Africa Journal Day 14

Friday, May 6, 2005
Day 14
Bert & Wilma Visser’s Guestroom, Yaounde, Cameroon

From what we have seen of Cameroon so far, there are less people, there is more wilderness, and there is more infrastructure. We have been here 24 hrs and no power failure yet! And there is garbage collection in Yaounde.
We started out our drive yesterday from the Baptist guesthouse, after a swim in the pool, by stopping for breakfast at a beautiful Café where they had delicious French style pastries. This is one of the treats of Cameroon I remembered from before. From there, the three-hour drive from Douala to Yaounde. Most of this was through tropical rainforest, although Bert said none of what we could see was virgin, untouched rainforest. We kept meeting trucks loaded with huge hardwood logs; logging is a major industry and these big ones come from the heart of the tropical rainforest, another side of deforestation so common in developing countries. Bert said that when they first came to Cameroon, some of the logs were so huge, only one would fit on a trailer.
Bert and Wilma live partly into Yaounde, very close to their work with SIL (stands for Summer Institute for Linguistics, and is the field name for Wycliffe Bible Translators). It is a comfortable home but they find it a noisy part of town, with a bar across the road, neighbours with noisy children, and an untreated young schizophrenic. Wilma had him quite manageable with medication, but he didn’t like the side effects, so he quit them.
I spent much of yesterday afternoon preparing for the Everything that Hinders Seminar that I am offering today and tomorrow. It was a public holiday here yesterday (Ascension Day), so Bert had the day off; he and Andrew planned for tennis, but the courts were wet, so they shot hoops instead. We saw Wilma’s office where we also checked out emails and posted my journal. They have a network connection to the SIL network, which in turn has Internet connectivity
We had a wonderful evening chatting with Bert, Wilma and Mary Jean. Mary Jean graduates from high school, and is planning to attend Dalhousie University in the fall.