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.