A Shift in Perspective

It occurred to me a few days ago when my family asked via Skype to tell them something wild I had seen recently that I hardly know what’s noteworthy anymore. A year in, what once made me scramble for my camera I now hardly notice. And what I was once offended by often just makes me sigh roll my eyes.

When I first arrived in Bafia, I remember being awed by so many things: the pagne, the things people carry on their heads, the chicken/goat/cattle traffic jams, the mud huts, the motos on every corner, motos in pirogues, motos on top of other motos, the bushmeat, Baka pygmies, the massive trees… And I was alarmed by things too: people drinking sachets (tiny bags of booze) in any setting and at any time of day, infants hanging by one arm on speeding motos, nine other people crammed into my four-seat row for a ten-hour voyage, people pooping in the middle of the street, people screaming my skin color at me everywhere I go, people asking for handouts almost every day, corrupt cops, corrupt NGOs, corrupt government officials…

It’s so different than life in the States that it sometimes offends our sensibilities. The in-your-face nature of things can be overwhelming. The boundaries and standards that we are used to are different (ie customer service), and sometimes just plain non-existent (ie personal space and privacy).

About a month ago I hit a low point in dealing with this part of life in Cameroon. For the previous few months I had been growing more outwardly hostile. I was becoming more and more impatient, irritable, argumentative, suspicious, and judgmental. The lowest point was probably this day: I was first jolted awake by a woman screaming outside my door at 5:30am, then had my landlord ask me for the second time to front him six months of rent, then had a man I had never met or even seen before insist that I give him money because he knew someone that I knew, and then had the young woman who does my laundry tell me that her brothers had stolen my clothes – all before 8am. Deciding I needed some time alone, I tried to cut the outside world off by closing all my doors and windows but had four more persistent visitors over the course of the day – three neighborhood boys who wanted to borrow my bike, make them some food, or give them one of my USB keys, and one man I had met only once before who asked me to give him a pair of pants.

Cameroon just does not stop being Cameroon. It is relentless.

Which is why that day also helped me realize what I was most frustrated about: my lack of control over these external things. I was never going to get greedy people to stop stealing from their sisters or their community members. I was never going to make every Cameroonian realize that I resent being asked for material donations. I was never going to get everybody who schedules a meeting for noon to show up at noon. Never. If I didn’t shift my attitude about these things they were going to drive me crazy. And so I decided to give up on the idea of changing them. And I just let go.

Remarkably, this has allowed me to appreciate some things I hadn’t before, and the negative things even seem to have dwindled – partly because I’m just not so alarmed by them anymore, but partly because I have consciously tried to turn their volume down. The not-so-perfect parts of Cameroon are easy to spot and often easier to pay more attention to, but attempting to look past them has freed up some energy to appreciate things I took for granted. The girl who does my laundry has bad brothers but she also had the impressively disciplined idea to ask me to guard the money I owe her so she can save and pay for her daughter’s school fees. Kids still come by my house every day, but they do so because they like hanging out and playing sports with me. The people who reach through the window and shove peanuts in my face do so because they are trying to make a living in a hard environment – and more often than not if I just smile at them they will return it with a much bigger smile.

So much of the attention we see as harassment is just an attempt to interact with us. Some of it is definitely harassment, but some of it is simply a crude way of engaging with people they never get the chance to directly. Sometimes its too much: the groping of female volunteers is never fun, and the SONEL employees who cut power a few hours every other day to steal and sell the fuel elsewhere will never stop making me mad. But there’s no reason I should make the kid yelling ‘Le Blanc!’ pay for my anger at the SONEL employee. There’s no reason to assume that the price I’m quoted is always 5x higher than the real price. It may be, but it can also be a good entry point for cajoling and joking with the vendeur and making him your friend. Most of the time that’s all people want anyway.

Make no mistake, the ‘letting go’ is still a work in progress. But the goal is to have more energy to give to the people who will make Cameroon a better place.

Savings and Loan Association project

There are no banks in Lomié. There are no microfinance institutes (MFIs) either. In fact, the history of banking here – and microfinance in particular – is not good here. Without going into more detail or personal asides (or any more than the previous post), large-scale financial services have not worked here.

