A eulogy to Divine

Once I told my friend, Divine, how afraid I had become of travelling. I had seen already so many accidents, heard stories, knew so many people who had been killed on the road. He told me it just wasn’t my time to go, and that somehow made sense. Divine, like any other God-Given or Blessed, came from a typical religious African family, only he emigrated from Nigeria to Cameroon some time ago. I never asked why, but I always guessed he came for the economic opportunity that, for anyone hardworking, seemed to spill onto the streets of Cameroon.

He made his home in Kribi at some point, a beach town with a lot of tourism, and the nearest big city to my newest home at the edge of the Cameroon forest and the beach. His family was lovely, though I never met his wife. His children were always polite, and despite their father’s love of the English language, they were totally francophone. He made his living repairing television screens, a skill that he had been taught by a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1990s and a business that probably was booming until the economy turned towards newer technology like flat screen televisions and laptops. Whenever I visited him, I could see the remains of what once was the busiest of days: he kept old parts of televisions stock piled in his small shop. Those small motherboards took up most of the shop and at first glance he seemed like a mad scientist, or a hoarder, but they often came in handy for all kinds of repairs.

 I first met Divine at the big bakery in town. I had just come into town that evening on motorbike, and stopped to buy something to eat. Because I had my Peace Corps-issued motorbike helmet and because I am “obviously” American, he said he knew straight away that I was a Peace Corps volunteer. Divine approached me slowly, and because he’s missing many teeth from diabetes and bad medical care and his general appearance was unkempt, it seemed to me that a homeless person was trying to ask me for money. I was trying to avoid this small, strange-looking person, and it wasn’t until the fifth time that I heard him say “Peace Corps?” in an ever-forceful voice that I understood what he was trying to say. When I finally admitted yes, warmth spilled out of his face and he opened up with great stories of all the Peace Corps volunteers he knew from Kribi in the 1990s and how they had recently been back to visit him. He gave me his business card and told me to come visit him at his store.

It took a long time for me to first visit him and it was because of my friend, Miriam, a VSO volunteer who told me a story about him teaching her to drive a motorbike, that I was reminded to go to his shop. She took me there and I would always go back whenever I had time. We would often share beers, but because he often had money problems, I would buy. Sometimes he would borrow money from me to buy me a beer, something that always bothered me a little, but I knew he loved to spend time and share stories with Americans. We would watch National Geographic on his store’s cable with one of his televisions he had repaired, and it seemed that Divine had absorbed all of the messages about species extinction and global climate change from watching National Geographic most of the day.

When I eventually left Kribi, I got a job in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capitol city, and I couldn’t visit often. He would call me from time to time with whatever credit he had in his phone, always aware of the time, and always finishing the call with a “Bon. Bye” before it reached 30 seconds. Sometimes he would call to ask for money, and that was always when I knew he desperately needed it for his health or to send his children to school. In what I recently learned were the last days of his life, I didn’t even know why he wasn’t calling anymore, and I always thought I need to call him but I never did. I don’t know what voice I would have heard on the other end of the line, if he spent a long time in sickness before finally dying, if he got sick suddenly and there was nothing left to be done, if a small amount of money could have paid for the medicine he needed to survive. Maybe it was just his time to go and he knew it.

Running and development

This is my first photo blog entry. It's documentation of my last run in Campo.

Three little monkeys jumping on the bed…

We all know how this story goes, but why couldn’t my co-workers and I figure it out sooner. Having just returned from a European holiday, I returned to post, much to my dismay still in the rainy season. I knew that usually the rainy season ends by November, and so I was hoping that upon my return from my sisters (very beautiful) wedding, I would be able to have a smooth-ish ride back to post, or at least one that was not interrupted by a mudpit. Yes, the elusive mudpit. In America, mudpits are prized for times when girls in bikinis wrestle in them, but no matter how much it rains in Oregon, unless you come to my town in Cameroon, you do not know what a mudpit is. The word in French- le boulbier- was a word that I did not know until I left Campo a little over a month ago right after a heavy week of rains. People kept talking about “les boulbiers”, and I kept asking them what it is. In my mind I had it translated as a big pothole spanning the road, which often occur on dirt roads and are usually filled with short wooden planks to help smaller cars pass across. A few days before leaving that time, I had gone for a run. In an area where there was a lot of mud, I scanned around for a place to hop to higher ground where pedestrians pass. I looked, trying not to break my running pace too much, saw what seemed to be solid ground, and placed my two feet straight into mud that was shin high. I then quickly pulled my feet out, decided it was better to maybe just keep going on the muddy road, and unfortunately had to run back to my house looking like a melting swamp creature. Not knowing the word, even in English, for what that kind of mud was, it was when I travelled those few days later and arrived at the dreaded “boulbier” that I finally understood. Trucks were lined up on either side of the 1km-long mudpit in the road. Other trucks driven by adventurous drivers were stuck inside the mud, and one pick-up, driven by my friend, had accidentally placed his whole right side of the pick-up in a 3-foot deep boulbier on the side of the road, evidentially achieved when trying to turn around. To cross by foot was not a whole lot different, and I took off my shoes, rolled up my pants, and dove into mud that was, at times, 2 feet deep. Upon crossing the mudpit, you have to take a different car to get the rest of the 50km to town. I met with my friend Abwe, a Congolese/Canadian VSO volunteer, who was travelling to Campo that very day, and I warned him. Since he grew up in the Congo, I figured he knew everything. I told him how bad it was, but that if he walked slowly across the pit, he would be ok. When he returned to Kribi, he recounted the story of how he, too, had placed his feet on what appeared to be solid ground, only for him to fall into mud waist high! This explanation is leading up to my story of last night. When I made it back to Campo after two weeks of Europe eating cheese and fine chocolate and using public transport, I learned that the cell service was down, there was no electricity, no running water, and no food (these last three due to the bad road). I hadn’t spoken to anyone in a while and was sure that the cell service would be out a long time, so I insisted that my coworkers and I use the satellite internet at the neighboring logging town. The WWF car took me and two of my coworkers there and promised to be back soon to pick us up, after finishing work in the forest with the gorilla habituation team. We were sure they would be gone for about an hour, and we were out by 4pm. By 6:30 there was still no sign of the WWF, and I began to debate the merits of taking a moto home the 10km. Had I left at 4 when we got out, I would have been home long before, as there is a good walking shortcut through a wetland, but in waiting for the car, the night had already fallen, and the rain was looming ahead. Finally, at 7pm, the WWF car came, and we began to make our way back to Campo, but 4 minutes into the car ride, our Land Cruiser fell into a mudpit and were seriously stuck. Then, of course, it started to rain, and our driver left to find a truck that can pull us out. At about 9pm, the phone network finally came back and we were able to call people who could potentially help us, but no one could, as all of the trucks were evidently stuck on the other side of the gigantic mudpit on the road leaving town. Finally, we decided to call the other driver to come get us with our other car- a really beat-up SUV. He came, but went to the wrong entrance and the car died right in front of a mudpit, eliminating any chance we had to push the car to jumpstart it. By midnight, Nadege, one of my coworkers, and I were stuck on the side of the road, alone, with three laptop computers. We were not sure what was going on because we were told to wait for the car, but tired of waiting, we decided to begin the walk back to town. Because she wore high heels, though, she had to change into another co-workers sneakers, such that she looked like a little girl wearing her father’s shoes. At 1 am, we finally decided to call another colleague who sacrificed his sleep to come pick us up. When he arrived, we realized that almost our entire staff was stuck at one of three areas around the logging town the entire night. It was only Elizabeth, our very wise human resources staff, who decided to not come with the “rescue” car, and so it was only her that got a good night’s sleep. Everyone made it home by 2 am, on either one of two motos or in one of two cars, but the experience helped me to appreciate even more my new brother-in-law’s phrase that “The Swiss have the watches, but the Africans have the time.” Nothing works in Cameroon, but everything works out (fine?).

Oh me, ohm ayo

Since I’ve moved to Campo, there has been one person who’s looked after my dog probably more than me. His name is Ayo and he has some sort of mental disorder. Some days he’s more lucid than others, and some days he’s just strange. He walks faster than a New Yorker rushing to catch a train and he is always wearing his Paul Biya (our beloved president) t-shirt and hat. The first time I met him was after a big dry season rain. He used to clear the grasses in front of my house, said my landlord, but because he was incapable of distinguishing between plantain trees and weeds, his machete devastated everything and my landlord had to find a responsible teenage boy who’s obsession with clearing the land has left me crying over ruined squash plants.

That first day I met Ayo, he had just come to tell my landlord that people had been burying Paul Biya. Because the elections had come and gone, life-size Paul Biya posters had been left hanging on all of the houses. Now, several months after the victory, and with the first heavy rain of the new year, Ayo finds posters ripped from their walls by strong winds, strewn on the ground, and covered by dirt from the erosive droplets hitting bare earth. To Ayo, this “burial” is an attack on the president himself, may his soul always be elected in eternity, and must be spoken of to someone who can do something about it.

