Long time no post! Since I last blogged we’ve had 2 birthdays, an anniversary, a series of mushroom trainings, and Casey and I have started a beekeeping project. Lots has happened!

Casey had an insanely amazing birthday celebration. The twins took us to some falls around my village and treated us to a meal.

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I held my first training on mushrooms in village, we took the bottles of mother spawn we were given during the Peace Corps training and inoculated jars to create more seeds.

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Fanning’s sister visited during our clusters celebration of our year anniversary of living in Cameroon. Ginnie is serving as a PCV in Benin! We took her on a tour of the chefferie in my village.

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Fanning also had a birthday. It was basically a party for me too since we made sushi and it’s the one food I’ve really been craving since I got here that I haven’t been able to find (for good reason). I almost cried, it was so delicious. We watched “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before”, did face masks, and ate brownies and key lime pie. I’m amazed by the cooking and baking skills of Fanning and Casey. I’m lucky to be posted so close to them and that they feed me <3.

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Casey and I have started a new project that I am very very excited about. We have formed two beekeeping groups, one in my village and one in hers, and are starting to write up a grant to get money to send these groups to a training in Ngaoundere. The current traditional beekeeping methods in the Adamawa use fire during harvest, which is harmful to the bees and produces a smoky, dark honey. Our goal is to train these small groups in improved apiculture methods, and to provide them with Kenyan Top Bar hives and the associated beekeeping tools to get them started. The long term aim is to create groups of trained individuals that will then go on to train other farmers in their villages on these new methods. Our first step was to hold a business plan training for each group. This gave them the tools to express their long and short term goals, and set the groundwork for their projects. Each group filled out a questionnaire which helps us to write out our grant.

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I’ve also started teaching English class twice a week to four girls and my landlord’s son. I had a great deal of appreciation for teachers before, and I have even more now. It’s not easy to teach kids English via French when students here don’t really have a grasp of French. They speak mostly Fulfulde, and so my classes end up being French and English classes. Am I qualified? Nope. But I’m trying. And that’s all we can really do! Hopefully the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree, and I managed to get just a little bit of the patience and skill that my mom uses every day in the classroom.

 

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Speaking of my mother, as of today there are 43 days left until I reunite with my parents and my cousin Emily in London for Christmas! We’re going to Wales after that, and then Edinburgh for New Years, where we’ll meet my brother. After Edinburgh, James and I are headed up to Northern Scotland to see the Northern Lights. Then I head back to London, and back to Cameroon just in time for Mid Service Training (MST) in the capital! And I mean just, I’m landing the night before it starts. I can’t even imagine a 3 week vacation right now, but I’m sure it will fly by and then I’ll have just under a year left of service! Ok, that’s all for now, if I don’t update before I go to the UK, I will for sure have a blog post after vacation!

Thanks for reading!