Travel in Cameroon

Thank you everyone for the Birthday wishes!  I am finally back with a new blog.  It has been a while because I have been fortunately busy among other reasons.  One such reason is it can be difficult to find a strong topic and be appropriately sensitive.  Last week however, inspired me to a topic that deserves proper criticism: Travel in Cameroon.

Lets start with the basics.  To leave my post to Ngaoundere, my banking city or Yaounde, the capital, I need to take a 45 minute motorcycle taxi ride (which is usually quite nice and beautiful) through the countryside to Tibati where I take a bush taxi to Ngaoundal.  A bush taxi is a worn down sedan where the driver attempts to fit as many persons and baggage as possible into the car to maximize profit.  This will usually mean four (often five) grown adults in the back seat, two in the passenger seat and one passenger sharing the drivers seat with the driver.  Not including babies and small children who fit into the laps of the squeezed adults.  Sometimes there will be a goat or chicken in the trunk with the luggage.  This journey use to take up to four hours but since smoothing out the road, it takes only two and half hours.  From there I spend the night with the local PCV and take a second class train ticket three and a half hours north to my banking city in Ngaoundere.  That is just for banking (and seeing my friend Jasmine and getting western goodies and wifi) where I spend the night and repeat the journey back down.  To go to Yaounde I take the night train, in a sleeper car or first class.  The trains are not too bad and inside first class and the sleeper cars, they are actually as nice or better than the train I took in Russia.  Just south of European standards, which is nothing to complain about.  Making them run properly can be the problem (I am not saying, “run on time” because that may come off a little fascist).  

That brings me to last Sunday.  I arrived in the evening to await the trains arrival and had dinner with Terry, the volunteer living there.  Upon getting to the station however, we learned the train was not coming, at all.  I was used to the train being up to five hours late and Rachel had experienced much worse, but a full cancellation was new and particularly aggravating since I was going to Yaounde for only two nights to see Rachel right before my Birthday.  Turns out a train derailed and although no one was hurt, the accident badly damaged the tracks.  I had to spend the next day in Ngaoundal (sharing my anxiety and lack of being with Rachel with poor Terry) before finally leaving Monday night.  I woke up the next morning a little before seven expecting to arrive in Yaounde within two hours.  Naive and silly me.  Another train derailed and I was told it would probably be several hours before the train continued to its destination.  After two hours of waiting, I leave with impeccable timing running into another PCV who happened to disembark at the same time from a different car.  We took a moto to a bush taxi to a bus and finally reached Yaounde in just two hours.   

Alas, I spent a lovely couple of days with Rachel and even got to have dinner with a friend of mine who I met in Paris and was a British-Cameroonian businessman who started a new and wonderful restaurant in Cameroon.  At that dinner he explained corruption in the infrastructure in Cameroon and gave examples of how some roads are better than other because they LACK government oversight.  Roads built directly with foreign money often turn out better because corruption eats away at the money provided for road construction.  Thats is why the road from Yaounde to the large city of Bamenda (Rachel's post) is so bad but the one from Bamenda to the Nigerian border is just fine.

On my way back to post, I heard another volunteer got stuck for several hours coming down to Yaounde on the train and sure enough going back, I was delayed too.  Only five hours this time. As I once heard from another volunteer, “In Cameroon, nothing works but everything works out.”

I hope you are all well.  

Disability Support Group Update!

Happy New Year Everyone!

Just a quick update on the disability support group in Mbakaou.  As I mentioned in an earlier last blogpost, I started focusing on persons with disabilities.  Between Rachel's formation and my New Years vacation with Rachel in the beach town of Kribi, I was able to better establish the support group!  L'Association de Handicape en Mbakaou now has nine members (and growing), administrative offices, a constitution, a membership fee and an action plan.  The group is a reflection of the dedication and work of the new members who hope to better support each other and develop new skills to fight the poverty that is so acute for persons with disabilities in rural Cameroon.  There are many problems with access, Cameroonian bureaucracy and starting income generating projects facing our group, however I believe the new group is well up to the challenges despite all they have going against them.

I hope you are all well!

Belated Happy New Year from Cameroon!

Dealing with Children

I’m back!  After going in and out of sickness over the past three weeks I thought a good place to start was where I believe I recently picked up a cold: at the primary school.  The health center was doing vaccinations for the measles in the whole community the week of Thanksgiving.  Although vaccinations are not part of my job, helping out in community wide efforts can be considered part of my job as is helping out with the health center.  In the United States, vaccinations are taken care of at a doctors office, health center or hospital, but in rural Cameroon, the health center has to actively seek out children and keep note of who was vaccinated by marking houses with chalk.  This vaccination was a little different.  We went to the schools to vaccinate each class and set up shop in the center of town at the Chiefs house. 

I was mostly active at the primary school, which was truly amusing to be a part of.  Usually the polio vaccinations are given orally through an eye dropper and don't encourage a lot of resistance form the young children.  However with the measles, the nurse gave them shots, and the kids were not excited about that.  Now in Cameroon, crying is highly looked down upon even among young children and immediately made fun of, thus each student was expected to take the shot as stoically as possible.  One of the health workers actually bullied the children who started crying and told them they were going to get two shots if they did not stop.  Ironically, the little kids starting at five years old often did the best job at not crying.  It was the twelve year olds that began to lose their minds when they saw the syringe.

