Since Buea often serves as a crossroads for those passing to and from Nigeria, I was fortunate to meet up with Colin as he crossed over the border en route to the southern half of Cameroon and, later, the Congo. Of course, Buea being the nice place it is, Colin was persuaded to cool his heels for a couple of weeks for a dash up Mt. Cameroon, followed by a soak in the warm tropical waters in Limbe, and later settled down long enough to sit for an interview at chez moi. We’ve stayed in touch over the intervening months via email, with a lengthy blackout period as he paddled his way in a canoe with a Japanese cyclist through darkest, mostly roadless Congo to Brazzaville. This may sound like fiction, but it is not.

For what he’s experienced over the last three years, he remains surprisingly humble and self-deprecating about his trip. Colin’s retelling of his adventures read like a cross between the reportage of Ryszard Kapuściński and the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson, softened with the poetic lyricism of Bob Dylan. It’s long overdue that a cycling magazine or blog devoted a profile to his odyssey.

Last month I received another dispatch from Colin (now in Kampala) with a selection of photos. Since we share a mutual love of cycling and he doesn’t maintain a blog, Flickr account, Facebook page or any such modern artifice, I’ve taken it upon myself to be his publicist. I couldn’t begin to do his epic story justice in this or any other post. Suffice it to say it involves mob rule in Kinshasa, evangelical preachers channeling the late James Brown, blue-turbaned UN peace keepers in Goma, volcanoes bubbling lava in deepest DR Congo, wild chimpanzees, rolling hills through Rwandan countryside and, finally, the Ugandan capital. From Kampala, it’s on to Kenya and Ethiopia.

Says Colin: “I feel excited about seeing Kenya and continuing the journey, so hopefully whilst you are reading this I will be peddling along a quiet Kenyan road with the sun shining and the wind blowing.”

With that, here’s some photos from Colin’s amazing ride (the captions are his):

Lucky for us, Joe’s final 3-week web design course at began around the same time I was leaving for an extended visit to Yaounde. I insisted that Simon first complete his Windows studies as a prerequisite to Joe’s class. He applied himself at the computer by day and reviewed his notes on my veranda, often until late in the evening (a sure sign of a dyed-in-the-wool hacker). The week before I left he passed his Windows exam with flying colors and earned the first computer literacy attestation issued by the TRC. Here’s Simon on May 7^th, the day he received his attestation (Cameroonians are famously serious when posing for portraits and he couldn’t keep a straight face for the camera):

With his credentials in hand, I enrolled Simon in Joe’s class and paid his course fee. The program Joe put together is really impressive and the personal attention he gives his students made it absolutely ideal for Simon. When I returned to post at the end of May, Simon was beside himself with excitement describing Joe’s teaching methods and his newfound grasp of semantic markup, cascading style sheets and so on. As a follow-up to Joe’s web design class, Joe Heather paid Simon’s course fee for Joe’s intensive, one-week introduction to Photoshop.

Update: Simon got his first tech job this week working in a new cyber café opposite the University of Buea. In doing so he’s achieved his first goal of becoming a computer “administrator” of sorts (he would often try to hack the admin password at the TRC) and the Internet is, at last, free of charge.

Before arriving in Cameroon, the vocabulary of the databases I’d worked on were defined by the requirements of business. Datasets focused on discrete, quantifiable entities like units ordered, cost, volume, base price, vendors, suppliers, inventory and so on. Somewhere at the end of the chain of order fulfillment was an actual product—whether it existed in bits or atoms was unimportant. It was abstracted behind so many layers of code that in the programmer’s eyes it scarcely mattered what existed on the other side of the conveyor belt. That the system worked is what mattered most. An oversight in the data model, a software bug or other glitch meant long evenings and weekends for the unlucky coders in the trenches.

At Link-Up, the NGO I’ve been working with as a secondary project, the database I’ve labored on has acquired quite a different form. I collaborated over many afternoons with Roland Musi, the director, to transform a laborious paper process into an electronic one that will (hopefully) streamline things and direct assistance to the kids that need it most. After the first two hundred-odd cases were entered, I received a copy of the database to make some enhancements. At home I surveyed the data that had been populated in the fields I had defined.

In the process, a curious thing happened. The mission of Link-Up, which I understood quite well (or so I thought) became excruciatingly clear in the simplest and most vivid of terms. They were defined in anonymous and yet intimate pieces of data. Take, for example, a sample of the contents of the field used to track the description of the child’s illness:

• Constant headache
• Handicap on the right leg
• Always having fever
• Suffering from Filaria all over the body
• Cough and frequent malaria
• Suffers from TB
• Malaria
• Fever
• Paralyzed
• Blind
• Chronic cough
• Swollen body, especially the legs

Fever, malaria and headache make up roughly half of all the recorded child illnesses. Records of hospital visits are rare. Most of it, one might guess, goes untreated or only by traditional medicine in the countless small villages that lie just off the tarred roads surrounding Buea.

Since Link-Up exists to serve the most vulnerable, critical child cases while need exists in varying degrees throughout the southwest, a triage must be performed. One of the criteria for assistance is that one or both of the parents either be deceased or disabled and unable to provide for the child. In the process of evaluating need, various factors related to family health history and economic situation are recorded. Among them are the parent’s cause of death. Some are specific while others so vague as to leave one guessing as to ultimate cause and the lost opportunity for effective diagnosis and treatment:

• Sickness
• Witchcraft
• Poison
• Drowned
• Malaria
• Stomach ache
• Chest pain
• Unknown
• HIV/AIDS
• Side pain
• Childbirth
• God fire
• Sudden illness

A substantial number simply report “got sick” as the prelude to mortality. The vast majority of the deceased are impoverished peasant workers; subsistence farmers, tea pluckers, rubber tappers, Cameroon Development Corp (CDC) laborers, housewives. I couldn’t help but wonder about the personal stories behind the unprocessed facts and figures my application had collected.

In these moments, pouring over the raw data of Link-Up that represented Cameroonians I’d never meet, I can say with conviction that the work finally hit home. At the same time, the needs and best laid plans of commerce as I’d known it seemed to pale in comparison.