While sometimes the things he says are strange, sometimes he is painfully honest (probably because people underestimate his capacities). The former doctor in the Campo Hospital used to pay him to clear the grasses. One day, the doctor decided to “borrow” the generator to bring to his village for the funeral of a family member. I don’t think it would have been a big deal had the generator returned to Campo immediately after use, but of course it stayed in this other village for quite some time. It was Ayo, who somehow knew the whole story, who told everyone he met in town the story of how the doctor stole the generator. This resulted in a) the generator being returned to Campo, and b) Ayo losing his work with the hospital (at least until the new doctor arrived).

Ayo also happens to be in love with my dog. He comes by my house sometimes at 6 am and whistles in the windows so that he can talk to Owondo. Sometimes he comes by and calls my name, circling the house to see if maybe I’m out back. When I don’t respond (I’m usually in bed), he eventually leaves, probably disappointed. Owondo will see Ayo from a distance and run up and greet him, and sometimes Ayo leads Owondo away with him, either to the beach or to town, and then always returns him to me. One time, I left Owondo with a co-worker’s children when I went away for work. When I came back a few days later, I found Owondo outside their house, but there is no chain! The kids said that when they went to bed he was chained up, and when they woke up he was gone (and so was the chain). The next morning, like clockwork, at 6 am, there is a knock on the door. It is Ayo returning the chain. Here’s where reality and Ayo reality sometimes get confused- he said that Owondo hadn’t been fed and it wasn’t good that he was chained up there. I know they had been feeding Owondo, and I can’t figure out why the kids were deemed unfit parents according to Ayo law.

When Ayo visits me at my house, I never know what to expect. One time he made a throat slicing motion to me when we crossed paths and was telling me a story about a girl getting killed. I didn’t completely follow the story (as I never really do), until he came to my house with two heads of white dolls. One was a life-size doll and one was small, they were both blondes, and they both came with upper thigh pieces, too. So, there’s Ayo standing outside my house holding a large white doll head and telling me a story I can’t understand, and then he starts to leave (and leave me with the dolls appendages). Even though I’m not a believer in sorcery or black magic, this freaks me out and I make him take the doll pieces away. Apparently he had taken the doll pieces to the mayor and said it was me. Mike, an RPCV who stayed in my house while I was gone for a few weeks, said he had come to the house, again, with the doll pieces.

Ayo’s always a little more lucid when he’s being looked after, and everytime I see Ayo, I’m reminded of how important it is to look after mental health. In a society like Cameroon where people are often undernourished, where physical health comes only as an afterthought, mental health doesn’t even have a standing. Here, there’s really only one word for mental disorder: “Fou”, which means crazy. Vocabulary is essential for humans to be able to better understand and describe what we see, and I hate that when people don’t know his name, I’m forced to use the word “fou” to describe him. I know that when people don’t know my name, I’m described as “la blanche.” Or maybe they just pick up the decapitated head of the life-sized Arian doll.

America, the beautiful

I have been lacking in updating my blog lately. I think part of this is that I am trying to keep myself busy with work, not reflect too much, not think about time.

I have been back in Cameroon for nearly a month after having spent my month of home leave. I left Cameroon in a different place than I returned to Cameroon, and I’m not really sure why that is. My trip to the Airport in Yaounde was scary for me. I remember thinking that I hadn’t left Cameroon for nearly two years! How could I even remember how to navigate the airport? And after messing up with the protocol several times (forgetting to pay my exit tax, almost getting tricked into wrapping my bags in plastic, etc.), I finally made it to my gate to find, fortunately and coincidentally, my friend, a former Bangladesh PCV making music in Yaounde, taking the same flight as me to Brussels. It calmed my nerves to talk to her about the return to America. She had, after all, spent a long time outside of America, living in India, studying in Europe, and now a year and a half making music in Cameroon. My panic did not really set in until my connection flight left, and I realized my return to America was not, in fact, a dream.

When I arrived in the airport, my newly acquired line-cutting skills came in handy to get me through customs and out of the terminal faster than the others. I remember having a sense of paranoia, that the government is watching me, that they are filming me on CCTV, and that the drug sniffing dogs will find something on the bags I brought back, packed by other people. But I made it, and the millions of cars at the airport, the lack of pedestrians, the rules… the rules… it was all so shocking to me, like I had been on a distant planet for so long that I had lost my old sense of time, and watching my watch tick away the seconds made me remember something from a memory.

And then my month started. Driving through the suburbs with all the neat little houses and sidewalks and stay-at-home moms pushing their babies in strollers; going to the grocery store and seeing a million different kinds of bread, of cereal, of off-season fruits; going shopping for Cameroonians, because god knows the last thing you want to deal with is explaining to someone why you didn’t bring them something back (because you’re insignificant to me, you insult me, you just called me fat, and because you have done nothing nice for me ever!); hot yoga classes with people who can take a few hours from work to take care of their mental and spiritual health; loneliness sitting on a bus, listening to your ipod, not wanting to talk to anyone knowing that no one wants to talk to you (which is the exact opposite of Cameroonian bus rides where joking and making small talk with your neighbors, or listening to the guy trying to sell some Chinese gonorrhea medicine is the only way to pass the time)… Those moments felt so empty in a lot of ways. Yes, it’s nice to eat cheez-its after two years, but the lack of human interaction required to do so, the facility with which we can engage ourselves in self-destructive behavior (like eating an entire box by myself in one sitting) is alarming after living in Cameroon where you’re responsible for yourself, your neighbors, your family all at the same time.

But I think being back and being with my friends and family was what made it hard to return. These interactions are much easier than here in Cameroon. And it is in coming back to Cameroon that I feel such a weight everytime I have to leave my house and interact with most people, even the ones I consider my friends. I thought, before I had left, that I had reached a good place with Cameroon and Cameroonians, but upon returning, I realized how loaded my interactions are with most people. I thought I could spend forever being the only Westerner I know in village, but it gets tiring. I miss easy interactions, ones where I feel like I’m home, not ones that remind me constantly of who people think I am (mostly limited to white, rich, a woman).

I remember thinking that volunteers who extend have to be a certain kind of selfish- a self-absorbed, self-centered sort of outlook. And I think that is how I feel about ex-pats living in Africa in general. We all came here to do good, but after a certain period of time, I think some of us stay because we like being thought of as a savior, we like being self-righteous… we like being stared at, called pretty not because we’re pretty but because we’re white. I see myself falling back into it. My presence in America is relatively insignificant. There are thousands of young white women, just like me. But here, there is only me. People come to me with all of their problems in the world, expecting me to solve them. I often say that I can try to help by looking up information, but they are usually looking for more than that, which I know I am incapable of giving.

I will be ready to move on at the end of the year. I will be ready to have some of the luxuries that come with life as a Westerner, not as a poorly paid Peace Corps volunteer. I don’t want to embrace all of the lifestyle- I want to be a pedestrian, I want to have flexibility in work and be told at the end of the day, “Thank you for your hard work, Lauren”, I want to eat good food and know who grew it or who cooked it, I want to drink gallons and gallons of tap water each day, I want to be able to buy a cappuccino and sit at a café and pretend that I’m a nobody. I’m ready to be socially active, to speak out and not have my opinion sound so far-out-there (What?!?! Gay rights? Animal rights? Human rights?), rather than the drudging through of speaking with officials as though you’re communicating with god herself. Mostly, I want to be a participating member of society, where it is not contested whether or not my voice counts since I’m not “from here”. Long live “les etrangers”! Long live perspective, travel, personal growth, and working for something better.

Tracking the trackers

This weekend, I slept in the forest for my very first time. I entered the forest with one of two gorilla tracking teams on Friday and left with the rotating-out gorilla tracking team on Saturday. Since my work is with the communities, it isn’t every day that I have the chance to go into the forest. In fact, the forest that I usually see is old fallow- land where people have cultivated in the (usually recent) past- so this forest was more pristine (although debatably so, as it was logged over not too long ago).

On Friday, I took the opportunity to go to the camping site of the gorilla tracking team. Because this park is of interest for gorilla habituation/eventual eco-tourism, the early stages of gorilla habituation require very keen trackers as the gorillas are still at the “scared as sh*t” stage of human interaction. Most of the trackers, or rather most of the reliable trackers, are young Bantu (usually Bulu) men from neighboring villages. However, the best trackers are usually the Bagyeli pygmies. There are some who are really experienced trackers. These trackers, when in village, are successful hunters. But no matter how good they are at their job, half of the battle seems to be getting them to show up to work.

As much as I want to romanticize the experiences of working with indigenous populations of Central Africa, working with the Bagyeli is really freaking difficult work! I learned this when we were trying to get into the truck and one of the most experienced Bagyeli trackers, after getting drunk from his 5.000 cfa advance payment, refused for no obvious reason to get in the truck to get to the forest. There are two young female scientists who lead the tracking team, and the newest one had to jokingly (although not jokingly to him) seduce him, as “his wife.” This is apparently a running joke, but his wife doesn’t think it’s funny, and after listening to how he talks about her, I realize that, to him, this marriage isn’t a joke. I was just glad that it wasn’t me.