But for decades, Cameroonian friends and neighbors have belonged to small savings and loan groups called tontines. Each week, people pool their money and choose one recipient to pay back the loan at their convenience, interest free. This same model was introduced in Lomié about 15 or 20 years ago. It works because the groups are self-selected and self-regulated, resulting in loan repayment rates of nearly 100%. Mohammed Yunus’ Grameen Bank model is similar, in that it uses social solidarity (or pressure, perhaps) to ensure loan repayment. And because it circumvents more rigid social hierarchies (such as India’s caste system or the elevated role of men in patriarchal societies like Cameroon’s), they are not typically targets for corrupt public officials and/or bank managers.

Generally speaking, tontine meetings (which usually take place weekly) are uncomplicated. Everyone saves a minimum designated amount and the group chooses one person to receive the loan. Often, though, they don’t work as well as they could; book-keeping methods are poor or non-existent, the president has too much influence over the group, loan recipients are not disclosed to the rest of the members…

To provide an alternative to these challenges, a savings and loan experiment called a VSLA (village savings and loan association) was created by a mix of local residents and development workers from CARE, Oxfam, Plan International and others. It works similarly to a tontine, but has built in systems to encourage transparency, equality, and sound financial management practices among its members. I recently started one of these groups with 11 vendors in Lomié’s daily market.

The nuts and bolts of our group work like this:

• Members choose one another based on requirements agreed to in a constitution, written by the members (with some guidance by the VSLA model and me).
• Each week the members meet to save money. Every fourth meeting (monthly) people can take out loans.
• Savings are composed of shares, equal to an amount designated by the group (in the case of my group, 2,500 fCFA – about $5). Each week a member can purchase anywhere from one to five shares, saving anywhere from 2,500 to 12,500 fCFA.
• After an initial period of five weeks to save up capital, the first people can begin taking out loans equal to no more than three times their total savings (if they’ve saved 10,000CFA, for example, they can take out 30,000CFA). This combination of savings and lending both encourages savings (in that they can’t take out a loan without saving at least a third of the loan’s value) and ensures higher repayment rates as the loans are all taken from within the group.
• A monthly service fee of 10% is charged on all outstanding loans. It is essentially the interest rate but we don’t call it that for two reasons: 1) Technically ‘interest’ is something charged by an outside lender. Since loan funds come from inside the group we call it a ‘service fee’. 2) “Interest” is specifically forbidden in the Koran, and about 20-25% of Lomié (as in Cameroon) is Muslim.
• Meetings are managed by a committee (Comité de Gestion) which includes the following roles:
  • President – calls meetings to order, manages flow, keeps things on track, and ensures that the Constitution is followed by all members.
  • Secretary – keeps written track of all of the members’ savings, loans, repayments, and fees.
  • Treasurer – keeps the money box and brings it to each meeting (see pic of box below)
  • Two (2) Money-counters – count the money saved, loans disbursed, fees gained, and social solidarity money being contributed each week
  • Three (3) Key-keepers – responsible for bringing the keys to open the box to each meeting.

My group has been saving for four weeks now, and their fifth meeting will be Saturday. This Saturday will be the first loan distribution meeting. I haven’t actually been there for the last two savings meetings since I have been in Yaoundé helping to design the training for the next group of Community Economic Development and Education volunteers. I was ecstatic to hear that not only have the meetings been taking place regularly and smoothly in my absence, but the group has already saved 117,000 CFA (about $240)!

Here’s a pic of the meeting where we finalized the Constitution and elected the Management Committee:

Estelle

I’ve written before about the severity of corruption here. It infects every aspect of life. From govt to businesses to non-profits to members of your own family. Take the case of Estelle:

Estelle is actually an example of everything that’s right with hardworking people in Cameroon. She’s 21 years old, has little education, multiple informal jobs, and one daughter. She is unmarried and lives in the same house as her extended family – her mother, daughter, at least one sister, and many cousins. She also works extremely hard. I originally hired her to wash my clothes, but she has picked up more and more responsibilities recently. She is also reliable, honest, and wants to work for her income – all refreshing and inspiring traits.

At first I was paying her the same amount I had been advised was a fair price – 200 CFA per item washed (about 40 cents, excluding socks and underwear which are free). One day a few months ago she came by with the usual sack of clean clothes and proposed something:

First, she said, I was paying too much. I like my clothes washed more frequently than most people here, which is fine, she said, but that meant I was paying too much for a clean wardrobe. She proposed that instead of paying per item I just pay a flat monthly fee and she would come by every few days to wash whatever was dirty. It’s also tough to save money, she said, and she needed savings to pay things like her daughter’s school fees. Instead of just exchanging clean clothes for money, she asked that I pay her a flat fee of 10,000 CFA/month (about $20) and guard it for her at my house. Then whenever she needed it for her daughter’s school fees or other investments she would come and get it. After having been frustrated by people’s inability or lack of desire to save for anything, I was highly impressed by her proposal.

