I am not much of a blogger. Obviously. But as we get ready to head back to Cameroon, I hope to do better. We have been enjoying? the cold weather in North Carolina, but are planning to move back to Yaoundé, Cameroon this summer.

I have been reading about the use of infographics to communicate, and this infographic on urbanization got me thinking about living in the city again (we are in a very small town in NC at the moment). Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, is a city of nearly 2.5 million people – that is more than 10% of the population of the entire country. In addition (according to Wikipedia) Yaoundé can boast having 50,000 pigs and 1,000,000+ chickens. I think their chicken estimate is a bit low…

As the graphic shows, there are both good and bad things about large cities. For us, the growth means that we can find speakers of many of the 270+ languages of Cameroon nearby, which can be very helpful when doing translation and literacy work in those languages. The government is also based in Yaoundé, and we are there at their invitation to do linguistic research and language development.

Currently more than 1/2 the worlds population lives in cities, and urbanization is expected to continue. You might be amazed how many different countries and languages are represented in your neighborhood…

-Kevin

Graphic from : Long, Justin. Missiographics 1.0. GMI. 2015. gmi.org. Feb 18 2010. http://www.gmi.org/products/books/gmibooks/missiographics-1-0