We finally arrived at the entrance to the park at around 5:45, and the Bantus were quick to pack up their bags and head out into the base camp in the forest. It took a great deal of cajoling to get the Bagyelis loaded up with gear. By the time we headed out into the forest, it was 6:30 and the sun was setting. Good thing I brought my headlamp because the forest gets dark! We arrived at the camp somewhere around 8 or so, and it was only a miracle that I didn’t trip and fall once on the way. We set up our tents and after tiring from listening to Bulu banter I went to lie down to read some of the book “The Forest People” by Colin Turnbull. This book is an account (one that is extremely romanticized) of the author’s experiences living with the pygmies in the Congo in the 1950s, and reading it in a camp with about 5 pygmies (2 of whom were drunk and 1 of whom was dancing to my very least-favorite Cameroonian pop songs) made me realize that the pygmies he wrote about are not the same as the sedentary pygmies, the disempowered, marginalized, drunk-from-cheap-liquor in sachet pygmies who live in village. Maybe his account was too glossy to be true, but there were some characteristics that held true about the Bagyelis- mainly that they don’t really see the point in working hard or in money. As Nadege, the experienced female scientist said, they show up because they want to. If they decide when they wake up that they don’t want to come to work, they just don’t show up. Talk about an unreliable work force!

I saw, the next day when gorilla tracking, that the Bagyeli tracker, Kabila, glided through the forest, much as described by Colin Turnbull. He was so lithe and fast despite being so tiny, slightly aged, and likely hungover. It felt like a near run just to keep up. And he was really good at seeing the traces of the gorillas—broken hollowed twigs, poop, footprints. He was, for the first few hours, the first one to see the signs. I just felt like we were wandering aimlessly around the forest, and then one of the trackers would point out a sign that I never in my entire life would have seen on my own. This is an ability that only comes with growing up in the forest, living the forest, breathing the forest. As Colin Turnbull noted, the Bantu are afraid of the forest, hence their never ending obsession with domesticating it- turning it into farmland, developing it into cities, beating back the bush to avoid living in the forest. As such, it was one of the Bantus that walked with the machete to beat away any tangle of vines (and as the white, I stayed close behind him because walking through the forest on path is VERY different from following no path at all), while Kabila needed no help to move gracefully through the jungle. But after a few hours, his dedication to the cause seemed to have tapered off, and he wasn’t really even seen for a while.

The goal in gorilla tracking is to start with the last known nest (usually from two nights ago) and arrive at where they spent the last night. This work can take from a few hours to all day, and sometimes, if you're unsuccessful, you have to start from scratch the day after not successfully finding the most recent nest site. This is the early stage of gorilla habituation, just to know what the gorilla population is, where the range is, etc, with the eventual goal of finding a few good sized populations that are conveniently located to habituate them to human contact just enough. When their last night’s nests were found, I was with the three Bantu trackers, with Kabila nowhere to be found. The nest smelled occasionally (depending on the wind) like a very sour horse stable, and the nest was a very large flattening of shrubs and trees, a sort of bush mattress that makes the ground soft enough to sleep. There was feces scattered randomly (hence the smell), and it really gave an impression of how powerful gorillas are. We stayed for a while, taking fecal samples and GPS coordinates, and investigated in which direction the gorillas likely headed off in in the morning. I was disappointed and relived to not have had an encounter with a gorilla.

When heading back to the camp, Kabila somehow showed up, and helped direct us quickly back onto the path, but fell behind at some point, probably because he got distracted or had to pee. When a tree fell in the forest right behind us, crackling like a lengthy gun shot, the other trackers seemed far from worried that Kabila had been caught by a "widow-maker". They called his name, and despite having no response, kept us moving quickly back towards base camp. I have no idea how far behind Kabila was, but he showed back up to base camp not long after we did.

I returned to base camp dripping wet from the humidity and from having walked at a quick pace for 5 hours all morning. My socks were drenched from falling into the last creek crossing, and I was exhausted because, well, god knows when was the last time I did that much activity… It was already noon, and I had another hour and a half of walking in front of me just to get out. We made it back to find the work truck waiting for us at around 3 pm, and after having been eaten alive by many, many ants, I was ready to leave the forest. It isn’t the most hospitable place, especially if you are used to seasonal forests where most things die or hibernate during the winter. And the work, especially the work with the Bagyelis, is not exactly the easiest work to accomplish.

“The Forest People” can transport you to a place where the forest is good and giving, and Collin Turnbull would likely argue that my proximity to the Bantus and the fact that I live in society, outside of the forest, is reason enough for me to view the forest as a place to be happy to leave. I can romanticize the forest because it is beautiful, fascinating, and calming, but when you’re picked apart by ants and hungry and tired, a real house with an indoor bathroom is a lot better than bathing in the river and sleeping in a house made of leaves.

Kony 2012

It’s a story that’s been told time and time again. The white man rode in on horseback to save the poor, hungry, powerless African, or to attempt to conquer the unconquerable savage African landscape. In the recent online debate of Kony 2012, Uganda, international press, international intervention, aid, I’ve come to ask myself if I, too, am this middle class, well-educated American who wants nothing more than to solve the “problem” of Africa. Do I count in this group of white saviors? When my dad gave me Earnest Hemingway, I couldn’t swallow more than a few pages. How many times do we need to be fed the image of the rugged white westerner who’s come in a safari vehicle to work as a doctor, to feed the hungry, to stop the poachers, to become romantic with some young, attractive local? This is all so overplayed and trite. And yet all too accurate.

The Kony 2012 debate has just recently caught my attention. I’m not sure if Cameroonians are talking about it, but it seems that the complacency of Cameroonians of living in “peace” is a sort of response to the existence of other African nations living in constant war. I am a critic of this kind of peace that the people of Cameroon have sacrificed for development, living wage, education, community health, gender equality. Even educated Cameroonians will tell you that they are culturally used to rule by social dictator (the traditional chef of the village, the head of the house, etc.), so, “Let us live out the end of his life.” Then they will take a new ruler. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this idea. Not all societies must be democratic; The American is born with the belief that each and every citizen has rights that are undeniable. People here, too, know their rights, but the acceptance of social order trumps all. The ability to eat and drink at the end of the day is the only important human right.

So why is it that white Americans, white westerners believe that there must be a different reality for Africa today? Can we as outsiders even begin to understand the pain and the tragedy of life in war-torn Africa? Or the complexities and lack of transparency of governing bodies? And does this mean that what we are seeing is not wrong? Complexity and lack of transparency is even seen on a family level that I can’t even begin to comprehend most times. And is it up to us to determine who is just, who is evil? The White Industrial Savior Complex (as written about in The Atlantic) is a very real character complex. I was told to read a Time’s article about the war in Rwanda and write a mid-term report on it for the 7th grade. I couldn’t understand the extent of the war then, and was rewarded with a D- on my report card. To this day, I still can’t understand the war in Rwanda, and as Aidan Hartley wrote about in “The Zanzibar Chest” even the journalists on the ground couldn’t then and can’t now completely understand the extent of the situation. I’m from one of many generations raised to see Africa as a Feed the Children campaign, portraying dirty black children with bloated bellies and flies on their faces. In this way, it becomes simple to see who is doing right (us, the whites), who is doing wrong (obviously the government, which is hard to separate from the people themselves), and who is victim (poor black people).

And the problem is that this oversimplified image is often what brings White Industrial Saviors to Africa. As to not entirely exclude myself from the category, but as to distinguish myself as someone who is not entirely inside, it is worth noting that there is a very real reality of life for white people here in Cameroon. They see life as simple here. They believe that they’ve earned the car that they drive around in, that they’ve worked hard for the expensive imported food they eat, that their elitist education means that they understand what it means to be an African and that they understand the problems the Africans face. They see poverty as a problem that can be solved by international aid, through continuing to believe that the IMF and the World Bank fund good work on the ground, that the environmental protection of the forest can be bought through REDD+ policy design. “If only we could keep Africans away from themselves” seems like such an ingenious international policy. Only it doesn’t work.

And yet we keep playing this game over and over again. Politically, how many times in 2011 did we see the West intervene in African politics? It is a strange reality when you see a political injustice happening in live time, but the Africans around you tell you that revolution needs to be organic, it needs to come from the heart itself, in order for any real change to happen. Look at Idi Amin. Tell me that he wasn’t the chosen leader by the West, the carefully selected and trained hopeful for Uganda’s future. Had the revolution happened once organically, maybe 30 years after it was forced, it would have been effective, just, and democratic, and maybe Kony wouldn’t even be a political player in today’s arena?

But the nuances are so detailed. White people want leaders in Africa that align politically with the West. Western donors, for example, like seeing that I, a white girl, live in Campo and work with the WWF. Other westerners trust me and my sense of reality so much more than the Cameroonians working here. The fact that I believe that perdiem is ridiculous and that I’m not really sure I trust the local NGOS that work on the ground with money is information that western donors LOVE to get from me. And sometimes I have a superiority complex. For example, I laugh when I see the social science research that these guys do. Why would you even consider a survey as being helpful when all you get is to check the box yes or no for 5 simple questions? But I’m a snob, and even though I have the salary of an elementary school teacher here (and can therefore claim to “live like one of the people”), I have a superior education, and I’m a super critic of the analysis of the situation.