She came by regularly, taking and returning clothes and reminding me every two or three weeks that it was time to have my floors washed. I kept track of monthly payments on a sheet of paper and had her look it over and sign it each month. At one point I gave her an old cell phone. That way, I told her, she could be in contact not only with me but with all of her clients. Everything was working great.

From time to time I noticed that she seemed frustrated. She’d take my bag of dirty clothes and leave quickly without saying goodbye, or I’d ask her how she’s doing and she’d reply “Ca va en peu” (It’s going a little) or sometimes “Ca ne va pas” (It’s not going).

A couple weeks ago she came to my house in frustration. She had taken my clothes almost a week before but I hadn’t seen or heard from her since then. The reason she was so late with my clothes, she said, was that her brothers (45 and 28, both of whom live in nearby houses) had stolen them – and not only my clothes, but a foam mattress she had recently bought for her and her daughter. She had spent the last week trying to track down the clothes and mattress before finally resorting to getting the local gendarmes (police) involved. Upon handing over the stolen items, her brothers claimed that since Estelle was unmarried and they were the men in the family they were entitled to her possessions.

This kind of petty theft and subjugation of women is not uncommon here. Theft is common not just from those perceived to have money (ie Peace Corps volunteers or white tourists), but from anyone that has something someone else wants – whether it be govt officials, NGO directors, bank managers, or anyone else. Traditional gender roles and strict hierarchies are often exploited as a justification to line one’s own pockets. In the case of my stolen clothes and Estelle’s mattress, her brothers justified their own greed and laziness by claiming familial male entitlement.

I don’t feel threatened in this country, as the level of violence is fairly low, but I am extremely bothered by the pervasiveness of corruption, greed, and petty crime. My sympathetic self might suggest that anyone who lives day-to-day does such things partly out of necessity, but it’s not that simple. People who have plenty steal anyway. One public official in my town insists on charging money to show up at events he is invited to. The director of one prominent NGO in my town is the former manager of an MFI here, and he is commonly understood to have stolen money from that MFI. That MFI, in fact, is the last of four in Lomié – all four of which have failed because the managers and/or board of directors created ghost loans and stole all the savers’ money. I have never felt physically threatened, but I have been pick-pocketed. My house has never been broken into (though I know many volunteers who haven’t been so lucky), but I am asked constantly for money and gifts by neighbors, community members, and people I have never met. I have never been held up but by gun or knifepoint but I have given a loan to someone I thought was a friend only to have him promise to pay me back a tiny portion of the loan and simply blow me off time and time again.

The experience of Estelle is the perfect example of how this kind of attitude cuts development efforts off at the knees. When greed prevents people from allowing their neighbor, community member, or own sister from working toward their own advancement everyone loses. People dismiss, pacify or make excuses for this mentality by saying “T.I.A.” (This Is Africa), or suggesting that it’s a cultural fact of life that Westerners or ignorant/arrogant development agents have no right to criticize or try to change.

But that’s nonsense. Just ask Estelle.

Dutch group visit

Between March 16 and 22, I hosted a group of seventeen Dutch students (including two professors/chaperones) from a group called Green Experience. They actually found me through this blog, where they told me of their plans to come to the area. They came to the East region to do agriculture, health/sanitation and ecotourism projects in Batouri and Lomié. In Batouri they did a sanitation project, helped teach tomato-growing techniques, and participated in a number of cultural activities. Their time in Lomié helped them to experience a more rural side of Cameroon. With the help of my host institution, GeoAid Cameroon, and its agriculture program coordinator Octave Ondoua, we built the following program of activities: (excerpted from a report given to GeoAid International)

Friday, March 16: After the group’s evening arrival, they were accompanied to a local hotel that I had arranged for them, and then plans were made for the week’s activities.  

Saturday, March 17: After the long journey to Lomié, many of the students were much in need of some rest and recovery. Heeding the necessary protocol, however, Octave took the delegation to meet local authorities, and then led an impromptu visit of GeoAid’s offices and other sites in town.

