March '07 - The hike from Hell

Seems like a while since I wrote you all an update, certainly lots of things have happened here and I hope to hear from some of you in return, whatever has been happening in your neck of the woods.

Since last time, I had just three weeks working after my return from the wedding, then my friend Avril arrived from the UK for a 2-week action packed visit to Cameroon – well that was the plan at least.

The summary could be “started well, went downhill, literally and figuratively pretty quickly”. To explain – we spent the first couple of days in and around Douala, which was fine, although the climate there is grim, very humid. We then set off to climb Mount Cameroon – at just over 4000m about the third highest (I think) in Africa. As we are both pretty fit (well Avril is, I thought I was) and had done lots of similar things before – Avril the Inca Trail, me Kilimanjaro for example – no problem - we thought! We set off to do the up and down in 2 days, which included a 3am start on Day 2, getting us to the summit around 10am I think – we eventually got to the bottom about 5pm – I was the problem – I have never, ever felt so knackered and had to stop every few minutes to rest – what an old plonker! I nearly had to be carried off by one of the porters (which he has done before he informed me, no doubt in an attempt to cheer me up) and upon eventually getting to a bar, after my first sip of refreshing grapefruit juice I promptly threw up – complete humiliation! All I can say in my defence is that the terrain was incredibly rough, I got altitude sickness this time, and I have been desk bound for the past six months – but it was a very scary experience in reality though I can just about laugh about it now!

In an attempt to speed recover from the Cameroon catastrophe, we then headed the next day to Kribi, with the plan of staying a couple of days, then going onto the rainforest at Campo, then up to Bafoussam to show Avril where I am living and enjoy the Women’s Day celebrations (which are a big thing here in Cameroon). Wrong again – Avril picked up a really bad case of travellers tum and we basically spent the rest of the holiday lying around the pool in our hotel (see above) at Kribi, which was conveniently near a loo! As neither of us had planned for this sort of inactivity, it all got a little tetchy at times and we ended the fortnight bored, burnt and bad tempered! We did manage a river trip to see some Baka pygmies (not sure what the PC term is here – short stature people perhaps?) but that was about it, then back to Douala for the flight home. Avril is sure she will not be back, and I do not blame her, it was a pretty grim fortnight in places. One bright note – I introduced Avril to chess which she is clearly a natural at, so that was good fun.

And so for me, last weekend back here to Bafoussam and the project. Things are going well in parts, but it is still painfully slow and I am again reconsidering what I might be able to achieve over the 2 year period. Its not that the folk here are not competent, its just that they are way too busy with the day job of running a busy bank totally manually and getting them to devote time to testing and implementing a whole new system is proving very very difficult. Not helping either is the system supplier, who surprise, surprise is taking longer to make the changes than they originally estimated. My ability to be patient continues to improve however and I have to keep in mind the constant background of illness and family problems that afflict people here. My boss was off for 2 weeks with malaria for example, my IT technician suffers fairly constant bouts of severe headaches which basically stop him in his tracks for hours at a time – so I need to take all that into account and curb my frustration with what I see as minimal work being done at times.

Culturally the experience continues to be very interesting; the mix of the old and the new continues to surprise me. For example – the last few weeks, as the end of the dry season approaches, have been ones where a number of traditional ceremonies take place. Just the other day I was surrounded by a bunch of teenage boys, dressed in not very much, plastered in a mixture of mud and engine oil, carrying large antlers! This was an initiation ceremony of some sort apparently. Another example - the Monday morning prayer meeting at work was led this week by one of the workers who is into some “Christian” cult or other, and proceeded to do the whole speaking in tongues, writhing around on the floor, screaming at the top of his voice thing – in his day job he is the marketing manager! It was not like this at Lloyds TSB!

Gone on far too long as usual, as ever, welcome any news, views from home – Chelsea for the Cups!

A bientot