Paca-tastic

I feel like I should update right now because I will be traveling to the Comice Argo-Pastoral show in Ebolowa tomorrow early in the morning, and I will probably have a bunch of news from that. The local dialect here is called Ewondo, and everyone here is rather insistent that I learn it even though everyone speaks French which I am still having enough trouble with. The language is really cool but it has absolutely nothing in common with English so all the words are really hard for me to remember. Here is most of what I have learned thus far:

Embolo- Hello (this is really informal)

Mbebe Ngoge – Good evening

Ngoge Mbam – Response to good evening

Mbebe Kidi – Good morning

Kidi Mbab – Response to good morning

One Mvoe – How are you?

Mene Mvoe – I am good

Akeba (abwe) – Thank you (very much)

The PACA meeting went surprisingly well, and everyone seemed pretty motivated to be involved which kind of surprised me. It was held at the Chefferie in Bibondi, and it was reasonably well attended. After I was introduced to the neighborhood the people attending split up into three groups, the men (mostly the important older guys),

The guy in the corner is the Chef

the women,

and the young men.

There where more younger guys, but they where smoking/peeing when I took this

Each group came up with a list of the needs in the community, then they got together and made a list of the five most important. Then I made a chart of those, and they decided through “pairwise ranking” which was the most important.

ASS-GIC stands for associations and Gic's just FYI

As I said this went surprisingly well, as I thought the whole exercise was kind of silly, but it actually sparked quite a bit of discussion and debate amongst the groups. At the end of the meeting the people gave me a village name, Eyene, which is a common name there, and they said that I was a child of the village and that I can go to any ones house and eat dinner (I think that is kind of a form of welcoming me to the community).

I feel like I have already done a bunch of work in the little bit of time that I have been here, so that I don't feel to bad about going to the Agro-Pastoral show so soon after getting to post. I also plan on going some where for Christmas to meet up with some other volunteers, and I will probably spend New Years Eve in Yaounde. Also every morning the whole village is completely covered in fog, which looks really cool, but reminds me of silent hill a little too much, here is a picture.    

spooky.