Sunday, March 18: Eager to see the variety of products (and particularly the selection of rare meats), the group went to the market early in the morning. Later, Octave and I took them to view a GeoAid-funded project, a local farm run by a Baka group, where the students asked many questions. They seemed most charmed and engrossed, however, by their Baka hosts.

Monday, March 19: Naturally, the group was eager to see what made the Lomié zone unique, and so a two-day hike around the Dja Reserve was arranged to take place the following two days. Later, the group visited a local pig farm and chicken farm (another GeoAid project), and then enjoyed a lunch of rice, beans, plantains, a dish of manioc leaves, and a local meat-based soup prepared by a friend and collaborator of mine. The meal was accompanied by a lively discussion of the challenges and opportunities for development in Cameroon. In the afternoon, the delegation toured the local technical high school, Lycée Technique, where they were impressed by the woodshop and computer lab facilities. The Dutch delegation then set up a microscope that they had brought, and many of the Cameroonian students eagerly (and a bit nervously) looked through it at some water that had been collected from a nearby garbage can. Communicating the importance of using a clean water supply for cooking and washing your hands had the desired effect, as the tiny microorganisms seemed to make their impression. 

Tuesday, March 20: For the group’s final two days, Octave and a local representative from ECOFAC (a multi-national agency that manages the Dja Reserve and other protected areas in Cameroon and Congo) accompanied them on a trek through the nearby Reserve, where they stayed overnight with a small group of Baka. A musical performance that night gave the Dutch students the opportunity to see firsthand an important part of the culture of one of Africa’s most marginalized groups.    

Wednesday, March 21: After they returned from the trek through the Dja, I and a Canadian volunteer organized a party and exchange for the Dutch group and a group of students from Quebec. They happened to be in Lomié at the same time studying the potential for ecotourism in the area.

Thursday, March 22: The group departed Lomié for Yaoundé, accompanied by me.

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Neighbor kids photo shoot

People often stop by my house to see what I’m up to. Mostly kids. If the door is open someone will inevitably poke their head inside. There’s also a dirt lot in front of my house, which makes for a great playground for throwing the baseball and (American) football around. A couple of weeks ago a group of kids gathered outside of my house to play. Shortly afterward my colleague returned a camera he had borrowed, and one of the kids quickly began snapping photos. Here are some of what he took. Boy do these kids love being on camera.

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Mt. Cameroon

I spent about a month traveling around the Western part of Cameroon starting the beginning of December. What an amazing trip. What an amazing country. And I haven’t even seen most of it.

A big highlight was climbing Mt. Cameroon, West Africa’s highest mountain at 4,040 metres (13,255 ft). My friend Renee, who was one of the team of six American volunteers that climbed it with me, wrote a good blog post about the climb so I’ll just direct you there for the story (http://useitforgood.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/climbing-mt-cameroon/). We spent three days on the mountain and saw about four different kinds of terrain – from alpine grassland to dense jungle to massive lava flows to summit rockpiles. Simply beautiful. See for yourself:

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Letter to an anonymous screamer

Dear Screamer,                                                                                                                     I can’t be sure that it’s you every time. It’s probably not. But it sounds like you most of the time, and I have something to ask of you. Beg of you, actually: Please find somewhere else to yell at people.

I try to make lemonade out of your sour morning screams and tell myself they are a good excuse to start my day earlier, but I have to tell you I’d rather be given the choice of when and how to wake. Birds would be fine. Children playing. The pitter-patter of lizards sunning themselves on my tin roof. Even the caw-ing of neighborhood roosters. But must it so frequently be you a mere few feet from my bedroom window? I get it – 6am is a perfectly natural time to be chopping wood or revving your moto for an extended period of time, and I get that yelling is a common form of communication here. I’m getting used to those things. But you have to know that someone lives in this house, and you have to know that not everyone is awake before 6am. Granted, you Cameroonians are early risers, but even if I were wide awake before the air-raid siren of your yelling pierced my eardrums, it can’t have escaped you that you’re leaning on someone’s house.

