First few days

We don't have regular internet access and we are trying to type on a French keyboard so we will see if we can do this every day.

Jan 9-10th
After 28hrs of travel, we arrived in Cameroon to about 20 eager faces that came to meet us at the airport. Some traveled 1 hour or more to greet us. True to the French, they were more passionate and expressive about us then our reserved Canadian “that’s cool” approach.

We are living upstairs in an apartment where Clever lives. Living here is one step up to Nicaragua. We have our own bathroom, and at this point, we haven’t figured out how to turn on the light in the washroom. The toilet is constantly running, and has no water in the reservoir to flush. Being a farmer from a way back, living with water problems we subscribed to “if it is yellow let it mellow, if it is brown flush it down”. Well, let’s just say that I needed to flush. I finally figured out how to remove the lid of the contraption, and managed to hold the valve down so the bowl could fill. The water made it half way up when there was a knock on the door and an indisposed wife who couldn’t answer it, so I let go and got the door. I stuck my hand in the back of the reservoir again and held the valve down again to let it fill up. The comical thing about this is that there was no lid or seat on the toilet, finally it was full. I let go of the valve, the apparatus flushed slowly, but alas, it didn’t work. I jerry- rigged the valve and put a mug on it for weight and that seemed to close the valve. Then I searched for some kind of bucket. The best I could find was a kettle. So finally it was full again. Quickly removing the mug, while adding a kettle chaser to the mix, the flush was finally accomplished. Janet and I had a good chuckle in the midst of our weariness. We dived into bed at about 11 o’clock Cameroon time, which was 5 pm our time. We feared that our bodies might just take a little nap and be wide awake, but we slept for 9 hours solid. Maybe this time change won’t be too hard to handle after all.

Jan 11th
Today we did a bit of mini touring, visiting some leaders and speaking on the radio. I was proud of Janet as they asked her speak, basically putting her on the spot. She did great as she was well poised, and articulated herself well. We just got started, with introductions and while Janet was in the middle of her riveting talk, the power went out and we had to wait till the generator started up. They started the whole program over and Janet got to do her introductions again. Then they asked her theological questions. She handled herself very well.

We also went to church tonight to give a teaching to the leaders. I was to teach for an hour, but only went 50 minutes. When I said I was finished, the interpreter said “you have 10 minutes left”. It seemed more like they wanted to get their money’s worth than “we love this so much we want more.”
The interpreter is doing a great job even though he has not done a whole lot of interpreting. He speaks English, French and German fluently, and understands some Italian and Spanish. He has had to do interpretations from one language to two different languages.
The people here are very warm and friendly and hospitable. We now understand what our kids mean when they said that they stick out like a bunch of giraffes amongst a herd of gazelles. Though the height difference is not as much as compared to the smaller Asians, we are amongst very few white people in the city. We have seen only two other white people so far.