Cameroon –just arrived

Not much yet to tell really. Except that the weather is great: cool nights, warm to hot days and a shower every couple of days to wash everything clean (including the inside of the car as we forgot to close the windows…)

Materialistic as we are, I’m gonna start with our house: It’s a great place, newly built (which means not a manicured garden as yet…), with a big garden and on the outskirts of Yaounde. But within 20-30 min drive of the city centre. Water and electricity are mostly present – we’ve had a couple of power and water cuts but mainly due to technical problems rather than availability. On the picture below, you see our house on the left and the office and guesthouse on the right. Both are connected with a great terrace.

Jara’s doing fine. Is enjoying running around naked or just a nappy and having a lot of space. A difficult sleeper as she always has been, the nights are not too bad! We’re getting a couple of nights through every so often – hopefully that will become regular before too long. We’re in the process to look for a crèche or something similar which would be good for Jara. She misses her Bangkok –buddies!! Luckily, with us arrived another couple with a son, only a few months older than Jara. We meet up with them at least once a week to let the children have a good play.

We have explored Yaounde a couple of times and no, it’s not Bangkok, nor Ghent or Stuttgart. But if you look, you can find everything. Before leaving Belgium for example, we were warned to bring a water filter as they don’t have them in Cameroon. As they are impossible to find in Belgium, we had one send to us the week before we left from Germany, at great expense. On our first outing in Yaounde, what do we see… dozens of water filters for sale at a fraction of the price we paid in Europe… future travellers, be warned!

Work wise, Thorsten is getting settled well and looking forward to the coming partner visits with trips into the country. I haven’t really started looking for fulltime paid positions as we have another baby coming in November. So far I’m feeling fine and have had no problems. Where I’ll be for the delivery is not decided yet. We’re trying to figure out the options and if possible I would like to deliver here. But we’ll see.