Pigroast

The view from our friend's house in the northwest: a totally different climate than the extreme north!

Pulling pork at the pigroast.

I left post to travel down to Yaounde for midservice training. We stopped at my friend’s post in the northwest region for a visit and a pigroast. He lives in the Anglophone section of Cameroon so it kept taking me by surprise when people were talking to me in English, or Pidgin English. Some things are easy like they say “chop” for food and “snap me” for take a picture, but sometimes it sounds like a completely different language. The pigroast was a lot of fun though and it was cool to see some more of the country/ meet some farther away volunteers.

Now I’ve been in Yaounde since Monday. Even though it’s called “training” it’s really just a series of medical check-ups and appointments with administration to make sure that everything is on track. I went to the dentist, still have no cavities which is kind of a mystery considering how much sugar is added to unsuspecting dishes like vegetables here. There’s actually a lot of free time to catch up with other volunteers who we haven’t seen in a while and do some “big city” things like eat out at a pizza restaurant, delicious, and of course return to the Hilton. (Where apparently I arrived about a half an hour too late to see the star of the Cameroonian football team, Eto’o, who was also there…. Lesson learned: you get what you deserve for arriving late to happy hour!)

Other things in Yaounde have also been overwhelming: like using the washing machine at the Peace Corps house. I think it is pretty practical common sense that when you have separate washing machine and dryer units placed side by side, you would obviously put the washing machine on the left and the dryer on the right…. Anyways I clearly have not used a washing machine since December… and even then I probably wasn’t actually doing a load by myself since there were so many of us at the house… anyways, this time I managed to put all of my clothes and the soap into the dryer and called over a friend to help me start the water before realizing that this was in fact the dryer. And then I felt very silly since obviously they have completely different doors etc. and I had to scoop out all the soap and put it into the washer, but I did finally end up with clean clothes which was an overall upgrade.