September - October '07 - There and back!

Unbelievably, I am one month into on my second year here, the time is now beginning to pass very quickly, which is a good thing I suppose!

Work wise the project has been going faster since I last reported – we now are fully parallel / live on Savings, Fixed Deposits and Share accounts. The system has generally performed well, with only a couple of minor live errors surfacing – so far so good. The supplier has also almost finished delivery of the new function. This will allow us to complete the implementation with Current Account and Loans – I hope to start these next week, they are quite complicated and will take the rest of this year to complete, leaving me 8 months in 2008 to roll out to all the branches – that’s the plan, sounds quite easy really! We’ll see.

Also on the work front, I attended the second annual get together of all branch managers, which took place in the town of Nkongsamba, which is a 2-hour drive from where I am. This was a daylong conference, and I was quite pleased, as they had taken on board some of the recommendations I had made following the first conference I attended last year. Having said that, it still was pretty drawn out and could still be much improved – I will get to go to one more of these before I leave so will see if next years is even better. Oh to have had this much influence in Lloyds TSB!

The main thing I have been up to since last time has nothing to do with Cameroon – I went back to the UK for a couple of weeks to have a holiday and see family and friends – including of course my beautiful granddaughter Esme. I had a great time, managed to see all my family and quite a few friends. This meant travelling up to Scotland as well (it is beautiful; I had forgotten quite how lovely it is). I also crammed in a visit to Stamford Bridge (little did I know that would the Special Ones last league game in charge – disaster), plus lots and lots of eating out – several people back here have commented on my weight gain – cannot be possible in two weeks surely – but there again I did eat Italian (3 times) Indian, Chinese, Spanish, Turkish, British and sundry other meals so perhaps a little Cameroon rectitude is in order. Oh and I also stopped briefly in Zurich to catch up on my friend Michèle – that included another couple of spectacular meals, including a cheese based breakfast – fantastic.

Upon my return, the bank had kindly arranged a driver to collect me at Douala airport. What was not so good was that he turned up completely pissed, so much so that he could not find his way out of the car park, when we managed that he could not remember how to get to the hotel, luckily I could. Then the next morning he turned up to discover he had managed to lock the car with the keys inside. Fortunately, after an hour of us trying to break in, a local passer by did the trick in 2 seconds with a coat hanger (methinks he had done it before).

One amusing incident just before I left for the UK – I was attracted to a large crowd gathered around a chap selling what turned out to be local medicines. Although he was speaking in Pidgin, I got the drift quite quickly about the product – basically the local version of Viagra – as he was demonstrating its efficacy with the assistance of an enormous wooden penis – which became magically erect when he mimed taking the medicine! If he could have guaranteed the effect on size as well as performance then I might well have been interested -not that I particularly need any help of course :-)

One other big change when I got back – the bus station I have been living in the middle of for the past year had disappeared – the local council (bless ‘em) had decided it was causing too much congestion and moved it to the outskirts of town. Whilst overall a blessed reduction in noise and pollution, it does mean all the street traders have moved as well, so the local area is now rather quiet!

And so life goes on here, the rainy season is still with us (that’s since April) but it is getting warmer by the day, the end is in sight and I have my good friends Bob and Susan with their 2 boys due for a visit towards the end of October so life is fine.

Hope this finds you well, hear your news soon I trust

Cheers

Duncan

Ps “Necks of Kings” – the correct answer was “next of kin” – the prize was won by Polly Rastall, who kindly suggested I donate it to a charity here, which I will do.