Arrival in Yaounde ...

Hi all: sorry for the lack of posting on the blog so far: we’ve had some problems accessing the internet.

Anyway, we’re here in Meskine and things are absolutely fine with us. I’ll try to write a couple of posts now to bring you up to date.

I mentioned in the last post that we had two days in the capital, Yaounde, before coming up here. It’s a typical African city: hot, dusty, with crazy traffic and beeping horns everywhere. I loved it!

We arrived at the airport on Saturday night with me (Tim) realising that my preparations hadn’t been as thorough as I thought, and that we were turning up in a new country without the address of where we were staying, nor any means of contacting our hosts, nor even any CFA (Central African Francs) to get us there! As we got out of the baggage reclaim area, we could see the doors out of the airport filled with, to put it kindly, a scrum of local baggage carriers, taxi drivers and who knows what else waiting to offer us some service or another. After a quick pray, we ventured into the crowd and, thankfully, found our driver, Yaya, pretty quickly.

We stayed at a small-guest house with an American couple who have lived in Cameroon for many years: they’d worked with Wycliffe Bible Translators (we have come across a number already; they seem to be active in West Africa). Here are a couple of photos from the guest house giving a glimpse of a rainy Yaounde:

We also meet an American lady who, with her husband and three children, was in the process of working out the paperwork to adopt two local children from an orphanage: it was great to get to know them. We’re hoping they all get re-united soon and meet their new brothers and sisters.

Anyway, that’s enough about that leg of the journey. On Monday we got on a “Cam Air” flight to get up to Maroua, a town in the ‘Extreme North’ region of Cameroon…