I’m not asking you to change. It’s just an issue of proximity. Let me illustrate:

A certain amount of noise is to be understood due to the occasional foot traffic around here. For an unknown reason, though, you are most often in the areas within about 20 feet of my home when your forceful wailing commences. Often closer. Your favorite spot, apparently – as this morning’s aria demonstrates – is around the area represented above by the large X. This spot is also closest to the corner occupied by my bedroom. You may have noticed that my walls are indeed made of concrete blocks and not mud bricks, but they do not – as you may think – absorb sound. Combined with my tin roof, they actually amplify and distribute it throughout the rest of the house. I also hear you in other nearby spots (represented above by the smaller x’s), but less often. If you’re wondering how I can be so sure of your exact location, I must reiterate that concrete does not muffle sound, nor does the ½-inch gap underneath my front door or the screen windows on three of the four sides of my house.

I admit that I struggle on such mornings to hold in my irritation and not run outside in my underwear. If your yelling lasted long enough for me to get properly dressed and go outside to confront you, I would. I have tried this on three occasions, actually, the latest of which was this morning. But by the time I am dressed and reach my bedroom door you have stopped. And when I reach the outside to see if you’re still standing nearby you are either nowhere to be found or too far away to avoid yelling after an old woman.

Which actually leaves me to wonder – can you hear me rustling? And if so why do you immediately stop? Is it because you know you’ve woken me and that I’m getting up to tell you about it? If so that’s messed up, because it means that you know exactly what you’re doing and you’re just playing with me.

Please, please help me avoid becoming a crazy person and setting my alarm for 4:30am so I can catch you in the act. Do me a favor: Whatever you’re saying that requires yelling, say it earlier, later, or just more quietly. Say what you need to say before you’re out of normal speaking range, or wait until you’re within such range. Or if you’re just the kind of person who yells when you talk, do it farther away. Because I’m telling you, you and me are getting ready to have a really awkward conversation where I don’t care that I’m the crazy grumpy guy outside in his underwear.

Dust tans and travel woes

It’s been a while since my last post, but for good reason: it’s been a busy month. In the last few weeks I have been traveling a lot, have picked up a number of side projects, and participated in an impressively well-organized multi-day health fair in and around the village of Messok (pics below). For an idea of the other projects I am currently working on check out the page entitled ‘Projects’.

I am currently writing from the Peace Corps case (pronounced ‘cause’) in the regional capitol of Bertoua. [Peace Corps has a number of houses throughout the country for the purpose of housing PCVs passing through the region or attending meetings or other work-related trips. Each case is equipped with comfortable beds, clean bathrooms, libraries, and internet. I can’t express how helpful these are to have, and I have to hand it to the PC Cameroon country directors for organizing and maintaining them. Not all PC countries have such a network of houses, so we are pretty lucky in this regard.] In the last few days I have been to Yaoundé, Bertoua, and Batouri on my way to an engagement party for PCV Jessica and her Cameroonian fiancé Jupiter in Batouri. The party was a great time (thanks to wonderful host Janelle), and it was really cool to meet up for the first time with the other PCVs in the East region. There are only 8 of us here out of ~180 volunteers in the country, despite the fact that the East is by far the largest region, encompassing about 1/5 of the country. It is also the least developed, which makes getting around a more difficult and a much longer process, but engenders a sense of unity among the volunteers here. Every Cameroon PCV has a travel woe story, but I have to admit that up until now I’ve been fairly spoiled. Travel in Cameroon, you see, is just not like most other places. And in the East, it is an entirely different beast. A giant, hairy, dirty, mean jungle beast.

My first taste of this was about a month ago, when I was supposed to come to Bertoua for the quarterly regional meeting, At about 6pm on a Saturday I bought a ticket for the voyage the next morning, where I was told to be at the station at 3:30am for departure to Abong-Mbang. There is only one road in either direction from Lomié – to the south, where you will find a few other tiny villages on the way to Congo, or to the north, where after 125km the network of paved roads begins at Abong-Mbang and you will find 95% of the population and 99.999% of the infrastructure of Cameroon. Needless to say the bus only goes in one direction – to the north, and it only leaves once a day – at 3:30am. When I arrived at 3:30am that Sunday there was no bus, only a handful of other sleepy passengers. And so I did what I was becoming accustomed to doing. I waited.

After about an hour I noticed people starting to trickle off and leave. Then I noticed that the man working the ticket counter (and ostensibly the man with all the information) was now nowhere to be found. But other people stayed, and not wanting to miss my one chance to get to Bertoua that day, I waited with them. After another hour or so had passed, an overloaded bush taxi pulled up to the station and 8 or 10 people piled out of the 5-passenger sedan. [All Cameroonian travel vehicles resemble clown cars, as any empty space is seen as an opportunity to fill it – with another person or two, or chickens, or plantains, or whatever.]

