Namesake

Two weeks ago I was feeling a bit down. After a weekend in Yaoundé for a province meeting I returned to post to find the campus without power and the town with power. Normally it's the other way around - when the town loses power we fire up the generator on campus so we at least have power a few hours a day - usually about 4 hours in the morning, then another 3 or 4 hours at night. This time, it turns out the meter for the university was broken, so we had no power, even though there was power in town. It took the power company over a week to come and fix it, which is actually pretty good time for Cameroon. As you can imagine, running a gasoline powered generator to power the whole campus gets expensive, especially for a poor African university, so some days they just left it off all day to economise. As a result, I got very little work done all week.

On top of that, the Dean did not give me any teaching hours, even though I had repeatedly asked him to give me time in the computer lab so I could catch up in my computer classes. Alas, I was preempted again, so another week slid by that I will have to make up next semester. Not that I would have been able to teach much without power anyway ...

So, by the end of the week I was feeling pretty frustrated. Every volunteer has moments, no matter how good their overall experience, where they feel that they can't do the job they came to do, or that they aren't accomplishing anything. Last week was one of those times for me.

So, this was my mood, when one day my friend Peter knocked on my door. He told me his wife, my friend Marie Noelle, had just brought their new baby boy home. What he said next almost knocked me over: they named the kid after me.

Bryan Stephane Landoh Kyanpi, born January 17, 2007 :

The proud parents, Peter and Marie Noelle :


After that I decided that having a kid named after you was probably worth a couple of weeks without power or Internet.

NOTE: They spelled the name with a Y because, in French, "I" is pronounced "ee"", so if they had spelled it the same way, his name would have been "Br-ee-an". That's OK - I don't mind.