We've finally managed to sort out transferring money from our UK accounts to HINT's Cameroonian account. We've made several attempts at electronic transfers, one of which I sent in May, and we finally resolved last week! Just the four months then...
Another transfer that Hev sent arrived pretty quickly, so we sent a second, larger amount by the same method, and it took less than three days! See banks, you can do it when you try...
All of which means we've finally more or less paid up our room and board for the year. After initial fears that this was going to be considerably more than we estimated (because we're in a different, bigger house than originally planned), it's actually worked out pretty much as we expected.
As you are probably aware, we are funding our time in Cameroon with a combination of our own savings and donations from friends and family. Our shameless spamming of said friends and family with begging letters had a better response than could reasonably expected. as a result, We found ourselves with signifcantly more money in our Cameroon fund than we required to cover our basic expenses.
Rather than see how long it would take us to drink this excess at £1 for two pints (which would, of course, have been fun), we decided to buy HINT some much needed equipment. the IT training centre (where we generally work, at least at the moment) is always in need of more computers. Also, we're in desperate need of UPS's (uninterrupted power supplys). Only the server has one and the frequent power cuts are not only annoying, but are damaging machines. we've had Three hard drive failures since we've been here.
So on Tuesday we headed to Douala with a budget of (cue Doctor Evil voice) one million CFA ( ~£1000).
With this we managed to get four computers with monitors (second hand), and seven UPS's - enough for the whole office.
We set the UPS's up today. It involved some inventive African wiring which I don't want to think about (nothin to do with me guv'), but it's sooooo nice to be protected from the blips (I think Flash on my machine has sustained serious brain damage and will never be quite the same).
So I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who was kind enough to contribute towards our Cameroon fund. You didn't have to, but you did, and we are very grateful. We are having a great time out here, and we're slowly getting some work done. On top of this, we've now been able to but HINT some much-needed kit. None of this would would have been possible without the many people who decided to contribute, so to all of you: Thank You, Thank You,
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