What's it like living in Cameroon?

We'll be talking about this on the blog all year, but for now just a few highlights. We live with:
- a slower pace of life--"African time"!
- a very hospitable culture, where formal greetings and house visits are really important
- dirt roads (the few paved ones are in terrible shape)
- three hour church services (with lots of dancing)
- a daily awareness of poverty

The poverty in Cameroon is not technically "extreme" (which is when households are unable to meet basic survival needs---when people are living with $1 per day per person or less). But it is definitely all around us. Malaria---the result of as well as a contributing factor towards poverty---is all too common. Most of our students have had it or will have it at some point. Cameroon is much better off than many other African countries, but this week when Wes read the following in Jeff Sachs' The End of Poverty, it hit close to home: "The unsolved challenge for development economists is to understand why economic development in Africa has been so hard to achieve, not just in modern times but for centuries, and not in some places but in virtually all of tropical Africa (not including the five countries of North Africa or South Africa)" (194).