I continue to believe, however, that we can judge this reality. We can see nothing but poverty, famine, child soldiers, and war zones, but there are complexities we are missing and will never be able to fully understand. What has drawn me to Africa and continues to hold me here is that so much of what I see is unexplainable. Life is hard for some, so hard. I can try to explain everything I see with science, but the truth is that for people here, so much of life is unexplainable. Black magic, sorcery, power, family… these are some of the major influences that rule the perception of existence. No matter how educated someone may be, no matter how religious or urban, there is always this side of Africa that will continue to be a major determinant in who eats and who goes hungry, in who goes to school and who works at home, in who becomes ruler of a nation or an army and who becomes the enslaved.

In forcing our god on the people of Africa, they have evidently taken it with a grain of salt. I can say that they are more religious than we are, though it may be strange to think of a god-fearing individual as one who believes that their sickness was caused by sorcery. To us, this does not look like a Christian. And to us, these political actions do not look like democracy in action, a country in the process of development. I do not believe it is right to imprison innocent children, to make them into soldiers, to indoctrinate them with the belief that the world is against them. It is so wrong and there is no end in sight when poverty keeps getting worse and power keeps growing continually off-balance. But who are we to believe that it takes a White Industrial Savior to make real change? Yes, we are enlightened. Yes, we are better than them because we stand up for what is right in the world. BUT we know that we take oil from these countries and yet we continue to drive our cars knowing that it is fueling the power and social injustice, but also feeding the nation. The world is complex, it is more than “the bad guy” versus “the good guy”, and while I appreciate the efforts to end the taking of child soldiers in Uganda, this is a bigger problem than Kony, this is a bigger problem that East Africa. This is maybe a question of world racism, of power, of ingrained corruption, of hopelessness… The end of Hitler did not mean the end of Nazism. We need a bigger world view, and we need more critical responses and critical (and importantly, equitable) dialogue on the ground to spread ideas to intrinsically change the world.

Caged bird.

It’s difficult sometimes to understand why and how things happen the way they do. Three Sundays ago I got a call from my old neighbor in Ebolowa, Papa Billy, who was with the husband of my Russian friend, Nadia, who had come to Cameroon shot-gun style after getting knocked up by her Cameroonian then-boyfriend. Nadia’s husband is a pharmacist, is wealthy, is off his rocker. He’s an exceedingly abusive husband who has money (which results in power over just about everyone, including and especially the police) and likes to drink and sleep around. Anyway, Nadia and I became friends a year ago in May. I liked her because she was friendly and, despite having two children, liked to drink beer. It was shortly after this time that I began to learn the realities of her life as an abused wife.

I don’t want to get into all of the details, but I can tell you that it was bad. There were times when she would call me at 1 am from her bathroom, hiding from her husband who was trying to break down the door (all in front of his own mother). I’ve suffered for her, just knowing what she has put up with. I would often wonder why she doesn’t just run away. Get divorced. Request that her embassy send her back to Russia with the children. She made several half-hearted attempts like this while I still lived in Ebolowa. Once, upon her request, I tried to take her to Yaounde to show her where her embassy is (because a sign of an abusive husband is apparently one who doesn’t let you register as an ex-pat with your own embassy), only to have her crazy mother-in-law step in just in time to steal and hide her passport. And then I moved and I worried for her, as all her “friends” in Ebolowa are easily bought by her husband’s green affections.

A few Sunday’s ago, I got a phone call that she ran away with the two young kids. I was so elated! Finally, I thought. Finally, she has planned her get away so carefully that she wouldn’t even tell me. I was grateful to not know anything because when her husband asked, I could honestly say I have no idea where she is. The thought crossed my head several times that maybe he murdered her, but more often than not I imagined her living under a new identity in Douala, or taking a plane in the middle of the night back to Moscow. I thought she finally had come to her senses, she had finally found her inner strength to leave a bad situation.
And then the phone calls from her husband happened. “If Nadia calls, tell her I’m not angry. I just want to know she is ok. I just want to know the kids are ok.” Uh, yeah, right. Why would I ever be so crazy as to try to cajole her to going back to her abusive husband?
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Two Thursdays ago, I was woken up by a phone call at 10pm. “Hello, this is the morgue. I’m just calling to tell you that Koyot is dead. Please contact the family.” In a state of sleepiness, and the bizarreness of the situation of having the morgue call you from a number that you don’t have registered makes you think it’s a practical joke or a dream. I tried to wake myself up, to sort it out. I tried calling some people in Ebolowa to find out if my mototaximan is in fact dead.

What makes it worse is that I realized that even though it had been maybe 5 months since we last spoke, he still had me saved in his phone as “my wife”. The last time Koyot was supposed to help me out, he was supposed to come to my house at 5am. I called the night before to arrange the ride. I called him again at 4:30 am to verify that he was on his way. He told me yes, and I waited for him until 5:30, when I finally gave up and took a different moto. I can’t say I was devastated, more annoyed because what good is it to have a mototaximan’s phone number if he’s completely unreliable? After that day I kept waiting for him to apologize. He never did, and I avoided all contact with him because, apparently, situations like this turn me into a middle schooler again.

It was the morning after the potentially-prank phone call from the morgue that my Ebolowa neighbor, Papa Billy, called to tell me that Koyot is, in fact, dead. Hit by a car just 100 meters from my house. It was when I arrived at my old neighborhood last weekend that I saw the blood stain on the road from where his head hit the pavement. The car that hit him, apparently, had only one functioning headlamp, causing Koyot to think that it is another moto. The car, an old beater that wore the impact of a head-on collision with a moto, was sitting in from of the gendarmerie, with Koyot’s moto, now missing the handlebars, sticking out of the trunk. My neighbors described how Koyot’s ears had blood spilling out, how his skull was completely destroyed. And while I wanted, in theory, to make it to the removal of the body from the morgue, I think I subconsciously intentionally arrived 30 minutes too late and only got to see the parade of motos accompanying Koyot’s body to his village for burial. I’ve never handled the Christian tradition of showing the body, and no matter how good of a makeup artist they had, I’m pretty sure Koyot’s face would have been intolerable for me to look at. Better to guard the image of Koyot happily talking to his passenger on his moto driving to the village.
Koyot had a moto helmet- he just never wore it.

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This past weekend, while on my tour of Ebolowa, I got the news from a mutual friend that Nadia had come back. I keep thinking that Nadia is like my bulimic friend in college who I tried so badly to help. I wanted her to stay because she was my friend, but her depression caused her to transfer to a school closer to home. I was really sad to have lost her as a friend, but only after did I realize it was for the better- for me, mostly, because the amount of energy I put into that friendship was wearing me down. I wanted so badly to help Nadia help herself. I wanted her to see the light and run away, far away, and I wanted to rest here knowing that she was in a safe place with the kids living the life she has been dreaming of. Only now do I think that maybe this is the life she’s been dreaming of; an abusive yet needy relationship, a moto that you ride without a helmet knowing that potentially one day you may get the same fate that many others have suffered.

Torture of the Marines

Ok, so it is true that after I accepted my extension, I first learned the word for sea turtle: La tortue marine. As you can imagine, I immediately thought someone was asking me if the WWF works in the field of torture of the Marines. I was very confused. Needless to say, after finally understanding that it means marine tortoises, I could say, “Yes.”

The WWF worked a great deal in the past with the conservation of sea turtles, but because of funding (something I am learning about huge NGOs like WWF) they had to stop several years ago. We follow the hot trends in conservation. Whatever is in mode in the conservation world is where money can be found, and that is how the WWF determines its work. Right now gorilla tourism is the hip thing to investigate, and sorry, turtles. Sorry fishermen. But all the work up until now (at least 5 years of work) is all you’re going to get. Don’t even look at the fact that behavior change towards conservation (particularly in parts of the world that live hand-to-mouth off of their natural resources) takes a REALLY long time. There is just no money.

This week in Cameroon marks the national holiday of “Youth Day.” It seems odd from the Western perspective where it is the youth (defined as anyone under 45ish) who rule the world, as we forget the aging because, well, wrinkles are just not attractive. But there is a holiday for the neglected, often over-worked, underpaid, powerless youth. As part of these festivities, I’ve been working with a local group of (exceptionally educated) fishermen who are interested in sea turtle conservation. We went to some coastal primary schools to give some lessons (ok, I really just sat there and watched as they gave their lesson). In the schools we learned that 100% of the school kids have eaten turtle and turtle eggs. So clearly we know that the efforts put forth in sea turtle conservation are not working. I would say that it isn’t necessarily bad to eat sea turtles and their eggs for these very low technology fishermen, but everyone’s effort counts, right? I keep coming back to images from the film “Sharkwater” where these huge trawlers pull out shark from the ocean, cut off their fins, and then throw them back into the water, still alive, only to sink down to the bottom of the ocean floor to await a starving death. All of this to the soundtrack of Portishead. Yep.

