05 Feb Hello!

Hello, how are you? I hope that however your day is going, that you are calm.

Today is an important day for me. It is the first blog post of my project Mdjem which has been so long in my head and I can finally share it with you.

Through these lines, I want you to get to slowly know me better, and that you understand the reason for this project, and with luck, I will win the trust necessary for you to come and live this dance trip with me.

I will tell you many things. I will start talking about why Cameroon. Nearly everybody asks me and the truth is that, if I put myself in their shoes I understand the curiosity. It is an unknown country for many people and not a touristic place of the African continent. Going back, I also didn’t know anything about it and this even produced some respect. It sounded strong, dangerous.  I don’t know why because really, I didn’t have any information. But watch out, many Cameroonians have also asked me this question.

Before Cameroon, I lived in Angola and Ghana and also spent some months in Morocco. Outside and inside the continent I have visited and lived in other countries in different moments of my life. But Cameroon is where I settled myself.

If I search for objective reasons for the choice of Cameroon, I could find many. For example, it is where I spent the most time and therefore had time to settle and sit down. Because in addition, I already had other destinations behind me, which allowed me to have a previous job of understanding, accepting and respecting certain situations and realities. Because Douala is a city that was easy and useful to be in with my daughters, because the beaches were mindblowing, because I found that people smiled more, because I made great friendships, and because I started dancing again… But the reality is that each previous country also had a potential to make me fall in love with it and that Cameroon has its positive points but also its negative sides. So finally, why Cameroon?

What I usually answer and what I will write here is that falling in love with a country is like falling in love with a person. There is no rational explanation.

Why a person and not another? Why a country and not another? They are similar!

Why not your own country? But they are so different! Impossible to answer.

Why the third country and not the first? Who knows, each vital moment is different.

Like in people, it’s not what you can see on the outside, it is what is inside. What you cannot see, is what emerges. And of course, how you feel in that place and the experiences that you live.

In reality it is that you like how you are with that person or in that particular place. Free, comfortable, yourself.

I entered and left Cameroon carrying the same essence inside of me. But I left more polished, evolved and complete.

And this is priceless.