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.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Thursday, January 12, 2012
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
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).
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).
Saturday, November 26, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
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!
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!
Friday, September 9, 2011
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.
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.
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