IST or In-Service Training happened in Kribi which is a beach resort town in Cameroun. There are two resort towns in Cameroun; the other is Limbe which is in the Anglophone or English speaking part of Cameroun.

It was great getting together with the other volunteers and seeing them after not seeing them for many months. As well as my birthday, it was 3 others birthdays so we got to celebrate together. While there I got three packages, 2 from my mom, one from my sister, so it was like opening birthday presents.

On the way back from Kribi, I stopped in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroun as well as the place of the Peace Corps office to do some research on some projects I’m working on and figure out how the heck I’m going to get all the packages and bags I had with me back to post. I decided I couldn’t, so I left some of the stuff in Yaounde in storage and started heading back.

To get back to Bangou, I took a long bus ride to Baffusam which was a little more than 4 hours, then a taxi from Baff to Bangou, a little over an hour away.

I took three bags with me, in which I fit quite a bit from the packages as well as the stuff I brought from post to Kribi. By the time I got to post it was dark and I was tired of all the traveling. The chauffer, who I know pretty well, went to get my bags and there were only two. I came with three bags. I asked him what he did with the other bag. He thought about it and said that he maybe gave it to another passenger by accident since it was dark. The bag had a bunch of Christmas gifts for the charity as well as some other personal stuff. It was dark already and I didn’t know what I could do, so I just didn’t pay him, but he said he would go look for my bag tomorrow. I said sure, and told him I would pay him for the ride when I got my bag.

The next day, I was with the Chief at the palace and I told him what happened. He called the chauffer, and asked him about my bag. He said he got it and was going to bring it to the palace.

Something like that happened to me before, where I left my bag, with my laptop and everything important to me at the time, when I was living in LA. I left it somewhere in downtown LA, and I thought I would never see it again. I went back to look for it and someone had come by and give in it to the church next door.

Acts of kindness like these, where I thought I would never see the bags again, perhaps because if I were in their shoes, I might have at least thought about keeping it, give me hope in humanity and lets me see that all is not lost in our world.


The birthday group


the boat