After the chauffeur had finished unloading the top of the car – which was stacked with bags as high as the car itself – I asked him if he had seen any sign of the bus from Abong-Mbang. He chuckled a bit and said he had seen it, but it was a ways back and that they had slid off the side of the road. The people in it, he said, had spent the night in the trapped bus, presumably trying to sleep crammed together like sweaty sardines. [This, I would later find out, is not uncommon during the heavy rainy reason, during October and November.] So after 2½ hours of waiting, I decided that I would check back later. When I checked back later in the afternoon, the bus was just arriving. The chauffeur, understandably, was exhausted and in a sour mood after having spent the last 34-odd hours in the bus, and would not be going back to Abong-Mbang that day. Considering how bad the roads were, there was no way I would make the 9am meeting in Bertoua even if the bus did indeed leave at 3:30am on Monday morning – which it never actually does.

This time, I was actually able to get out of town. I left Lomié at about 5am last Tuesday morning, after a violent thunderstorm had knocked out power and the cell phone network. Deciding it was a good time to be leaving town, there were an unusually large number of people waiting to take the bus that day. There are a few types of buses common in the East; the large Greyhound-style buses that go between Yaounde and other cities; ‘coasters’, which are a bit smaller and usually have about 21 passenger seats; and affectionately-named prison buses, which are smaller than coasters and have a grate in between the driver and the passengers (hence the name). The buses that go between Lomié and Abong-Mbang are coasters. In each row there are four seats, but Melo Voyages (the lone bus agency in Lomié) insists that there is actually room for five. On Tuesday, due to the large number of passengers, they put six – which is enough room for one cheek and a little more, but not an entire rear end. Children also do not count as passengers, no matter how old or large they are. So in my row that day there were actually ten people, 6 adults and four kids. On my left knee were two people – a woman with a baby on here lap, and on my right knee was the 5 or 6 year old son of another passenger. [It is also common to be handed a child or a chicken to hold onto for the duration of a trip, because as Cameroonians are fond of saying, Nous sommes ensemble (“We are together”).] Aside from the two times we had to get out to push the bus through the mud and the one time the gendarmes made use all get out, show our IDs, and take down all the baggage from the top of the bus in search of illegal bushmeat, I spent an uninterrupted ten hours like that. Which made the five-hour trip from Abong-Mbang to Yaoundé later that day a breeze. I have to admit, though, that there is a certain sense of togetherness that comes from trips like that. Misery loves company, after all. And nous sommes ensemble.

On each of the past three days I have also been in a bus for between 4 and 8 hours, so while I technically should have gone back to Lomié today, I’m taking the day to recoup and stretch my legs, whether PC likes it or not. Tomorrow is going to be another long day, after all. I just hope it doesn’t rain tonight, otherwise I may spend all night tomorrow crammed in a coaster like a sweaty sardine, with God knows who on my lap.

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My house

A number of you have asked about my house. Here it is. It’s not fully furnished yet, but as the Cameroonians say “petit à petit, l’oiseau fait son nid”.

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And so it begins

The problem with having waited so long between blog posts is that I hardly know where to start. Which is actually a great problem to have. Let me explain.

But first, let me set the scene:

