Hello!

This is a project that Owen Powell and Alex Horne started on October 24th, 2006 (United Nations Day), and finished on October 24th, 2007. Our aim was to prove that London is the most cosmopolitan city in the world, by endeavouring to meet and chat to a citizen from every country in the world who currently lives and works in London.

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We managed to meet people from 189 countries. According to the UN, there are 192 countries in the world, so we've proved that at the very least, London contains over 98.4% of the nations of the world!

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We are still looking for people from three countries:

Marshall Islands; Palau; Tuvalu.

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The final encounters during our year appear below, but to follow our story from the start please click on the links under 'How we're doing' on the left-hand side.  The countries appear in the order in which we found their representative. (Any country with an asterisk * next to it has a brief account of the interview - longer versions will appear in the future!)

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To find out more about the project, including our self-imposed rules, then click here.

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Follow this link if you have the urge to see us looking awkward on Channel 4 news.  Or just below you can see us when we were half-way through the project being interviewed by George Alagiah on BBC World.

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Please email us on worldinonecity@hotmail.com if you want to get in touch, or if you know any shy Londoners who are also Tuvaluan, Palauan or Marshallese.

George Alagiah interviews us on the BBC

Tuesday, 4 September 2007

No.126: Cameroon


Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 4th September 2007

Therese arrived in the UK as a student in 1985, sponsored by the Cameroon government to study Business Management - with the intention she would bring her skills back home. However, an economic crisis a few years later meant the government couldn't guarantee her a job, so they suggested she stayed. "It was a blessing," she says, "as I had already met Richard, and wanted to stay with him."

Now they are married, with eight-year-old triplets, and a house in Harrow that has banana trees in the back garden.

When she visits Cameroon again, she's amazed by how much it has changed. As a child, her father's village was traditionally rural. Now the villages have electricity, televisions, and other aspects of modern Western life. "They're not like villages how I used to know them, they’re like .. [Therese casts around for the right comparison] .. Scotland!"
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