Kay family album

Each week I was in Cameroorn I wrote my daughter Gwen a letter, which she then transcribed and emailed to about 70 primary recipients and an unknown number of secondary recipients. All but three or four of the letters survived the Cameroonian mail system, and I now have them available: 1-10 , 11-18, 19-29, 30-39 40-48, 50-60, 61-69, 70-79, 80-89, and 90-108.

On Saturday 30 June 2001 our children gave us a party in honor of our 35th anniversary. The party took place on the sands of Salisbury Beach in front of the cottage my family has rented yearly since I was about 4 years old. Janice and I met as children within a few yards of the party, but we do not remember our meeting, nor do we know when we met. Thanks to Janice's cousin Ed Braverman we have a picture of the gathering.

In March 2010 I, Janice, Gwen, and her husband, Jef, bought the cottage next to the cottage we had been renting for the previous 65 (sixty-five) years. Here is a picture from the marsh side, from the ocean side (with the cottage we used to rent to its right), and on a postcard that is being sold at the beach (our cottage is directly in front of the large pink cottage. The water tower was taken down in October 2009).

Here Janice is wearing her     In Cameroon, especially with
her hair in a quite popular    pineapple, it is eat or be eaten.
Cameroonian style.             In this case, we ate the pineapple.
                               You might also note that Janice is
                               bundled up against the cold, despite
                               being 4 degrees north of the
                               equator.       

This is our younger daughter, Natalia. She is standing at the entrance to the world famous Botanic Garden at Limbe, a resort town on the Atlantic. (If the Limbe Botanic Garden is world famous, how come you have never heard of it?). She recently graduated from Mt. Holyoke College.

Here I am during l'Ascension du Mt. Cameroun, one of the world's great races, even if you never heard of it. An "out-and-back" (or perhaps up-and-back) race, it covers a distance of 21 miles and rises 11,000 feet. My gloves are for protection against volcanic debris, although I did find them handy at the summit, where it was about 40 degrees F. The gendarmes at the summit, who were there to prevent cheating, were bundled up in parkas and sleeping bags but were still suffering from the cold. The 442 on my shirt does not refer to the number of bottles of Guinness I drank. The regular sized Cameroonian beers, at 22 oz., tended to knock me over.

This is our older daughter, Gwen. She is at the entrance to the sultan's palance in Foumban. The present sultan's grandfather, Njoya Ibrahima, introduced a written language to the Bamoun people. He created an educational system to teach the language and translated a number of books into the language. Njoya Ibrahima's reign predated the arrival of Europeans in that part of Africa and refutes the notion that Africans were ignorant, uncultured savages in need of enlightened Europeans to watch over them. For further details about Foumban, see an article by Howard French in the New York Times (Tuesday, 21 October 1997, p. A4).

Gwen is a professor of history at SUNY-Oswego. Her email address is kay@oswego.edu. She has a web page at www.oswego.edu/~kay.

This is our son Bill. In the picture he is descending from Buea to Limbe through the rain forest. Now he finally believes me when I tell him it is a jungle out there.

Bill recently (1997) received his masters in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Oregon. Halloween of 1997, he became a father, transporting Janice and me into grandparenthood. Below are pictures of our new granddaughter and of the proud parents, Bill and Tisa. The baby is a few hours old in these pictures. Pages of additional pictures were created on 21 January 1998 , 28 April 1998, 25 September 1998, 16 April 1999 , 17 May 1999 , 30 August 1999 , 20 November 1999, 25 February 2000.

The above was written in 2000. Will now (2021) lives in Philadelphia and is married to Reina. The "baby," Sequoia, is 23, a recent graduate of Binghamton University - SUNY.

On 7 October 2017 Reina gave birth to Ren Meier Kay, pictured below. Born 20 years after his sister, Sequoia, he has an uncanny resemblance to Sequoia at that age, as you can see above.

This is a picture of one of the classes I taught at the University of Buea, part of my extended family, so to speak. I'd like to think that I was such a great teacher that students flocked to my classes in droves, but I can't. What you see is the result of 250 students taking a required course in a classroom designed for 136. It is true that there was a mad rush of students into this class.

This is a picture of Mt. Cameroon, which rises from the ocean to a height of 13,430 feet. I took the picture near my house, at an elevation of 3000 feet. You are looking at a wall which is two miles high and 30 miles wide. The wall started spitting lava in March of 1999, sending hot tongues down the mountain almost to the ocean. Numerous temors shook Buea, but the lava left Buea unscathed.

This last picture comes from a sendoff (going away party) for Janice by her students at OIC, to whom she was known, in African style, as Mammy Gwen. They were sad to see her go but wished her well.