Here, fishermen eat shark, too. But these guys have small wooden canoes carved from a tree trunk. They push them out from the beach with much effort, tie them up in the water until take off time, and then in the late afternoon or early morning, swim out to the boat, hop in, and take off for days at a time. When they catch a shark, they might sell it. But Cameroonians eat all parts of the shark. They love that the shark is rich in oil (less cooking oil they have to use), and they always thank God for their catch before chowing down. It is the same thing with sea turtles. While there is (I imagine) a niche market for wealthy Chinese who want to eat turtle eggs/turtle meat, these fishermen won’t chase down a turtle that is coming to land to nest. They’ll probably eat their eggs, but will certainly leave the turtle alone. But if a turtle got caught in their net in the water, they are fair game.

Last night I attended a meeting with the fishermen, and as a representative of the WWF (fortunately a new one) I learned how tense some of these negotiations can be. There is so much resentment towards an unfulfilled promise of compensation for turtle by-catch. They even believe that the WWF was using them for personal profit. And I can’t blame them. Turtles are listed species, and so technically it is illegal for the fishermen to kill the turtles. But I keep coming back to my Wolves in Yellowstone grad school class with Cristina Eisenberg. Even wealthy American ranchers need motivation to not kill the wolves that have killed their cattle. So why shouldn’t these already hungry fishermen demand compensation for releasing their by-catch that potentially has damaged their fishing net and that could feed their family for a few days? There isn’t sufficient law enforcement to patrol the beaches (let alone the park), so what do they care that it is illegal? They will never get caught.

And I keep thinking that we are accusing the wrong population. The new development of a (Chinese, of course) deep-sea port taking up to 40 kilometers of coast just north of us possibly has a much larger influence. Not only will this increase the population greatly with workers (many of whom are coming from outside and who have no idea about the importance of sea turtles or the ecology of the ocean), but the sheer magnitude of destruction is unthinkable! The EIA for the sea port declared that its impact on sea turtles will be minimal because there is the stretch of coast to the south where sea turtles are known to nest. Hilarious, right? Way to put the pressure on the fishermen to a) release their by-catch when their families are hungry, b) become the eco-guards to stop poaching by outsiders (Cameroonians and Chinese) who could care less about the quality of the oceans life, and c) never develop their own livelihoods because of the expectation that nothing will change over the next 50 years in terms of the quality of life of the local population. When EIAs like this get approved and projects are pushed forward for the sake of development, the legal code of this country is compromised. Why even have laws?

Needless to say I will continue to work under the assumption that, much like we see in America, collaborative governance works. The locals can be interested in conservation for the sake of better fisheries management and the WWF will continue to try to work based on the long-term impact, not the hottest trends in the world of conservation funding.

What color is God?

I sometimes forget that money is the true God of everything. Big business like timber, mining, extractive, destructive businesses rule, and the poor get poorer and the idea of a better “tomorrow” or even having a “tomorrow” remains something for people of the North. These businesses are run from Europe, America, China. They sign local contracts so that the locals can’t see the real faces behind the job. They bring in underpaid workers with few skills and provide them even fewer skills and a broken voice. Programs designed to protect the environment, to create gender parity or to attempt to close the economic gap will always take backseat as long as people living in wealthy countries need their iPhones, their 24mph cars, their 3-story homes. I, too, am as guilty as the rest for driving the demand for such destructive resources. I, too, have dirty hands.

I’ve recently been caught up in a story of consumerism and deceit. My reading list as of late has included: The Ecology of Commerce, Harvest for Hope, Globalization and its Discontent, and critiques of the UN’s REDD+ program.Despite Jane Gooddall’s call for hope at the end of her book, I still feel an overpowering sense of hopelessness when I think about “it” all too long. This is maybe especially true in having just suffered local elections here in Cameroon, knowing that my friends haven’t been paid by the government in 2 years, but watching a blatant pay-off of apathetic voters. Again, this is especially true watching the American primaries role out from a distance… They leave me wondering how Americans can still think these things. (When did “Anti-Abortion” become a viewpoint? Whatever happened to pro-life? At least the pro-lifers think positively.)

Politics aside, I’ve recently gotten involved in some heavy affair. My new work is focused around livelihood improvement for people living around the Campo Ma’an National Park. As a Peace Corps volunteer, this means very little that is different for my actual work aside from the fact that I have collaborators, an office, a driver, and a budget. Plus, it sounds way more official to say I work with the WWF because what is Peace Corps, really? The park was essentially imposed until the year 2020 on the local population as an environmental offset for the impacts of the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline (COTCO) which runs just north of the park limits. The new status meant that people could no longer perform any of their local activities in the park, which mainly includes collecting nontimber forest products (including animal protein) and slash and burn agriculture. Obviously, this was a huge change for people who formerly made their living from this land: now they have to watch for boundaries that they may not know the location of. In a part of the world where human rights are, one can say, nonexistent, how will the new management (specifically us at the WWF with the Ministry of Forestry) treat the ancestral rights of locals (including the Bagyeli pygmies and the local Bantu tribes) with regards to lower impact activities, like NTFP collection? Because management is not just limited to the local Ministry’s decision and the international focus of the WWF, conversation was opened up just a few years ago (surprisingly more than 5 years after the creation of the park… why this only recently became a talking point? I don’t know…) with the local populations. Already laws have been set in place to give special exemptions to the Bagyeli population, and negotiations are underway for the Bantu locals. This is good. This is progress.

During the holiday, just before the new year, a black pick-up truck came into town delivering the news to the Conservateur of the park that a mining company requested and was granted permission by the minister of mining in 2010 to search 70% of the park for iron ore. As any five year old knows, mining in a national park, regardless of what local legal code is imposed on it, is unquestionably illegal as it is so far from being low impact that it makes the logging companies look good. I think this is an especially shady affair because of the contract signed by Exxon-Mobil funding the securing of the park. Questions aside, they have the former minister’s signature, so to them there is no problem. The mining company can be traced, as many good exploitative businesses in Africa, back to Europe, specifically the country of Switzerland. While here in Cameroon you can only see black faces inside the company’s pick-up truck, it is no surprise that there is a white man manipulating it all. And then you see just how dirty business is. There was possibly some sort of major bribe involved to get the minister’s signature because even if he was completely incompetent (which happens often here) there had to have been some ringing of bells when he saw where the proposed mining action overlay on the map of Cameroon. And this was likely in fact to his benefit. He had the power of the signature that they wanted, and they had his pay-off that helped complete the construction of his cement megamansion outside of Yaounde.

And this mining company has us on our knees. We seem to just be hoping someone higher up will catch the error because all of the work of the past 10 years here will have been for nothing if this goes through. Development is a slow business, especially when it forces people to be conscience of their environment. The potential for gorilla tourism here is huge and can possibly bring in a real long term development to the area. There are many advantages to visiting Campo as opposed to flying into Cameroon to drive through to the DRC to visit Dzanga-Sangha to see gorillas. And the mining company could kill it (and the health of the communities) in such a short time. While mining offers development more obviously than conservation, quality must be regarded first and foremost. Look at the Grand Canyon, where recently the US (God Bless America) ruled that uranium mining would devastate the tourism industry, which is an industry that brings in far more financing than mining ever could. Ecotourism offers a healthy meal of beans and rice while the mining company offers candy and ice cream for lunch… such a tempting offer…

I’ve noticed that people generally do secretly like this reserve, knowing that they will be able to mildly exploit it and keep their heritage despite all of the other developments happening around the area. What message would be received by the people if what they’ve been excluded from for 10 years for the hope that local and empowering benefits would eventually reach the community suddenly went all to hell? People would know, for sure, that all of this hoping for a better tomorrow is a joke played by the elite on the poor of indebted countries.

One of the many problems I deal with in daily life here is the blatant racism from people. Yes, I am a white American. That doesn’t mean that I, personally have a ton of money. It is hard to separate the person, sometimes, from their nationality or the color of their skin. But when people get all of their information from the television, they see how “whites” all have computers, iPhones, personal cars, loaded refrigerators. I know that life is more complex than this, but we in the North have a personal responsibility to people in the South, sometimes for the sake of some of the most beautiful places in the world (like Campo Ma’an National Park), to curb our hunger for material goods. If we all combine our efforts, this green God of ours can be used for good, too.

A good year

Here I am. I'm sitting in an air conditioned office with wi-fi. I think I've made it, become a "grande", even though I'm a little nervous my money's going to run out this month. I'm going on my 3rd year as a PCV in Cameroon.

It's kind of hard to believe that I ever made this decision, especially where I was coming from. The city life is hard; the work is undefined and almost unbearable. I lived in an up-and-coming slum, and people would shout at me (often obscene words) multiple times a day.

