High time for a post

Well, it certainly has been a minute since my last post. (Sorry about the video not uploading, too. I'm not sure I know a way to do so, any advice is welcome.) Things have been going pretty smooth as of late. I survived another hot season and this one was a bit rougher than the last. I was in a three day conference in Garoua during March that literally made me sick to my stomach. After lunch one day I almost got up to excuse myself because I thought I was going to be sick. I've got a few ideas as to why it might have been worse. The first is that I remember last year feeling like "hey, this is really hot but I'm not dying or anything." I don't know that it was any hotter this year than last year, but I think remembering it as not too bad last year was my first mistake. Also, I spend a good chunk of time in the grand south last April, at the height of the heat. Furthermore, we had a huge dust storm that rolled through last year and cooled everything off for about 10-14 days. This dust storm was so big and strong that some cities in the Far North region actually had to shut down business for several days because people couldn't see 5 feet in front of themselves. Lastly, people said this year that the hot season started earlier than last year. That point is debatable, though, as I remember it being pretty hot early on last year, and I also remember people saying last year that the hot season was early. My guess is that the hot season never comes late enough.

At the end of April this year I went down to Yaounde for a couple days for a committee meeting and then went to the West and Northwest to hang out with a few volunteer friends. It was a pretty sweet gig as I got to visit my buddy Henry in his pretty small village in the West and then I went up to Kumbo in the Anglophone Northwest. Kumbo is a fantastic city of around 150,000 making it the Northwest's second city. While there I had a great time eating some good Soya (like shishkabob beef) drinking beer at a bar with a second story balcony, and then also eating of the best chickens of my life at a restaurant called "Casa Blanca." The owner, Casa, is a Nigerian who makes a special variety of the Northwestern dish Chicken Didji, which is like boiled Chicken that is then fried with carrots, onions, garlic, and Casa's secret ingredient: loads of curry. Fantastic meal. Patrick, Jake, and I also went to a pretty awesome death celebration for this former big man in the government. Loads of dancing, shot guns being fired off, palm wine, and traditional masks and clothing.

Due to some transportation problems, I also stopped in Bamenda, the capital of the Northwest, on the way back to Yaounde. Saw a bunch of the volunteers in the area then and also had the closest imitation I've had to a cafe latte since being in Denmark last summer.

Since I got back to the North, I've been mostly focusing on trying to get some projects off the ground, and also saying goodbye to a good number of the volunteers who are peaceing out. The projects I've been working on are getting some Soy/tofu cooking classes going, HIV/AIDS testing, a food security conference scheduled for the first weekend in August, and I was also trying to do some work treating malnutrition for a while. Though that last project kind of fell apart as the hospital in Ngong never received the necessary supplements to give to the pregnant women we found who were at risk of being malnourished.

I also got a pretty wicked case of Malaria a couple weeks ago. I was laid out for a good two days and still pretty tired and sore for a few more days after that. Luckily, it was only my first one here (the French guy in my town has had it like at least 10 times) and it will hopefully be my last. No need to worry now, though, as I'm all better. I even scored a goal in our weekly soccer game on Saturday. So, maybe, the malaria made me get into even better form....