Sunday afternoon football .......and Monday morning distractions

Day 41: Sunday 23rd November 2008
Sunday afternoon Football

Sunday afternoon football – very serious...until the atmosphere lightens with a little playinng around!

Later “Roots” is on the TV (dubbed into French makes it even more realistic somehow) – and I am forced to think about something that I have been trying to avoid - that since I have been here, even more than in the Gambia, I often find myself turning in the street to look twice at people who look so like individuals I have known from the UK, that even the names of people that I knew many years ago come back to me, and I find myself wanting to call out to them; the reason for that is the horror of the shared history of the UK and Africa in the form of the slave trad.

Cameroon, like many other places with a coastline on the Atlantic coast of Africa, has a history intimately connected with slavery, and quite rightly it has not been forgotten here.

To know that it is not just my imagination that so many people here look like they are related to people in the UK – to know that in fact many of their common ancestors suffered the horror of abduction and enslavement, only a few generations ago; is shameful and shocking.

To know that the world has still not eradicated slavery and that many people, especially children and women are still being bought and sold, and made to work without pay, today in all parts of the world is equally shameful and shocking.


Day 42: Monday 24th November 2008
A little distraction.........
Okay - now I know it's Monday morning and I am supposed to be working, but I defy anyone to resist this young woman! She comes along, sits herself down and says "I can write 2 + 2 = 4 - let me write it" - well who could resist?? Not me - nor Tom when he arrived from Santa. This little girl, whose name is "Blessing", and who is not yet 4, jumped down from the table and ran along the path to grab his legs and hug him when she saw him coming (he seems to have a magnetic attraction for kids here - he claims that it is the opposite with kids in the UK!! -but it's not the first time I have seen this happen!)

Oh and by the way, she does normally go to school, but she has a sick brother, so her mother, who is a temporary gardener, can't pay the school fees as well as the medical bills.