A Birthday in Cameroon
on The Road Less Travelled (Cameroon), 21/Jan/2010 19:44, 34 days ago
Today is my birthday, I am 28 years old. I didn’t have big plans for today given that usually birthdays are celebrated in Cameroon by going out for drinks/food with your friends and colleagues and then the birthday person pays for everyone. Given I am living on a volunteer allowance I decided to avoid taking everyone I know out for a meal. SoI really only told Greg and Caroline that it was my birthday. This is how I spent my day – WARNING don’t have high expectations for parties and celebrations, even though this chronicles my birthday it is quite reflective of a normal day for me.Me at my desk at home trying to get the internet to work. Notice the lovely birthday card from my parents.I woke up around 6:15am hoping to log on to the internet to be able to chat with my family before they went to sleep in Canada. However to my dismay I found that all the internet networks were down, so sadly I could not chat to my family. The network was down all day until 1pm which made work and checking email difficult for half the day. So to fill my morning I did some yoga, ate some oatmeal with cinnamon and got my garbage and laundry ready for my cleaning lady.Rolande, my cleaning lady - she is great!At 8am my cleaning lady arrived and started on my laundry. It is nice to have her come and do the laundry since it must be done by hand. It usually takes her an hour to do my weekly laundry. If I were to do it it would take a lot longer though because I am not as skilled as her. She uses washing powder and a bar of Cameroonian laundry soap to scrub the clothes. Then it all hangs on the lines I put up in my second bedroom which is now my laundry drying room. Today after she was done the laundry she also washed my floors and took out my garbage which was nice.I got a call in the morning from the VSO office that a package had arrived for me. So given the internet was down I went to the VSO office in hopes that their satellite internet would be working, it wasn’t, but I was able to pick up the parcel. It was a lovely box of surprises from my friends in Ottawa. I couldn’t believe it arrived on my birthday what perfect timing (I think they were aiming for Christmas though... ).Hard at work.I worked at my office in the afternoon. I had a few training sessions with my colleagues. I talked to Ayouba about writing feasibility reports and I worked with Sandrine on financial management techniques. I prepared a bit for the strategic planning meeting we are having on Saturday. Saturday meetings are not uncommon here especially for ACDES since many of my colleagues have other paying jobs during the week and find it difficult to make it to weekday meetings.Abdoublaye and I on the tennis courtI had a tennis lesson in the afternoon with my instructor Abdoulaye. He is ranked 4th in Cameroon (although he didn’t compete this year or last year because of lack of funds and need to bribe to place). I try to play tennis 3 times a week, usually a lesson twice and week and then a game with a friend once a week. I love the game and I have been improving. Despite my improvements I have a long way to go, sadly,Abdoulaye’s little 8 year old brother can beat me every time we play against each other. It goes to show where training starting from a young age can bring you.. I was once told by a tennis pro in Bermuda that had my parents enrolled me in more intensive tennis training as a child I could have become a tennis pro.Birthday dinner with CarolineAfter tennis, I headed back to my side of town and went to Caroline’s house for dinner. We made the tastiest Plantain and Corn soup (a recipe we got thanks to Chantal) for my birthday dinner. It was absolutely wonderfully delicious. For dessert we had fresh pineapple. Caroline also had a lovely card painted by a local artist for me as well as a homemade pin cushion.Plantain and corn soupOverall the day was not excessively different from most days here, but the package arrival and the pin cushions were nice little surprises.