Breadfruit

Garden Egg & Plantains

Garden Egg has several names including Scarlet Eggplant as it is known in Brazil, and 'Njagatu' (not sure about spelling here), as it is known in Bakossi, a dialect native to Cameroon's South West Region.

The first picture shows what garden eggs look like when they are raw and whole. The second two pictures show garden egg after it has been diced, mixed with tomatoes, onions, and spices, and cooked, alongside plantains.

Puff-Puff & Beans

Youth Enrichment League: Match Day 9

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Match Reports:

Life Skills Theme: Setting Goals

• MBS FC 6 -- 7 Olympic Fruiting SA

MBS FC          Points Breakdown         Olympic Fruiting SA
     4/4          Life Skills Presentation                4/4
     1/3               Win/Draw/Loss                       1/3
     0/2                     Fair Play                            1/2
     1/1                   Punctuality                           1/1

    6/10                     Total                                  7/10

• Chelsea FC 10 -- 0 Kanjas FC (forfeit)

Chelsea FC          Points Breakdown          Kanjas FC
      4/4             Life Skills Presentation           0/4
      3/3                  Win/Draw/Loss                  0/3
      2/2                       Fair Play                        0/2
      1/1                     Punctuality                       0/1

     10/10                      Total                            0/10

Youth Enrichment League: Match Day 8

Youth Enrichment League: Match Day 7

Thursday, July 25, 2013

The matches today were awesome! The best part is that as the tournament goes on, you see more and more teams, with the exception of Chelsea FC today, scoring four out of four points for the Life Skills Presentation. For CFDP, the primary goal of our tournament is to use the competition as a way to pass out an educational message to young boys around Kumba. Therefore, the "Life Skills Presentation" is the most important category of points, which you see below. If a team scores four out of four points for the Life Skills Presentation, which occurs for 30 minutes before the start of each match, it means that we have judged their coaches to have done a good job communicating the particular educational message for that day's match.

The football is getting really good, too. You'll see in the match summaries below that Dr. Mofor Sport Academy defeated Chelsea FC 8-6 in terms of points. The actual match ended in a 2-2 draw. Dr. Mofor played the whole game with only 9 players while Chelsea fielded a full team of 11. Dr. Mofor went down 0-2 early in the first half, but fought back to tie the game with two late goals! 

Match Reports:

Life Skills Theme: Communication

• Olympic Fruiting Sport Academy 5 -- 7 Best Stars FC

Olympic Fruiting SA          Points Breakdown          Best Stars FC

            4/4                      Life Skills Presentation            4/4

            0/3                          Win/Draw/Loss                    3/3

            1/2                                 Fair Play                        0/2

            0/1                               Punctuality                       0/1

           5/10                                  Total                             7/10

• Dr. Mofor Sport Academy 8 -- 6 Chelsea FC

Dr. Mofor SA          Points Breakdown          Chelsea FC

        4/4               Life Skills Presentation           3/4

        1/3                    Win/Draw/Loss                  1/3

        2/2                         Fair Play                        1/2

        1/1                       Punctuality                       1/1

        8/10                          Total                           6/10

Sugarcane

You peel the outermost layer of the cane, chew the inside of the plant to extract the liquid sugar, and then spit everything out once you have chewed it dry of sugar.

Puff-Puff & Pop for Breakfast

"Puff-puff" is the stuff on the left. Puff-puff is prepared beginning with a mixture of bread, flour, egg, sugar, salt, and water, from which small "puff-puff balls" are made, and fried. Puff-puff is similar to doughnuts.

"Pop" is the soup-like substance on the right. Pop is made by from ground corn, mixed with water, and boiled. It tastes pretty bland, which is why it's nice to mix with sugar cubes or combine with puff-puff.

Ndolé and Cocoyams

Ndolé is a national dish of Cameroon and one of my personal favorites. Ndolé is a mixture of bitter leaves, which are indigenous to Western Africa and similar to spinach, nuts, palm or ground nut oil, salt, and pepper, and small pieces of fish and/or meat if you have any to include. Ndolé is normally served alongside rice, plantains, or cocoyams.

Ndolé is the green stuff in the picture below. The cocoyams are the big, white things. The second picture is of a cocoyam whole before being peeled, cut, and cooked.

Paint BidTracker in Cameroon

A huge part of why I have been lucky enough to do this four month internship of sorts in Kumba with CFDP is because I am employed by an awesome company in the United States that allowed me to take a four month leave of absence and promised to hold my job for me when I get back. The company is Paint BidTracker, or PBT for short. Many companies would never think to do such a thing, especially given the fact that I had only been working at PBT for four months before I left for Cameroon. Therefore, I wanted to make sure I showed them at least a little bit a love all the way from Kumba.

Paint BidTracker is one of four companies that work semi-independently underneath the Technology Publishing Company, a company based in Pittsburgh, Pa., and comprised of around 50 journalists, graphic designers, and tech wizzes that do researching and publishing--both digitally and on print--for the protective coatings, engineering, and architecture industries around the United States. Paint BidTracker in particular is a reporting service that tracks state-funded construction projects out for bid around the country for general contractors, painting contractors, and protective coatings manufacturers. The "state-funded construction projects" that I'm talking about normally involve large industrial structures such as water towers, water treatment facilities, bridges, communication towers, marine ports, etc.

Before I left I told my co-workers that I would send them some pictures of bridges and water towers in Cameroon, so I’m following through on that promise. The only thing is that these structures are nothing like the ones we have in the United States and most of them have little to no paint on them. I hope my co-workers back home don’t think I’m sarcastically sending these photos. I mean, yeah, it is kind of funny, but Cameroon just really doesn’t have much to offer in the way of industrial structures.

Graduation at Destiny Bilingual Primary School

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Way back at the beginning of June, I went to the end-of-year graduation ceremony at Destiny Bilingual Primary School, which is the school where Killian, my housemate and co-worker at CFDP, is headmaster. (For this reason, just as many people around Kumba know him as H.M., which obviously stands for Head Master, or C.H.M., which stands for Criminal Head Master, as we like to call him at CFDP, as they do “Killian.”) I forgot to post pictures from the event, so I just wanted to put some up now. They were a number of stages within the whole ceremony, including speeches from the children, a spelling bee, the presentation of awards to those who performed especially well in various subject areas, dancing, etc.