First, to enlighten our readers who may not already know, let me present a definition: a podcast is an audio broadcast made available online for downloading onto a computer or an mp3 player, like an iPod. To tell the truth, I didn’t know very much about them either before this week, when it became my job to teach podcasting to my YAN students. Clara and I approached this unit with some trepidation: how, we wondered, were we going to be able to get all 90 of our YAN stude...

One of the many cool facts about Cameroon is that the country’s population includes hundreds of small tribes—so many that there are, according to recent estimates, over 250 distinct languages spoken here. The epicenter of this linguistic diversity is in the Northwest Province, several hundred kilometers north of Buea, where the name of each and every small town is frequently also the name of a tribe and of a distinct language. Though Buea (in the Southwest) is the ancestral h...

About a week ago, I got the following text message (without the capitalization, punctuation or embedded hyperlink): ‘Hi Clara, this is Kalika from Peace Corps.  I got your number a volunteer in Buea.  One of my relay members for the Race of Hope dropped out and we desperately need a replacement.  Want to run?’  The rest, as the say, is history.  With just a week to go before the race, I had to scramble to get the necessary paperwork together for registration…passport...

Monday, February 11^th, was Youth Day here in Cameroon.  In anticipation of the big day, schools largely ceased to hold regular classes for the entire week prior—instead, students rehearsed for concerts, practiced their dance performances, prepared for football (soccer) matches, dribbled basketballs, or simply milled about.  Despite the general chaos last week, we managed to entice an impressive number of our students away from the festive milieu to begin a unit on photog...

Visitors to Cameroon (and readers of our blog) probably know that it is hard to speak about Buea without talking about the huge mountain that towers 4,090 meters above it.  Mount Cameroon, the tallest mountain in West Africa, is actually a not-so-dormant volcano—it last erupted in 2000—and it is claimed that when the paramount chief of Buea dies, the mountain erupts. Luckily for us, the chief appeared to be in good health this weekend (at least as far as the mountain was conc...