Handbags and gladrags

Shopping for clothes with a couple of girl friends - whoopee! The Bamenda main market can be a bit overwhelming at first, but on an early morning trip with our housekeeper Anne, Gwenno and I had an excellent guide.

What a great choice of colourful fabrics! We'd both decided to have clothes made in local style, and as Anne is a seamstress by trade, she offered to make dresses for us. Cotton cloth in a huge range of traditional and modern patterns is abundant, some made here in Cameroon and some from Nigeria.

You buy a fixed length of 6 metres, and that's enough for a blouse, long skirt and headscarf. Anne brought us a big magazine with Hello-style photos - including a "Big babes" section! We could design what style we wanted, and she measured us and made up our frocks in a day or so. We're looking forward to showing them off at the Santa council meeting on Friday - a surprise for our hosts!

As we'd expected, most people do dress formally for work. The professional women I've met usually wear traditional or modern dress and jacket outfits; men wear traditional or suits, or just smart shirt over trousers. Traditional men's wear is a long tunic/coat over matching trousers, and a hat - looks great, very colourful.

Flipflops and thong sandals are amazingly popular, considering the state of the roads we all have to walk along. Men's shoes are really pointy but their feet look quite wide to me, as people go barefoot so much. I wonder, do they get bunions?

Lots of people wear western-style clothes, some new but there's a massive market for second-hand clothes. I gather they come from those so-called "charity collections" bags that people are always leaving on my doorstep. Companies collect our free cast-offs, bale them up and ship them to Africa, where local entrepreneurs buy them and sell them in markets and roadside stalls. So you see people in Tshirts advertising Bradford and Bingley!

Lazy Sunday

Sunday in Bamenda means church for a lot of people. Cameroonians don't understand the concept of atheism - or the British tradition of Sunday trips to the shopping mall! In this north-west region, 80% are Christian, 20% Muslim, and an unknown percentage also carry out traditional African religious / spiritual rites according to custom and need.

Last Sunday our housekeeper took me to the local Redeemer Baptist church, where I received a grand welcome from the congregation of 400. I was impressed with the way they used Powerpoint to show the order of service and words of all the hymns and Bible texts! There was a band with drumkit, keyboards and guitars, a good group of girl singers, and an engaging sermon titled "Why worry?" Everyone wore Sunday best, mostly traditional clothes and one family were in gorgeous matching outfits, both parents and son in gold/green fabric. As a visitor I had to stand up and be introduced in front of everyone, then shake hands all round.

I talked to an American evangelist who makes wheelchairs for a local charity, and the man shown here, one of the congregation, was delighted to be photographed. There appears to be no state support for disabled people, so churches play a big role in providing support to individuals, as well as providing some of the general education and health services. In church, I was struck again by how well-behaved the children are. Even tiny ones sat through the first hour of the service before going down to Sunday school, with no crying, whining or even much fidgeting!

This week was more of a lazy Sunday. Cameroon is currently suffering the effects of the harmattan wind bringing awful dirty dust from the Sahara, making the sky overcast and the air choking. Plus we have major road works nearby, causing even more chaotic traffic than usual.

So this morning I went across town to the Ayaba hotel to swim in their outdoor pool. At 10:30 in the pool there was just me and a stunning girl in a tiny pink bikini, who told me she's training for a swimming competition next week. I stalked a red-headed agama lizard to get its photo before some children came to hunt geckos around an open-air stage. Some guys playing tennis, others watching the match, loud French pop music on the pool stereo, dragonflies darting a foot above my head - just like being on holiday!

A new luxury hotel has recently opened, the Azam, and we'd been told there's a French chef who makes beefburgers "to die for"! It turned out to be a long way out of town, but was well worth the trip. A very international style, but after 3 weeks here that was actually a nice change (definitely 5 star toilets!) We were the only guests for lunch, the food was brilliant, not expensive and I got my first cup of espresso since leaving the UK!