How to bake a cake without an oven

Ovens are scare here, but don't worry, there are still ways to make baked goods. What you do is take an enormous pot, put a bowl at the bottom, then put the pan with the cake batter on top. You put the lid of the big pot on and place the entire thing over a fire. It gets tricky setting the right temperature, so you have to play around with it a lot adding wood and taking some away.

The food here, otherwise, is sometimes great and sometimes not so great. Unlike Madagascar where I had rice every single day, I eat a much more varied diet of starches here: corn, manioc, rice, pasta, and lots of plantains. My homestay family’s favorite meal was couscous de maize.Do not confuse these couscous with those of Northern Africa…what they mean by couscous here is dried, powdered corn or manioc that is added to boiling water and essentially tasteless and void of any vitamins. My first night in country we ate it with Gumbo – a snot-like, guey green sauce, which did not make a good first impression. Luckily, there is really great fruit!

On the right is a picture of a baker's oven. I'm trying to teach him how to make chocolate chip cookies!

The Bread Man

This is the Bread Man. He, along with his buddies arrive bright and early every morning at each boutique with a big stack of bread on the back of their motos delivering fresh loaves. In my village, we get Mbouda bread as it comes from a town called Mbouda and it is the best bread in all of Cameroon. It can only be purchased from the bread men if you’re not actually in Mbouda, so there is only small radius in Cameroon where it can be bought. If you put a little cream cheese on there, it is the closest thing we can get to a Bagel!

Introducing Wala Wahala

This is my new kitten! I got her to chase all the mice away and maybe even some bugs. Her name means “Nothing but Trouble” in two languages spoken throughout Cameroon– Fulfulde (Wala) and Pidgin (Wahala).