World Cup Fever

Above: The freshwater source after an hour of hiking, Fufu and eru ( you make small balls of the white doughy stuff and dip it in the eru. So Good!), picture of landscape and village)

This week we spent working in the office Monday-Thursday. We worked on preparing a report for the first village we visited. We had two trips planned for the later part of the week, but one got cancelled due to the rain making the roads too bad. This left us with a trip to a village on Friday. Our work has been a lot of fun and has required much brainstorming, calculating, and discussing. We are going to produce many of the reports with recommendations of where to go with the various projects. We hope to then return to the villages before the end of the summer and discuss the reports with them. These could be tense as we are beginning to see some of the struggles with community development and the expectation of money as soon as foreign people become involved. It has been and will continue to be a great learning experience.

This week in Kumba was quite fun. We had another amazing meal with Karine. We used 12 habanero peppers in a pasta dish. It was incredible. We were all sweating hardcore. We also went to the market to get me a "fresh" pair of jeans. This was quite an experience as we had a friend take us to someone she recommended. From there you pick a pair or two from a small shop and then they run around to all the other shops and get pairs that are similar styles and the right size. It is a very timely process. I got a pair tho, and then later in the week went with Karine to get them hemmed. The guy took 2 minutes to fix them. It was great.

The world cup has been fun thus far. The Nigeria match drew a lot of attention. We watched the US match last night with a decent sized crowd. They were all rooting for the US so that was fun. I am anxious to see how things are tomorrow when Cameroon plays their first match!

This week we have to travel to go figure out some things with our Visas and then travel to a village. We are hoping to return home from our travels tomorrow in time for the Cameroon match. I HOPE SO!!