Cameroon, Day 7-10: Welcome to the Village

After a long van ride through the hills of Cameroon, we arrived in Bali, the village we’ll call home for the next 4 months.

It’s the dry season here, so it’s very dusty. But the weather is gorgeous (sunny and 80-ish degrees every day) and there’s lush vegetation. It’s a very relaxed kind of place.

Everyone here greets us with “You are welcome.” They make it abundantly clear that they are friendly, accepting, and eager to talk to us. We’re staying in a spacious house right on the main road, and a whole group of people immediately helped us move all our stuff in, no questions asked.

The shower in the house is pretty much a cold hose that works about 50% of the time. Same with the sink and toilet. We have full buckets of water for the other 50%. Electricity is a little more reliable, but still goes out for about 15 minutes from time to time.

2/7/11

I went for my first long run in Africa, and the elevation made the air tough to breath, but once I got away from the main road on the little paths, it was breathtaking. This Earth is blessed. I can’t wait to go farther. 

On the way back, I got into an impromptu race with 10 little village kids. Left them all in my dust.

It’s amazing how people warm up to you when you try and speak their language. I’ve been able to pick up a few greetings and food words from the local Bali dialect. So, whenever I see someone I say, (have no idea how this is spelled) “Ola in-yea” and they laugh as they respond, “W’sat in-yea!” (I really don’t know what these actually mean. Our neighbor that taught me the phrases could be playing some cruel trick on me. I hope I’m not saying something like “I just farted!”).

We set up the SolPod prototypes behind our house for testing, and subsequently made friends with a bunch of the neighborhood kids – Ivory, Austin, Bradley, Brandon, Ryan, and Alicia.

2/8/11

We met with the Jolly Jolly Sisters, a group of women farmers that let us attend their monthly meeting to talk more about the SolPod, Jola Venture, and how to help make small Cameroonian farmers more profitable. The group seems like part agricultural union, part social club, and they sing a song to commence every meeting, “We Are The Jolly Jolly Sisters”.

We brought some dried fruit with us from Whole Foods, and some of them were amazed at 1) their existence, and 2) how much they are worth. Here, they are used to selling, for example, a branch of about 50-60 bananas for somewhere around 2,000CFA ($4.00). Then they saw the package of Whole Foods dried banana chips that sells for $5.00. Someone is making a ton of money between harvest and sale.

After the meeting, we had a fellowship feast, followed by each of them downing 1 or 2 beers each (Cameroonian beers are 32 oz. – twice the size of American beers).

2/9/11

I just went to the Bali market, which happens every 8 days. It’s quite the chaotic scene, but everyone somehow seems to know what’s going on.

The farmers here have worked hard all week to bring their crops to market, but I see their bushels going for prices that are less than a Subway sandwich costs in the U.S. Most of them are just barely getting by on this income, which cannot be more than $20 or $30 a week for many.

Apparently, this is just the way it always has been. Farming is a way of life, and they really don’t have any leverage with the wholesalers that pay pennies to bring the food to bigger cities at a greater margin.

I’ll be shadowing several of these farmers over the next few weeks to learn everything I can about them – what the whole process of farming each crop is like, from planting, to cultivating, to harvesting, to the sale. There has to be a way to improve this.

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