a bi camille, and a wan chop some fine puff puff

I just tried to say I'm Camille, and I want to eat good beignets in Pidgin.

I am back in Yaounde now, we got in sometime on Sunday afternoon after spending a weekend in Bamenda. Bamenda is crazy and enormous and full of english, or something similair to it. What I mean is that Bamenda is anglophone, but for the most part people speak pidgin english, which I can maybe understand a few words of. Pidgin is the most widely spoken language in Cameroon actually, so I few friends and family members taught me some of the language before I went to Bamenda, and we even had a full class devoted it it, but it really did me no good. I didn't really at all get a feel for Bamenda since we didn't live with host families, and only spend about 3 days there. We did get to meet some very interesting political figures, including John Fru Ndi, the head of the main opposition party, and a member of the SNCN, the anglphone successionist party. Then some of us went out to a bar with John Fru Ndi's son (when will I ever again be able to say that I drank beers with the son of the president of the main opposition party??).

I should probably backtrack a bit to Dschang. I really love it there. It felt more fimilair, and I just generally feel more comfortable in smaller towns. I told my host mother in Yaounde that I'll probably return to Dschang for my month of research and she got very sad. I'm also the first out of 4 students who hasn't decided to stay in Yaounde. I just feel more comfortable in Dschang, and as I'll want to do something with the environment, I really can't stay in Yaounde, because there's not a whole lot of environment here...

I'm starting to get really busy with school. I keep on forgetting that this program is actually pretty academic, all I want to do is run around and explore these cities and hang out with my host families. I should be working on transcribing a handfull of interviews I did about ethnicities, but I needed a break! It's so fricking complicated, all the groups and sub groups and etc, especially when my interviews are all conducted in French.

Tomorrow we start the organization visits! For the next two weeks we'll be running around Yaounde talking to reps from the peace corps, afriland bank, the world bank, and so many more.

Then after two weeks we head to Kribi, to SWIM IN THE OCEAN! gah I can't wait. Also though, we get to meet Pygmies, which is equally as exciting.

Sorry it's kind of a short post, but I've got to run. Me and a few others are going to try and find an electronics store, woohoo!

Also, I had to go the hospital again because my ring worm came back, hahahaha. I don't know what the french word for that is.

Ok, and I can't remember if I told these stories already, but I want to say them before I forget incase I didn't already say: I got trapped in the bathroom one night, and I peed in a sacred woman cave another day. BYAH!

hahah, ok I love y'all!