Kribi with Romeo and Irene

Our good friends, Romeo and Irene Dim have been asking us to go to Kribi with them for a few months now.  We finally found a couple of days when we could break away and we left on Friday morning and returned home on Saturday evening.  They think that we have done a few things to help them and they insisted on paying for everything.  In reality, we should have been paying for them because whenever we get in a bind, we call them and they drop everything to come and help us.

We drove across this bridge where the river comes into the ocean.  We stopped at a little village where the fishermen bring in their fish to sell at a marked and restaurant that is right on the ocean.  Here they are unloading their boats and mending their nets.


This is their boats tied up to the market along the coast where their fish are displayed to sell.

This shows the fish laid  out for the people who live nearby, and the restaurant, to pick out what they want to eat or cook.  There are several types of fish, crabs, and shrimp.  They use nets and bring in whatever gets caught in their nets.

We picked out our fish and they take it to a little work area where the gut it, clean it, put spices in and on the outside of it and then put it on the little wood grill and cook it.  This area was about 6 feet away from our table and we watched the whole process.  Jan wished that she hadn’t watched before she was going to eat.

This is our friends, Romeo and Irene, with the finished product on the plate.  We had fish soup, three large fish that you pick off the bones, plantains and fries with pop to drink.



This is the Fedelie Hotel where we stayed.  It was across the street from the ocean.  We were guests of Romeo and Irene and it was a weekend so many of the hotels were booked.  Romeo took Jan in to look at the room to make sure it was ok.  It seemed clean and was much better than most Africans live in every day.  I hurried and told them it would be fine.


This is the bathroom in our hotel room.  We were grateful that the room had air conditioning.  We slept well after a long day driving and walking along the beach.  Romeo had us fill up the bucket first thing in case the water was off later in the day.


Kribi is the most beautiful place that we have seen in Africa.  The city was smaller and less crowded than Douala and the ocean was very beautiful.  We walked along the beach and walked in the water.  We always wear our missionary badges and wear our church clothes when we are doing anything except exercising.


This is Irene and Romeo.  They have been a member of the church about a year and a half.  We are helping to prepare them to go to the temple in Johannesburg in a few months.  We hope to be able to go with them and their 4 children.  That would be the highlight  of our mission.

There were these huge rocks in the ocean without a mountain any where in sight.  We all wondered how God was able to set them there.

Jan, Romeo, and Irene sitting on the beach under a huge tree whose roots are exposed from the ocean eroding the beach away around the tree.

This is a point on the beach where the president of Cameroon has a vacation home.  It has military guards guarding it around the clock.

While we were walking along the beach at 9:00 in the morning, there were many fishing boats that returned from fishing all night out on the ocean.  The boats are all hand made out of thick planks and weigh a ton.  They fish with nets and bring in what they catch to sell across the street.  They go out every night rain or shine.

They walk the boats up the beach by turning them end for end until they get up out of the tide and close to the road.

These are the fish that they caught after fishing all night.  There are two of them per boat to work the nets.

The last 20 feet of the beach, they turn the boats strait and everyone comes to help push them up the last part of the beach.  Jan and I jumped in to help and they clapped for us,when we got the boat up to the road.  With 20 people pushing it was still very hard work to move  the boats.  For all those who came from the village to help put the boats away they gave them a couple of small fish for their food for the day.  They would help several boats and go home with enough food for the family for the day.

This is a little church that we passed on the road.  It looked like it would only hold 10 people, but Romeo told us they would put chairs outside for the overflow crowd.

In Kribi, there are rivers that flow into the ocean.  We went to this spot where there are some waterfalls.  It was very beautiful.  There were shops where we bought some souvenirs.  Romeo bought us a hand carved pineapple with coasters inside.  We told him we would think of him and Irene whenever we have a Coke at home back in Utah.  They really want to come and see us in Utah.  We hope they can.  We told them if they can get the airfare we would take care of everything else and show them a lot of neat things like all the temples and conference center in SLC.

The Falls

A village across the river from Kribi.  People live like they have lived for hundreds of years.


Jan and I with our very very good friends Romeo and Irene.  Irene had just bought that hat to wear at Romeo’s brothers wedding in a couple of weeks.  I told her she was like the Britts with her new hat for the wedding.

These young men were bathing and washing their clothes by the falls.  We were glad to see that they still had on their under wear.  That’s not always the case.

We hiked up a little trail to get closer to the falls and we found this lady washing dishes and brushing her teeth in the water.  We weren’t sure if she would like us taking her picture, but she smiled when I said “Bonjour Madame”.

On road from the falls, as we were leaving, we passed this man and woman on a mototaxi with this huge fish strapped on the back.  We assume that they were taking it home to cook for their family. We worry a lot about food not being refridgerated he in Africa.  The milk, eggs, fish, and most everything else, are just left out in the open.  So far, we have only had minor stomach problems from the food.

This is a mud house that we passed on the way to the falls.  Many of the older homes are completely like the bottom half of this house.  It is made with poles, sticks and mud.   Notice the windows, or lack of.