There was a long weekend in Cameroon last weekend. Tuesday was Labour Day, and apparently if a holiday falls on a Tuesday, then the Monday is also a holiday. Great! This was our last chance to ponce around the country like tourists before we go home, as I'm teacing almost everyday until we leave, and Hev needs to be in the Health sorry, advice centre everyday.
On Saturday we went to the beach at Batoke (naturally). On Sunday we went a little further up the coast to Idenau. Idenau is a small fishing village positioned on the mouth of a river. There's not a lot there, but it's a very laid back, beautiful place and we had a nice time mooching around for a few hours.
On Monday we went to Kumba to see the crater lake there. It's a small hike out of town to the lake, a well worth it. The lake is over a mile across, and because it's a crater, get deeper at the centre, up to 100 metres. It's also very beautiful and peaceful (even more so than Idenau), we hung out, took photos, had a swim, and took a brief trip out into the lake with one of the local fishermen in his dugout canoe. Very nice he was too, didn't try to rip us off, which is most unusual...
Tuesday was the First of May, labour day, so Heather headed off to Limbe to march with her HIV sensitization group. Marching was delayed a few hours by heavy rain, but eventually they marched, and I met up with Hev later at Seme beach, the posh beach hotel (over-priced, over-rated and not as good as Batoke, but they have natural spring to swim in and more rain shelter than Batoke...)
The rest of the week I've been waiting in vain fir any of my past students to come to me for help with their web site projects. I said I'd be available Wednesday to Friday, but as I suspected, no one's actually come. I guess most people are busy, and unfortunately not many seem to have been putting their skills into practice. This is mostly down to lack of opportunity, not many people have their own computers, so developing IT skills is not easy.
While not seeing any students thhis week, I've also been doing more development on the HINT website. I built the site without any databases because I didn't want to have to build databases and logins. etc. if it wasn't necessary. However, Genesis wants the moon on a stick, so I've eventually ended up doing it anyway. I've been repurposing the backend of this blog for HINT's purposes, which has been interesting, but very frustrating at times with the slow connection - because of making secure connections to DB admins and ftp clients it can take all day to do what should take ten minutes. Oh the joy of Web development in Africa...
Still, mustn't grumble, at least I've had a few solid days of development time uninterrupted by teaching. Teaching is okay, but grows tiresome, and I've decided I definitely prefer development to teaching, so at least I've learnt something about myself this year...
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