Vive le Dash

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me be the first to welcome you to the next step in internet pleasure... THE DALEVERSE I wanted to say hello world.  But you aren't the world.  No, you are a select few who have decided that you enjoy listening to me talk.  You have somehow found me, Dale, and fallen into my orbit. Congratulations on whatever good decisions in life brought you here. Is it colder in America or what? I enjoyed writing my blog so I'm just going to crack on.  In honor of my loosely titled  daledoesafrica.blogspot.com , I have managed an even more all-encompassing title. Mostly so that I never have to change it again. For the moment, I am loosely based in the state of North Carolina.  Bouncing between my father's house, my mother's, or my brother's.  So far in the past two months, I've visited Boston twice (for a pretty girl), West Virginia (for a pretty boy... and some snowboarding), and Washington D.C. (for a number of pretty peop...

We complain about travel in America.  We complain and we really, really shouldn't.  You don't know pain.  You know not suffering. You guys remember that time I had my host family kids stay with me?  Well when I took them back down south we all had to ride on the train.  Since I was buying their way, I bought us all second class tickets.  In the future, I'll choose jumping into a bear pit over this option.  It is an overnight train that is a minimum of 12 hours.  Do you know how second class works?  They just sell as many tickets as possible.  I'm not convinced there is any sort of limit.  We pushed and shoved our way through the eight second class cars looking for anywhere we could find space.  All the seats were taken.  People were laying on the floors beneath.  Even the connectors between cars were full.  There was only standing room in the aisles.  Some lovely humans scrunched up and provided we four...

I’M COMING BACK! Only temporarily yes, but I will set foot on your precious soil in less than a month!  I come to eat your food, drink your beer, and see how many women swoon when I say “Name’s Dale.  I work at a health clinic in Africa.  Helping kids and stuff.  Look!  Here are some pictures of me with them that I had printed immediately upon landing.”  Prepare yourself! I fly into DC, our beloved capital on the 13 th .  I already feel giddy as a school girl.  Spend the weekend there and then head down to North Carolina afterwards.  Likely with a raging hangover.  In fact, there is a good chance I spend three weeks in either a food coma or drunken haze.  Hopefully both.  I just… I just can’t wait.  Tears of happiness are forming. Until then, I’m doing some silly formation that Caitlin dragged me into.  Training people to be peer educators and spread knowledge about HIV/AIDS.  Work, pfft.  I’ll ...

Hotel's beach Lunch downtown Happy as a lamb

Those of us whose relationship goes beyond this blog probably saw pictures fly up on Facebook.  You may have noticed that I'm pretty shitty about posting pictures.  Luckily not all the volunteers are so slack.  A grand thanks to Jaclyn who is responsible for eighty percent of what goes up online.  This does weight what you see toward our vacationing and partying.  I promise my life isn't like that the vast majority of the time…  It has just been that way from the past month. After all that hard, hard work during training--all those late nights playing capture the flag and discovering a bar that actually had DRAFT BEER--I needed a little vacation.  It was actually slightly forced upon me as anyone who regularly reads  BBC might know.  All the same, I headed west to the closest ocean available: Kribi beach. It was, as all oceans are, beautiful.  Plus westward oceans get sunsets!   I spent four or so days there.   A who...

It was called IST which is an acronym I should probably know.  Pretty sure the "t" stands for training though.  My whole training class got together for the first time since we first departed to posts.  It was, as one might imagine, a bit of a shit show.  Extreme isolation ending suddenly with being surrounded by a language and culture you actually understand can lead to… certain excesses.  A couple weeks of that can take it out of you. The training itself was relatively useful.  We brought our counterparts from all over Cameroon.  It was incredibly interesting to just watch how different people from all over interacted with one and other.  Cameroon is bilingual too; everything had to be in both English and French.  This kind of draws everything out, but can be pretty useful to someone still learning French.  Actually, it got really interesting when we broke into groups and I found myself in the middle of anglophones and francophone ...

Water fell from the sky yesterday.  Hadn't seen that one in awhile.  Per usual, the Americans drew strange looks from Cameroonians as anyone from the Grand North ran outside to stand in it.  I should have snagged a few photos of us arms spread staring straight up like kids in a winter's first snow. Two and a half months is really not a long period of time, but... it is just the strangest thing to never see rain.  Weather has always been unpredictable for me and everywhere I've ever lived has had rain pretty regularly.  I'm not the sort of person to check the weather; I just go outside and look at the sky.  And I get rained on a lot because of it.  The Extreme North (and the two other regions making up the Grand North) are completely dry for months at a time.  I can just leave things outside and it doesn't matter.  Because I know, with a hundred percent confidence (take that weathermen of the world), that it will not rain. I think I m...

Or the north part of the west.   It’s a bit confusing.   Cameroon is kinda shaped like a chicken (seriously, go look at a map).   There is this whole western part where they speak English.   The northern part of it is called the North West and that makes sense except there are three other regions that are much farther north. We had quite the adventure and left Monday afternoon and didn’t get back till Thursday.   This probably doesn’t seem like much, but when every second of every day is planned a bit of an escape seems damn near the most amazing thing ever.   I think we spent half the time in a bus and that was fantastic as far as I was concerned.   It was too bumpy to actually do work which leaves hanging out, listening to music, and drinking.   I’M JUST KIDDING.   The only person who’s allowed to drink on the bus is the driver. There may come a point when my jokes no longer make sense to anyone other than Cameroonians and Peace Corps ...