and I walked into the DSA building, the first thing I saw was an old bookshelf with piles of documents on them. I couldn’t help but wonder what the documents were and if there was such a thing as archiving or even filing at the department. When we walked into the waiting area, a lady was sitting at a clear desk with her cell phone in front of her and nothing else. No computer, no phone, no fax machine, no nothing! When we were asked to go back to Mercie’s office, she also did not have a computer and had piles of documents on her desk. How in the world do those people function without computers, archives or any type of organization whatsoever?!
Mercie was super nice and spoke both French and English. She was very interested in me and asked all sorts of questions. She even offered to show me the town where she was from just so that I could get a different perspective on the culture that she grew up in. I was extremely pleased to be able to speak with someone in fluent English and ask her questions about where I could find school supplies for the children, water filtration systems, etc.
Afterward, Solange and I returned to the orphanage where Marie was working, and she had a male friend visiting her. His name was Antoine, and we spoke in both French and English. We talked for a long time, and I learned that he is very interested in green energy and finding a way to create computers to run on solar energy. With my masters focus on sustainable development, we instantly became friends. He told me that it is his dream to come to the U.S. and compete against the computer engineers in Silicon Valley. One of the funniest things that I learned from Antoine is that he assumed that all Americans had guns. I burst out laughing when he told me this and proceeded to tell him that if every American had a gun, then I’d probably never leave my house-lol.
Antoine told me that he had never felt a white woman’s hair and asked if he could touch my hair. Afterward, I was told that it felt like a lion’s mane and a zebra’s tail-ouch! I told him that normally my hair is soft, but due to the hard water here in Africa and it being blown in the wind that my hair stays quite frizzy and coarse here. I’m not sure if he believed me or not though-lol.
After Antoine left, some of the kids asked to see my pictures on Facebook. They liked my house and particularly liked my skydiving pictures. They were amazed that I jumped out of an airplane at 17,000 feet.
The other day I stopped by Patrice’s house to check my e-mail. Patrice is a good friend of Jeromie’s, and he has a small room in his mother’s home set up for public internet use. I’d say that he is doing rather well with his business because he just had a window air conditioning unit installed in his room-lol. Patrice cracks me up when he laughs because he laughs EXACTLY like Eddy Murphy. He is supposedly working on getting a loaner laptop for me to work on, but that has not yet happened (it was requested over a week ago). Almost daily I am over at his business harassing him to hurry it up.
Random Things
One of the most random things I see almost daily during the week are these three white goats. When riding in a taxi, there is a particular patch of land that these goats graze on in a very busy area and they are almost always there. No idea who they belong to (shocker), but I do feel sorry for them as I wish I could buy a bale of hay for them to get some proper nutrition.
Speaking of random animals, the goats made me think of a horse that I saw grazing on the side of the road last weekend on the way to Mt. Cameroon. It was not fenced in or tied up-nothing. I wondered if it had escaped from a pasture or if it was another one of the many roaming animals of another irresponsible animal owner…
I have seen a few people here in wheelchairs that one would see in the U.S., but I have seen a few people in wheelchairs with 3 wheels. They are very low to the ground and the front has a bicycle chain with handles on the sides to rotate the bicycle chain. It is very interesting to see, and one must be pretty physically fit in the upper half of their body to be able to maintain the rotating. Sometimes I see another person behind those in a 3 wheeled wheelchair, but I haven’t been able to see exactly what the person is doing. My guess is that they might be helping to steer.
I’ve had 3 taxi drivers ask me for my phone number this week, one claiming that he loved me repeatedly, and another driver asking if he could be my Cameroonian boyfriend. While standing at a very busy intersection with Solange, I had a guy on a motorbike chatting a way at me, but I was ignoring him. As I crossed the street, he yelled out, “I love you.” I cracked up laughing when I heard it, and I think he was rather pleased that he got some sort of reaction out of me.
Random Wishes
- I wish for my friends and family members to donate enough money for me to be able to buy a water treatment system for the orphanage..
- I wish to find affordable water treatment systems.
- If I never saw an ant again, I would be fine with it. I get so tired of sitting somewhere and feeling a tiny ant crawling on my arm or seeing them crawl on my plate, etc. They are everywhere, and I live on the third floor!
- I wish Akobe would not breast feed at the kitchen table!
- I wish to never sit and sweat ever again!
- I wish Paypal could be set up here in Cameroon.
- I wish I had my laptop back.
- I wish I didn’t have such a noisy roommate!
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