Cameroon Hospitality

Cameroon Mission trip isn't only about delivering technical projects to the missionaries. Another primary goal is also to establish long term relationship with the people working in the field.

Daryl and Sun are the couple of missionaries that our church supports. They have been our host for the entire week, preparing delicious breakfast, lunch and dinner. They even dried and folded some of our clothes! For that, we truly appreciate their love:



Enjoying Sun's meal together:



Philip and Paul Dubois, working alongside local workers:



Eric and Susan, missionaries at Banso. Eric is airplane and helicopter pilot for SIL:



Francis, the IT Specialist at SIL. He helped us with many of the tools we needed to complete the projects:



Our desire is that this Cameroon Mission Trip has been an inspiration for future professional mission trips. May God use the talents that He has given to each one of us to build up His glorious Kingdom!

Market Place at Banso, Cameroon

We had a pretty interesting at the market place at Banso, Cameroon. Apparently, every eight days (not seven days, but eight days), people from around the villages would gather together and bring their produce to sell to each other.

The locals at Banso are all very friendly people, and some of them let us take their pictures:









Some of the local produce that they are selling (smoked-dry fish and other grains):

Third Wireless Project

Our last Wireless project consists of providing Internet access to one of our missionaries, located at Banso, Cameroon. We needed to establish a wireless link from the Banso Community Hospital to Eric's house, which is about one mile away.

Banso is about 90 minutes of flight, north of Yaounde (Cameroon's capital city).

Winston took video of the aircraft landing:



Daryl took the team onto the small airplane:






Thanks God, this wireless project was completed quite successfully. The IT technician at Banso was particularly helpful in giving access to their computer system. In fact, he was very grateful that a group of people would fly from California to help him setup Internet access.

In this picture, you can see Eric Wolf's house, and the small Internet antenna (on the left) that we've installed for his house. The antenna gets wireless Internet from the hospital situated at the foothill:

Second Wiring Project

The first wireless project was a success!! Thanks for God's mercy, we managed to align the two antennas that are two miles apart, and managed to get 12.7Mbits/sec out of the link. Daryl from SIL was very happy with this project.

Onto our second day. Our task is to lay a few cables across the Guest Center so that visitors to SIL can also have Internet access.

Yao threw himself to the grass after finishing crawling up in the attic laying network cables:



And the rest of the team was busy crimping CAT5 cables:




When we finally finished the wiring project at the Guest Center, we took a picture with Paul Dubois (the person in charge of the Guest Center):



(And that's how we got Internet where we're sleeping, and how we are managing to keep this blog up to date)

A brief description of the third project: We'll be flying to Banso, Cameroon to help setup another wireless link from a Cameroon Hospital to a missionary's house.

First Wireless Project

First day of work: Setting up a two miles wireless network from CTC main campus to a far away airport hangar. We ran several tests at home, but by Murphy's law, things always go wrong when deploying at field.







Challenges we faced: Climbing up a 20-meters tower was not an easy task. After getting the harness in place, we set off the climbing task. Mid-way through the exercise, we discovered that Yao needed much the exercise that his wife has been nagging him for so long :-D











Daryl was happy with the new Internet connection at the hangar!

Arrived Safely!!!

We've just arrived safely to Yaounde, Cameroon!

At the Cameroon Customs, we experienced the first miracle! As per Cameroon regulations, every visitor to Cameroon needs to have the Yellow Fever vaccination. We all got the required vaccination, but one of our members forgot to bring the certification. During the flight to Yaounde, we prayed for God's help in this matter. To our surprise, we met a local Cameroonian person who helped us pass through customs control without the original certification papers!

God has been good. He demonstrated his protection and guidance on our first day at the foreign country. We expect to see more of His miracle in the days to come.

Flying to Cameroon

Flying to Cameroon

After arriving to Paris, we had only 1.5 hour to get to the international terminal to get to Cameroon. To our surprise, we had to take a bus from the gate to the actual plane!

It's going to take another 6.5 hours to get to Douala. Then, we'll wait for one hour before taking our last flight to Yaounde. This is probably the longest journey for most of us. We can certainly sympathize with the Togo Pastors who flew to California.

Boarding air france to Cameroon

Just landed Paris, we will take Air France to Cameroon in about. 2 hrs.

Three happy men after lunch

Just Arrived to Philadelphia

Phew ~ After five hours of airplane, we finally arrived to Philadelphia airport. Time for lunch ... :)

Pojen + yao

Laotong

I like my coffee ~

Flying to Philadelphia

Smile ~ :)

Waiting at the Airport

First blog entry for the Cameroon Trip!!! Excited at the opportunity, we decided to create a blog to keep track of our (near realtime) updates about the trip.

Here is our group picture taken outside of the San Francisco Airport!

Everything very successful so far. Praise God!

Second Field Testing

Testing on top of the Milpitas Hill. Never knew a Prius would come so handy :-)