quick update

Hi everyone, sorry for the delay, I’ve been very busy the past two weeks. As for my fundraising activities, I have launched a blog to help raise money for CRES. If you haven’t seen it yet you can find it here: www.supportcres.blogspot.com. I have raised a decent amount of money so far, and I hope to increase this sum when I return with a couple of activities I have planned. First, I will officially launch a website dedicated to sharing the story of the school and the need it faces. Additionally, my friend Sena and I are going to work on creating a book through a website that allows users to design and build a book entirely online. The company supports books that are created for a good cause – managing all payments, productions and sales in addition to making a charitable donation for every book sold. Right now I am taking as many pictures of the kids and school as possible and interviewing teachers and older deaf students so I can share their stories in the book. I am excited to start the project when I return to the states. I also wrote to PricewaterhouseCoopers to see if they would be interested in providing additional support to CRES. Hopefully these activities will eventually pay off for the school.

Friday was the last day of school for all of the non-deaf children. Harold and I bought notebooks and pencils for the top 10 children in each class, and during the end of the year ceremony on Friday morning, the parents of the top 10 children presented their child with their award. I really enjoyed the ceremony, and it was sad to see all the kids go. At the end of the school day, I peeked into one of the classrooms and found a bunch of children still in their desks, crying because they did not want to leave school for the summer. I couldn’t help but think of how different children in the U.S. react to the beginning of summer break.

Since a majority of the children will be gone now, we are spending most of our time on projects around the school. We paid for the back of the school to be cleaned, levelled and cemented over so that it could be transformed from little more than a trash dump into a playground for the kids. Harold brought over two inflatable soccer goals from England, and we are hoping to add a basketball hoop as well. I also have plans to paint a map of Africa on the cement surface and to put up some world flags to add an educational aspect to the playground.

I am also hoping to hire locals to fix the ceilings in some of the classrooms because many of them are in very bad shape.

I have also been filling my time with daily gym visits. I joined a gym about 15 minutes from our house, and at the gym a personal trainer is not only free, but mandatory. My workouts, which would have otherwise been fairly lame, have turned into an hour and a half of exhausting exercise, and although I was ridiculously sore for over a week, I’m glad that I am being pushed to get into good shape.

This weekend we went to a nearby beach town called Limbe. It was Matt, Harold, another volunteer named Kate and I. The trip was about a two hour drive in a hired taxi, and we stayed in a hotel right on the beach. The beach was made of volcanic sand, so it was entirely black. The sand is supposedly very good for your skin, so we sat with all the locals covered in the black sand looking pretty ridiculous. We also spent time exploring the town of Limbe, which is surrounded by the backdrop of Mount Cameroon, which is covered in lush green forest and palm trees, the whole city and beach were very stunning. I think Matt and I will probably return our last weekend here because we enjoyed it so much.

I have a bunch of other stuff to do today so I have to keep this blog post short. Next time I’ll focus on Cameroonian culture.