But, here I am. I recognize that I am still in the honeymoon phase, but I can tell this is going to be a good year. This is what two years of suffering were for.
a) I live 15 minutes from a tropical beach. The water is warm, but cooling from the day's heat. The waves are gentle, and the small sand particles remind me of a spa treatment rub. I have to walk past my friend's house to get to the beach, and I am inevitably offered food. Fresh fish or fresh legume dishes, it is all delicious.
b) I no longer have the stress of dealing with raising a dog. Here there is no pavement, so cars and motos can't go fast enough to pose a real threat to my dog. This means he runs off leash all day and scavenges. Which also makes my life easier when I travel. He's self-sufficient. He also loves the beach, and although he doesn't like swimming in the ocean, his separation anxiety causes him to join me frequently in the water.
c) Work. Oh, what it means to have the support of other staff members, a present supervisor, other people who are interested in what you're interested in. I will never take that for granted ever again. Here, much like in Ebolowa, I have ideas. Only here I have the means and the capabilities to improve on ideas and implement them. This is partly a result of the fact that my town here is a manageable size. I have not been thrown into a big city and asked to work wonders. I have a specific job, with a specific geographic zone. The limitations are sight-giving. I am brimming with ideas and am excited to see where they can take me.
d) My job is not dependent on who I know and how many people I know. Having the structure of the WWF means I can access people through this, rather than through my name and my contact list. This means I don't need to have a bazillion friends. I can have a few friends and enjoy spending time in my house, on the beach, in my future garden. This is what I always thought Peace Corps was all about. I finally have it.
e) I go to the office in the morning and come home in the afternoon. I don't have to feel guilty about not working when I'm not working. I can leave work at the office.

This is as far as my analysis goes for the moment. I'm stress-free. I think this is going to be a good year where I'll (for once) get a lot accomplished (or at least look busy doing so).

What's love got to do with it?

I recently have begun to realize just how deep the AIDS epidemic reaches, not in terms of who it touches or social patterns of how, but in terms of acceptance, understanding, and prevention. This is the first time since I've been here that I've known someone who has died from AIDS. One of my water project technicians died just about two weeks ago. I knew for a long time, since, specifically, he was forced to stop working, that he was sick. My supervisor, a very educated, wordly man who has worked with PCVs for many years broke the news to me that he couldn't continue the work, which was ok since it was mostly finished. All I was told was that, "Il est gravement malade est il se soin a Mbalmayo." "He is REALLY sick and he is getting treatment in Mbalmayo," a city know for its hospitals and missonary influence.

Everytime I would ask how he is doing, it was the same answer, and I have asked before what is his illness, though never to receive an answer. He was always really nice and very hardworking and young-maybe 30ish. When the villagers were too lazy to turn the cement, he got out there and turned it with his shovel carefully placed on his knee. About a month after starting the work in April (the effects of hard physical labor is something I can't help but wonder about), he was sent to the hospital never to return to his home village. I am greatful he was chosen to work on the project because we were able to pay him good money for his work, and was probably less of a financial burden on his family.

But all this while I kept hearing how sick he is. Of course my mind thought, "Well maybe it's AIDS..." But that is a conclusion you want someone else to draw for you, not one you draw for yourself. Just a few days ago, my supervisor broke to me the news that he died after his long fight, which was the fact that he would bleed when he pooped (I'm not a doctor...) impounded by the fact that he was seropositive. I wondered for a long time why he couldn't just come right out and tell me that he had AIDS. And I honestly believe that while sometimes up to 20% of the population has HIV/AIDS, people still don't believe in it 100% of the time. This was highlighted by a comment my supervisor made a few minutes later. "Oh, you know, there's all that sorcery in village. They thought maybe he would get better once he left the village." This statement came from an educated man about a young man who was on the skinny side and who turned cement for a living. How can anyone in this day and age possibly think that sorcery was what did him in?

No one talks about it. Sometimes people will drop hints like, "Oh, she's not serious." Or, "He's sick." But people make all efforts to avoid identifying what is not ok, which, to me, keeps HIV/AIDS mysterious and silences the voices of people living with HIV. Why is it not ok to talk about it? Why are some afraid to tell their sexual partners, or do some do it maliciously?

In addition, HIV does, generally speaking, have a face. Here, it is often the slightly older, well paid men with good jobs, "sugar daddies" as they are very accurately named, who sleep with very young, very attractive women and girls, sometimes as young as 12 or 13. The price? In the South, it is often nothing more than a beer (1 dollar)or free rides in Mercedes-Benz's. I was once told a story by another PCV who was at the bar with a forester who called an attractive, random young woman off the street to give him a blow job right there in front of his friends at the bar to show off his power in front of everyone. If you're a younger guy with HIV, you might be a mototaximan, and you come pick up your "friends" to bring them to school in the morning are return them in the evening after you've gone out. In this case, they're not rich, but they're young, often from out of town, and have very few expenses.

And condom use? This is generally stigmatized, though slowly becoming more acceptable in certain urban areas. Young women in my part of Cameroon might not necessarily feel like they have the power to demand the use of one, and other women and men say many a thing about their use (although much more bogus than the commonly heard American teenager saying "It's not comfortable."). Women, espeically married women, don't have the right to ask for one in many cases, even if they know their husbands are sleeping with other women. She is, essentially, paid for. I heard a case of a back-alley abortion doctor in another region of the country who is HIV positive, and accepts payment only in the form of unprotected sex (here abortion is illegal).

PCVs are effectively living in another world, trying to start that conversation that took America herself many years to start. While I don't think everyone who has HIV needs to share this information with the world, they need to be ok sharing it with their loved ones, their partners, and close friends. And sorcery is not the cause. Unprotected sex is. I get lost whenever my friends talk about sorcery. I even once told someone that if you don't believe in it, it can't affect you. They could not even understand the analogy that if you don't believe in God, he can't send you to hell (a Jehova's Witness, clearly). So even when my supervisor brought sorcery into this young man's death, I was speechless. I didn't know what to say, but I probably should have created the room for this young man's voice by saying something to make it real. Silence can only perpetuate the disease.

Two years in the making

This is the blog entry I’ve been meaning to write for a while, but I think my emotions hit me hard today when I said goodbye to Amanda at the station for her very last return to Lolodorf, thus inspiring me at last. This is a bit of a multi-session ramble, and though this entry will likely turn out like an African telling a story, I hope I will somehow make a point of some sort…

I’m at the final countdown of a once in a lifetime experience, probably what has been my biggest life-defining experience to date. Just around 2 months to go, more specifically. Some of you may not know that I’m extending, but I am. I’ll be staying for a year with the WWF in Campo on the SW coast of Cameroon, where I will get to put my graduate school lessons to use combined with what I have learned here about the culture. I will be the sole sociologist on staff and I am very excited to start this new chapter in my life, as you can only find limited value in a job that tells you to go out and be fruitful individuals in a society that has no idea why you’ve come except, obviously to throw money at people and problems. Really, where does one even start with such a vague job description?

I was too uncertain of what would happen after Peace Corps, too fearful of how my life would be in America (I mean, do I even remember my ATM PIN number or how to use a credit card or pay my taxes? Will I remember how to drive or keep my mean but funny comments to myself because everyone actually will be able to understand me? Will I even be culturally funny again in America?), and fortunately, since I get to prolong my stay another year, I don’t really have to start dealing with the end of an era just yet. But, sadly, this is the end of my time as an “organic” volunteer. This is the end of my time to sit for hours and hours and think about what it means to be born a Cameroonian, an American, a man, a woman, black or white. This is the end of my time to create work for myself in a culture that doesn’t necessarily want my help or ideas (unless it comes in the form of cold, hard cash). This is the end of my time to forget what day of the week it is because… well, honestly… same shit, different day. This is the end of my time to sit around with my neighbors and bullshit for hours, gossip, tell stories, compare cultures, in short to be effective in being ineffective. I may have not been the most productive, creative, inspiring volunteer (I would give that title to Julia Gallus who gives heartfelt meaning to the word “volunteer”), but I am happy and I am leaving good friends with good memories.

Peace Corps provided me with the experience to not just live in a different country or a small village, to wear clothing with crazy colors, to speak a different language; Peace Corps provided me with an opportunity to think differently in every possible context. Seriously. Just throw everything you know out the window. I guess we can start with language. First you must learn to communicate in French, but a villager’s French mixed in the local village references. Ask a French person what a “Yoyette” is, and I’m pretty sure they’d have no idea that you’re talking about a hip and well dressed young teenaged girl. “Ndjo,” meaning “free,” is market talk that definitely comes from Bantu roots. So, aside from the language barrier, you also have a whole cultural barrier you must first acknowledge exists and then you must figure out to transcend. Like, for example, humor. I can’t tell you how many blank stares I used to get when I would tell a joke here. Now my tailor knows me as the funny one. I hold my own with people in the market when they want to derange… uhhh, bother me, and I use humor to diffuse difficult situations that could possibly end in violence.