I’ve been in Lomié a little over three weeks now, and it is quite a place. The town itself has about 3,000–5,000 people, give or take. It is situated in the Congo basin, and its topography is mostly steep rolling hills. The landscape is thick jungle interspersed with the occasional dirt road and footpath. Lomié is actually more of a cluster, as ‘town’ seems to imply a level of physical infrastructure that doesn’t really exist. There are cell phone and internet networks here, however, which makes it seem like a veritable metropolis compared to the surrounding 120 km. There is also a daily market, two hospitals (equipped with one doctor, a few nurses, and very basic meds), a number of churches (Catholic, Presbyterian, Muslim, Adventist, Jehovah’s Witness, Pentecostal, and some others), a handful of small restaurants and bars, and a few shops where one can buy everything from eggs to soap to second-hand clothing to machetes. There is no running water, so people get their general use water from wells (to wash clothes and dishes) and their drinking water from one source I have yet to see. There is electricity, but it goes out about every 3-4 days for periods of an hour to a day. The voltage also fluctuates regularly, so the more equipped among us use voltage regulators to avoid mechanical meltdowns and explosions. There is little in the way of refrigeration, so getting a cold drink is next to impossible, and the food variety offers next to nothing in the way of dairy or ‘ready-to-eat’ cuisine. Restaurants don’t have menus, because they never know what they’re going to have from one day to the next. Of the three times I’ve eaten at a restaurant here, I’ve only seen other diners once – a group of three local men who drank their meal in the form of ‘33’, sort of the Budweiser of Cameroon. [Once when I ordered a 33 with my fried plantains and fish (which always comes whole, skin on and head attached), I watched the waitress hand some money to a local girl, who ran over to buy it from a nearby stand and then brought it back to the waitress, who then handed it to me, dusty and warm.] The daily food market offers a wide selection of starches (manioc/cassava, cocoyams, corn), spices (garlic, black pepper, ginger), some limited fruits and veggies, and protein (both dried and fresh fish, as well as a wide array of bushmeat – which is exactly what it sounds like). What the market lacks in the way of food variety they make up for in locality and freshness, since besides drying there are no other preservation methods. As is customary with expats, I’ve lost about 20 lbs since arriving in Cameroon three months ago, but this is due more to the lack of saturated fats, sugar, and cheese in my grad school diet than malnutrition. I eat less frequently because I have to prepare all my food, but my diet is actually fairly well rounded. I am currently staying at the compound owned by my host institution, GeoAid. As of last week my house was ready to move into, but I don’t yet have a number of the things necessary to live there. I’ve already contracted a local carpenter to build a bed long enough to fit my 6’4 frame, but I still have to get a mattress (which comes in the form or a large foam pad, anywhere from 4-8 inches thick) and a gas tank for my stove, neither of which are available here. But this will all happen in due time.

In any case, those are the broad strokes of my life here.

A common frustration among PCVs is that we aren’t as busy as we’d like to be. Work – and by extension, purpose – can be hard to find. It takes time to acculturate, to get to know the needs of the community, and for the community to get to know and trust us. But if the whirlwind of these first few weeks is any indication of what my life will be like for the next two years, I’m in for an exciting time.

So far I have introduced myself to a fair number of local leaders and townspeople, traveled to villages and dwellings outside of Lomié, and seen most of the projects on which my host institution is working. I have helped build plantain tree greenhouses, shown a farming co-op how to more effectively dry corn, and met with a tiny community on the border of the DRC about their development needs. I have met Baka pygmies, farmers, wildlife preservationists, shopkeepers, local dignitaries, a drunken near-blind riverboat captain, and a stuttering bushmeat hunter. I have eaten plants and animals I didn’t know existed, and I have seen jungle flora that resembles the set of Jurassic Park. And as of these past few days, I have some pretty good ideas for how to be effective within my host institution.

GeoAid International is an NGO that was set up about ten years ago by a mining company in this area in order to mitigate some of the negative side effects that go along with extractive industries. They are now independent, but see themselves as a liason between these industries and the communities in which they work. For the past couple of days, we have been traveling around southeastern Cameroon talking to mining companies about the work that GeoAid does and pitching them on potential collaboration. [The pitch: give us funding and we'll spearhead development programs in the communities in which you work. The community gets participatory health, agricultural, small enterprise and education programs, and you get community goodwill, good press, and can be in the leading pack on the corporate social responsibility front. That and we’ll make sure you're up to code on all the regulatory UNDP / World Bank / investment treaty stuff.]

After talking to the GeoAid Int’l staff, we’ve come up with a plan for me: my job in the next 3-6 months will be to build a community needs assessment pilot, train the GeoAid Cameroon staff on it, attend community health events in Lomié, Ngoyla, Messok, Mbalam, Ntam and Djoum, and provide feedback on how to improve such events going forward. There’s some useful overlap here too, as I was planning to conduct an informal assessment in Lomié anyway (a PACA or Participatory Analysis for Community Action for you PCVs, anthropologists, or development people out there). My hope is that this assessment will reveal some entry points for how I (either independently or with GeoAid) could be of best use to the local community, and that the lessons learned from a Lomié-based pilot study will help refine the assessment that GeoAid or its partners roll out in other communities. I have a lot of other ideas too, but I’m pretty psyched about this starting point.

But enough chatter. Here are some photos:

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