Hey
As you can see from the pictures, there has been yet another day of marching and celebrating here in Cameroon - the local folk certainly love these occasions. This one was in aid of May Day – with the particular theme of promoting health and safety in the workplace, and reducing death at work. I have not seen any statistics on this but it would not be a surprise if these were on the high side as in general life is treated cheaply in this part of the world – but they are trying to improve things.
As this day is also seen as a good way of promoting the company, the decision was taken that we would all be kitted out in the splendiferous garments you see!
The cloth for this cost 3,000,000 Fcfa (about £3,000 / $6,000), which RIC paid for. The workers then had to pay for their own tailoring – so my natty little number cost me 10,000 Fcfa (£10 / $20) to get knocked up – it will go down really well on the Fulham Palace Broadway when I get back - think I should wear it to the first Chelsea game next season! Well, perhaps not but anyway as you can see many companies were vying for the title of most brightly dressed – I think we did pretty well. Once more I was given the honour of being a flag bearer – this time the company flag – and again got lots of cheers from the watching crowds – as a “Monsieur Le Blanc” I am still quite a novelty in these parts. After the march past, it was back to the local bar for food and drinks, again courtesy of the company – all in all a fun day. The guy with the beard and the epaulettes made from condom packets is a local comedian btw – he is very funny, I start laughing just looking at him.
May Day was followed by me then spending a week away implementing the latest branch – this one in the town of Nkongsamba, which is halfway between Bafoussam and Douala. This is quite an interesting town as it used to be the capital of that part of Cameroon before Douala took prominence, and it also used to be the centre of the coffee trade in Cameroon. Sadly as it is no longer the capital, and the coffee trade still has not recovered from the last crash, it has fallen on hard times, but there still are a number of Art Deco style buildings and some broad tree lined roads – both unusual for Cameroon. The implementation went very smoothly – me and the team are getting pretty slick at this now – so that just leaves one medium sized branch to do next month and a couple of tiddlers which I might get done before I go, if not the team can do them themselves I am sure. Although the number of customers is tiny compared with LloydsTSB (where for example at one point I was responsible for a system that was to handle upwards of 12 million customers accounts) in an odd way this job has proved more interesting – I think because I have had to think of everything in IT terms from the moment a customer opens a relationship with the bank all the way through to the last drop of MIS – something I did not do in my full time career even though I worked in banks for over 25 years, tending to specialise in one area or another – plus I am having to teach staff some very basic banking things like what a GL is – again in the UK you can reasonably expect that the staff will have a pretty good banking knowledge.
Time is really flying by now, and in the past week I have booked my flight out, so the end is truly in sight. I leave here on July 31st, heading to France for a month before getting back to the UK – so two and a bit months to go, seems hard to believe it’s almost over!
Finally cannot go with a word about Chelsea – even though we could end up winning nothing - what a great season it has been I just hope they do even better next year when I will be able to see them!
Hear from some of you I hope, tah rah for now
Duncan