Food. It is an endless battle. It’s either feast or famine. Today I was offered two very large and complete meals just hours apart, and I couldn’t turn any of them down because I couldn’t figure out what to cook at home anyway, plus you don’t want to offend anyone. Sometimes, I even run out of money at the end of the month and am forced to conveniently visit my neighbors and friends around mealtime. Also, life would be a lot easier if I could just buy dog food in processed morsels instead of verifying each day that I have rice and dried fish pieces in sufficient quantity. Transport is an endless battle, too. It seems like whenever you need a moto urgently, there is not one to be had, and when you don’t need one they’re everywhere. Oh, wait, let’s start with what is a mototaximan in the first place and how much do you pay this person to take you from point A to point B. Water, electricity, money. Sometimes you have these things and sometimes you don’t. You can only imagine how much harder life is without these things, and how it is your relationships that help you get around problems with them. Disease. Volunteers can spend at least an hour a day engaged in personal or indirect contact with other people’s germs, many that come from unwashed hands after they pooped out in the field (or even worked in the field because, let’s be honest, poop is everywhere). I actually told a police officer who was checking moto legal papers that if he didn’t let us go through the control he would get to see a white girl crap her pants. We got through.

And just some of the day-to-day stressors that never help develop my sentiments towards Cameroon. 1) People shouting, spitting at you, “La wat! La Blanche! Nytangan!!” from 3 blocks over, whistling at you like you’re a dog, running over to you, and taking it personally when you don’t want to shake their hand, let alone talk to them. My first year as a volunteer, I would actually hide in my house for days on end to avoid even hearing that. 2) Corrupt gendarme stops on the road when you’re the only one who’s ID gets checked. And, no, that doesn’t make you want to date them. 3) Drinking and chronic malnutrition. Sure, this is definitely a regionalism, but I’m drowning in men and women, parents, pregnant and nursing, who drink from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed. And then you see undernourished, underparented children running around on the streets and everything feels so hopeless. You meet functional adults who would be considered very stupid in America, and you can’t help but feel that chronic malnourishment and fetal alcohol syndrome is the curse of bountiful Africa. 4) Never feeling like you can just be friends with men. And not ever really being able to be good friends with women because they’ve almost all had children since the age of 17.

And despite all of this, or maybe because of all of this and my deep understanding (which has turned into a forced acceptance) of all of this, I’m having a really, really emotionally hard time. I can’t believe my 2 years is up. I know this is only nostalgia hitting me, but the reality is, as RPCV Maggie Murphy reminded me, I will never be able to have “this” ever again. What is “this?” I am still trying to process “this” and I am sure I will process it for a long time to come, but it helps to have some contrast to what “this” is not. For example, I heard through my father who heard from my sister that I don’t “really work”. I’m not sure if it is because maybe she thought I was doing amazing, life changing things living/working on 300 bucks a month (which I think is the common outsider reaction a lot of us PCVs get to life as a PCV) and I’m trying to not take it personally because probably my dad misunderstood, but I will try to defend what looks like “not working” to most productive citizens of the developed world.

You are privileged. You were born into a more or less functioning society. Things are more or less easy. Even if you’re poor, you have welfare, you have sliding scale medical clinics, you have food banks, you have schools that provide books free of charge, buses that take you to wherever you want to go with a full seat all to yourself and a seatbelt. And if you’re middle class, you’re well educated, you have health insurance, you cut coupons, you buy food that’s been subsidized by the government and has met FDA health requirements, you work 30 to 80 hours a week at a job that has accountability, goals, standards, evaluations, and seeks to be better, you have a car that gets you places, you will live to be 80something. You’re life is good. Be grateful for what you have and give back when you can.

PCVs, particularly those volunteering in the cursed/blessed Central African area, work in a world that navigates all of the factors listed above, but then throw in the fact that we have no structural support, no financial support, no to very little peer support. All we have are our ideas and the resources (population, structural, ecological, etc.) around us. Human beings are only as good as the other individuals surrounding them. For example, several generations of us stupidly dedicated volunteers of the South Region have been working on a soy project to help combat chronic malnutrition. It is entering painfully slow into the culture. I once even tried to sell soy seeds to a neighbor, an old woman, who told me, “I want soy to eat, not to grow.” The people of the South are stubborn, proud, don’t want to be told that their children are suffering from malnourishment because, “I’m a great cook, my kids have plenty to eat.” The idea of working as a team is completely foreign, and as a result, women suffer endlessly lonely hours at the field trying to be productive as one to feed a family of 10. Tribalism does very little to help combat these problems, and any good Southerner will tell you, “We do not have soy in our culture. It comes from the West Region. We do not work in groups in our culture. That idea comes from the West Region.” People have traveled so little that every problem is automatically associated with outsiders. A murder last year caused a sort of tribal war between the Bamoun (from the West) and the Bulu (the Southerners), as the Bulu blamed the murder of their brother on the Bamoun. In the end, we all learned it was some of their own brothers who killed the guy, but no one took this as a learning opportunity, an opportunity for societal or personal growth.

As a PCV, we have the benefit of being a true participant observer. I am both an outsider and an insider at once. Although I don’t navigate the language perfectly, I know how to get around. I know who to talk to to get things done, where to buy stuff at the market, when someone is lying, how to sit 4 in the front row of a station wagon even when the seatbelt clasp is sticking straight into your butt cheek. I know many of these things better than many Cameroonians, as it is essentially my job to visit villages and hang out with villagers. We (female volunteers) are also caught in a middle gender. I am not quite a woman, not quite a man. I eat with the men, I am allowed to do men’s work sometimes, I hang out with men and drink at the bar with men. But, I know it is very different for actual male volunteers and I can’t ever just be “one of the boys.” I am also kind of a woman. I can sit in the kitchen with woman, hang out with them, go to the field and work with them, but I am often not allowed to work in the kitchen. I also don’t have children and am not married, so I am often seen as a threat to some women. I have unique insider experiences in my interactions with people, but I usually catch people I don’t know very well off guard with how Cameroonian (villageoise) I am. Also, trust is a difficult topic for most PCVs. Many people change who they are when they are around me. They may put on a different face, talk a different talk, seem more serious about working with me than they actually are. I can never know this side of someone, and I usually get the information second-hand, and you’re left wondering who to trust. For example, I once trusted my neighbor until she stole soy seeds from me. When I told this to my former counterpart Judith, she told me, “See, Lauren, not everyone is like me.” And I trusted Judith, until I didn’t trust her anymore because she eventually showed me a different face.

So, knowing what you know now, I hope that you all can understand the many challenges that PCVs face everyday. My first year I struggled to find my groove. I worked a lot to avoid dealing with my limited selection of friends who usually exhausted me, usually because of language. I struggled to find good projects, good people to work with, how to work with these very limited number of individuals. I liked to spend my free time hiding in my house- reading, playing with the dog, playing on the computer, working on the computer. I found comfort in being alone and food and beer. I gained twenty pounds (typical me, typical female PCV) from stress, from a need to seek American-style food, from pushing myself and my need to exercise aside because the social and environmental problems seemed so big and yet so easy to solve with just my help, limited expertise, and lack of financial resources. I had a work breakdown right around October/November of last year and everything fell apart. I started spending more time with friends, more time interacting with the people I like, less time formally working. I picked up my exercise again, which helped give me mental sanity. I focused less on being in America, on being an American with an identity that you can’t touch. I gave in to Africa, to where I am, to my friends and my families here. I tried to better understand life here, and in doing so, found less meaning in driving forward with work that seems, often, pushed from the outside. My ideas of what is right and what is wrong have changed, and I always see more grey than I ever did before.

And maybe it is the grey matter than hinders my work productivity. I will never forget when my mom and sister came to visit and they had so many great, simple solutions to such seemingly simple problems. I felt like, next to them, I had lost all hope to see change here. Or maybe I stopped seeing the need for change in everything that constructs this society. But, I think what has actually happened is that I stopped seeing the “problems” as unique, solvable problems, per se. What used to be a problem has become just how life is and likely always will be, unless local governments step up or foreign aid agencies better understand how interconnected everything is and how life works here. Maybe the problems are too big to even be solved, or maybe the solution is the same one we found in America: immigration and equal rights for all. And maybe that is where PCVs are most effective. We spend money that we earn here. We give ideas to people in passing, we talk to everyone as representatives of America. We encourage idea sharing and we bring the idea of “the customer is always right,” which is usually an idea that is too strange for Cameroonians to comprehend. But maybe this is where we, as PCVs, can be most effective.

So, in short, I have felt useless, frustrated, helpless and hopeless, lonely, and stupid. I have also felt powerful, helpful, driven, loved, and intelligent. I have often asked, “What is the point of PC?”, “Why is the mandatory 2 year service so long?”, “What am I doing here?”, “Why don’t I just go back to a functional society?”, and “How can I work here?”. I have also often thought, “This is the coolest thing I will ever do in my life,” “I can’t even remember life pre-PC, pre-Cameroon,” and “Why is two year service so short?” I have made great friends, I have learned the realities of life here, I have forgotten many words in English, I have become a member of several families, and I have found my two feet. Being a PCV is indescribable, which is why this entry is a jumble of thoughts and emotions. Being a PCV is the most wonderful way to learn. When we first got to country, I remember standing in front of all my fellow stagemates and office staff for self-presentation. I was so hopeful and idealistic. I remember talking about my Masters degree, how I want to work with woman, and when I had to present my fear, I couldn’t really imagine how it could be being a PCV. My fear that I came up with was that I would love it so much here that I would never want to leave. I can’t say that I love every moment here in Cameroon, as I often have dreams of returning to America, but with time I have come to accept the things I don’t love and look past the things I can’t accept. I’m in a good place. It is, as they say, the toughest job you’ll ever love, and I am just not ready yet for it to be over.

Let the voting begin

October 9th marks the elections in Cameroon. All 23 candidates will compete for the single spot as president, and, considering there are only 2 weeks allotted for campaigning and many unknowns on the list, there is really one sole name on the tip of people’s tongues: Paul Biya.

The reigning president, who has served since approximately my birth, is known for the peace he brings to the country. And it is true, Cameroon is a relatively peaceful nation. It flies low on the international radar, and people are so content with their peace that they never raise a stink about anything, which only gives the impression that all is well over here.

There are some hurdles potential candidates must jump before becoming candidate. One: They must have some sort of petition signed in all 10 regions by at least 50 important government officials (or something like that), for a total of 500 signatures in a period of just a few weeks… Often, at least in other situations, signatures are purchased, so my ellipses here may or may involve substantial bribery. After the petition is deposited, they are looked over very carefully and, in this electoral season, more than half were thrown out. That leaves us with 23 candidates, some of whom are questionably in the race to, when the time comes, hand over votes to the current president. Each candidate must also subscribe with 5 million FCFA (about 10,000 USD), and in return they are given 15 million FCFA from the government to compete in the campaign. The trick here is that each candidate who accepts this money must gain at least 1% of the vote. So, let the campaigning begin.

When you talk to people in villages, they are generally happy with campaign season because, similarly to the logging companies who buy happy villagers with boxes of fish and crates of wine, candidates tend to make themselves known to villagers with food and drink. Candidates who show up empty handed in a village get booed. Paul Biya’s entourage pulled a no-no in my neighboring village by bringing pagne (fabric, usually crazy colored) with Pauly’s face to only a select number of people in village. If you can’t provide to everyone, just don’t bring anything at all. However, the promise of fish and wine (all you can eat for today!) the day before the elections is enough to soothe the momentary anger from running short on pagne.

People in the city tend to be more educated, more aware of the issues, and more likely to get free things from presidential hopefuls. Today, I saw a rocking concert in the middle of town. Moto taximen who ride around performing crazy stunts on their motos as encouragement entourage for candidates get paid decently well for risking their lives. City folks have a more realistic view of how the elections can change their lives, and the minority want to see a change in power. The problem with a change in power, as pointed out by many, is that there is only one well-known, realistic candidate. In America, we were talking about that Obama guy at least 4 years before his famous election. Here in Cameroon, Paul Biya is the only household name. There’s not two names, partly because Paul Biya, as aged as he is, has not named someone other than himself. He has made no effort to prep a future potential president, a replacement. If (when?) he gets re-elected, he will have to serve a term of 7 years. Can a man with almost 79 years run a country until the ripe old age of 86? When does senility kick in? The prediction here is that he will gracefully step down and turn the title (throne?) over to a newly trained replacement. As long as it’s not his son, I think the country will have confidence that this theoretical new guy, too, can work towards maintaining the status quo: peace, bribery, underdevelopment, Chinese, and mediocrity.

Let’s get our election on!

Asian invasion

The Asians are everywhere! Even where you don’t expect to find them, they are there. And they are resourceful! And it’s not just the Chinese. (But it is especially the Chinese.)

This blog entry was inspired by a recent meeting with a group of Korean volunteers. A group of 12 young early 20-something Korean college students have just signed on to a year-long volunteer program here in Cameroon. A group of PCVs met with the Koreans to learn more about the two programs, and it was a good opportunity for the very first group of Korean volunteers in Cameroon to glean information from a program that’s been operating in country for 50 years. They were your typical Koreans; adorable, polite, they stood when they spoke, and the group seemed to be genuinely interested in helping the “poor, underresourced, undereducated” Cameroonians. The interesting thing about this group was that they are approaching their work from a team-based approach, which is at the heart of Korean culture. So there are 2 teams of 6; one living in Sangmelima, of the South Region, and the other in a village of the Center Region. Their interests and academic interests were diverse, but they all had one thing in common- they spoke zero French and maybe 5 words of bad English, with the exception of the program director, who spoke English very coherently.

The interesting thing about their program is that they chose 2 or so host country nationals to serve as community guides, and flew them over to Korea for a 4 month training program. The problem is their contacts in country are with government officials, so it leaves little to the imagination of who they chose to send over to Korea. This is also, obviously, the reason these two host villages were selected. The idea of community spirit just doesn’t exist in the forested regions of Cameroon, specifically the Center and the South, but, again, government officials come from these regions more often than not… Soooo… they favored their villages. I can just imagine how these hopeful and idealist young 20 year olds are going to fare work-wise… Particularly when they are teamed up with (corrupt, pushy, unmotivated) government officials. I can only imagine how much more productive I could have been as a volunteer if I had other volunteers at arms-reach, but they have so many odds working against them, particularly because if you’re Asian (or a white girl with blond to brown hair), people think you’re Chinese and people here generally hate the Chinese. Also, their culture is so polite that they will probably get eaten here.

In our Q-and-A exchange, we had some strange moments. One of the strangest questions they asked us for their agriculture volunteers was, “When do the people cut the grasses?” You can only imagine how long it took for us to understand what they were asking. They were asking about field clearing for agriculture. Imagine you have a room full agroforestry volunteers who do almost nothing but observe people all day long, and you can ask them anything. Instead of asking, “What are the major challenges to agriculture? What are some opportunities for us?” you’re going to ask, “When do people clear their land?” I’m pretty sure they should have looked that up on google before they came here. Or they could have asked anyone on the street… For such a tech-saavy nation, they sure weren’t tech saavy. Now, here’s my favorite question from our side of the table. “Why did you decide to pilot this program here in Cameroon?” The director, the only one who speaks decent English, responded, “There are many mineral resources here we want to exploit.” I can’t remember the rest of what he said, but I do remember Richard replying, “That is refreshingly honest.” So, the gigantic cobalt mine in the East and the hidden gold mines in the South are of interest to the Koreans. Everyone wants their piece of the pie, and sometimes they’ll get their foot in the backdoor to secure an entrance to the front door. I can’t say that Peace Corps is much better, as I am essentially here to create a better image of Americans to help stop communism... uhh… terrorism… to spread the joy and belief in capitalism as the only functional system that can ever be.

Moving on… The Japanese have also come. They, unlike the Koreans, have come more openly as capitalists, not cached in the selflessness of volunteerism. They rented or purchased about 5 hectares of land here in my village, on the site of the former Comice. They are paying my neighbors weekly (so it’s actually a good job) to work in the field that will very soon see its first rice harvest in generations. These are actually the guys who paid for the tractor work to be done on the land here that I talked about in my last blog entry. I talk about them like I’ve seen them or talked to them. I’ve never actually seen any Japanese person here. Ever. But people talk about them. People also have told me that the reason they are cultivating rice here is because there is some insect blight in Japan, so they’ve had to externalize their rice production. Apparently, if this is true, all this rice will head straight back to Japan. They are also farming NERICA, New Rice for Africa, which is a paddy-less culture that was likely introduced about 30 years ago, but never took off since rice is purchased much cheaper from Pakistan or Thailand.

And finally… I haven’t officially announced it yet, as I still have yet to receive official confirmation from both Peace Corps and the WWF, but I am hoping to spend next year volunteering in the Campo Ma’an National Park with WWF here in Cameroon. I am apparently a gluten for punishment. I mentioned earlier a cobalt reserve in the East, traversing to the Congo where there are no rules. Well what is the best way to exploit inland mineral (and probably forest) resources? A railroad, of course! In images that remind me of the Chinese building the US railway system, I picture a new kind of slave-driving, the Chinese as boss, Cameroonians as underpaid manual labor. And all for the profit of the Cameroonian ministers and the Chinese. Talk about echoes of 18th and 19th century Americas. All of this plays into the National Parks System here in Cameroon because the railway is going to at least skirt two national parks, Campo Ma’an being one of them. The railway will eventually head to an as-of-yet existing port in between Kribi and Campo, and will just miss the north-edge of the park. The potential consequences are unlimited, but mostly I am imagining heavy illegal logging with an easy way to get out of the forest (since the roads are so bad), forest fragmentation, climate change that necessarily comes with opening up the forest canopy, changes in animal migration patterns, increased marginalization of pygmie groups living in the forest or at least increased HIV/AIDS rates, and more hunting for bush meat in and around the park, as accessibility to the park will be opened up. We can thank our insatiable need for electronics and other consumer goods, growing middle class China, and our increasingly relatively poor world citizens, like the pygmies.

All of this is to say that we live in an increasingly globalized world, and even those who do not wish to participate or who can’t participate as consumers are the victims. And since China is going to be the number 1 world power very soon, one day we, too, may be the victims.