Thus one of my jobs was holding down the children who were not convinced of the health benefits.  In two cases we had to chase a young male child down a road or into farm land so they could get the vaccine.  One time, the crying child completely out ran me and the other school children gleefully caught up to him and dragged him back holding him by each limb like we were going to draw and quarter him in Medieval England.  I felt kind of bad so I had them put him down and I walked him back holding his arm.  He was still in tears.  At some time that day I caught something from one of the kids, but I can’t complain since the vaccinations truly are worth the effort.

Nigeria is still classified as a country with polio and cases still inch into Cameroon.  In fact a few members of my support group and a few other Cameroonian's I know had polio as children.  It is an important reminder of why vaccines are so important and the impressive efforts of local volunteers who go out once a month to combat the spread of preventable diseases.  Even if the kids don’t agree.  

Addressing Persons with Disabilities in Rural Cameroon

Last week my girlfriend and colleague Rachel visited Mbakaou to initiate a health training at my local health center.  Let me take a step back.  While I have primarily worked in health education with my main supervising body being the local health center, Rachel works with a disability support organization in the Northwestern city of Bamenda.  She regularly works with persons with disabilities, performs workshops for groups of men and women with disabilities and goes on a weekly radio show to discuss different issues for persons with disabilities among other projects.  It is often unusual for there to be strong support systems for persons with disabilities even in a city.  In the country side it is even rarer and often dependent on support systems from nearby cities.  Such support is more common in the Northwest.  In places like my region of Adamawa, it can often be rare.  This is a large problem that is often ignored by foreign organizations despite the fact that 95% persons with disability in Cameroon live under the poverty line. Thus for the last few months we have been discussing a project that could bring increased support for persons living with disability in my rural Adamawa village of Mbakaou.

I finally got to show Rachel around my post and I got to see her for the first time in one and a half months (it takes two and a half days to get from my post to hers, it actually takes less time to get from the capital of Yaounde to the United States), but we wasted no time in getting to work. The day after she arrived we started a workshop at the health center to train health workers and community mobilizers on the struggles of people with disabilities, added vulnerabilities of persons with disabilities and statistics illustrating the situation.  Over the course of the two day workshop, ten health workers and community mobilizers attended the workshop, and eight of the ten attended the full two days.  Along with educating the volunteers about the struggles and vulnerabilities we had a series of activities to illustrate our points.  We had the volunteers write their name with their writing hand, then their non-writing hand, then their writing hand on top of a book on top of their head and then with their non-writing hand doing the same thing.  We also had them listen to a monologue with cotton balls in their ears and race each other to the health center wearing blindfolds with guides providing only verbal support. 

Rachel’s pre and post tests showed very encouraging results and proof of our volunteers new found appreciation and understanding of issues for persons with disabilities.  Yet the largest proof of the workshop encouraging the volunteers to be proactive with disabled individuals was their demand to start a new support group immediately.  Before Rachel left we had held our first disability support group meeting in the health center, created an action plan and a constitution and chose a leader for the group.  The individuals of the first meeting were all physically handicapped and some needed help from the community organizers getting to the meeting. 

Since that time, we have had another meeting coordinated by my friend and community organizer Mohammed “FBI” Yaya and myself with the group.  The group is in it’s early stages but I am excited that the members are clear about their interest and their agreed upon goal to start income generating activities.  I can only hope this is a beginning to greater progress for the members of the group and the disabled community as a whole in Mbakaou.

Still Alive!

Hey everyone! I am so sorry that I have not written in several months but I am finally back and hoping to be consistent this time.  Part of the difficulty of writing this blogpost is writing original, interesting and positive material.  Part of the Peace Corps objective is third goal, which basically entails representing the host country back in the United States, or at least describing it for Americans.  So here we go again.

Since I am getting back to work, it is worth talking about a new project as of August that is one of my top priorities right now, and that is house visits.  In the last few months I have had a handful of setbacks when two or three projects fell through and the main counterparts I work with have been busy, away, moving away or simply uninterested.  School has also been out of session and a large amount of people were away visiting families between Ramadan and school starting.  So I began performing house visits, in which I would go into a home, check to see if the homeowner has and uses a mosquito net, and discuss malaria with them as well.

This project is well worth mentioning because it gave me a chance to see how active people were in fighting such a relevant and dangerous disease in the community.  The results, to be blunt, were a little disappointing.  I would say about three quarters of the people I visited had mosquito nets but less than a quarter of those people actually used them.  What made this worse and more awkward was that most people told me they did not have them even when they did and they would insist that they were using them even when they were clearly tied up and had been for a longtime. They did this because they thought (incorrectly) I was giving them or registering them for new ones.  Thus I asked people to let me into their bedrooms (that was the awkward part) so I could see if they actually had  or used them.  Twice, I was standing in front of someone's house, asked if they had one, was told they didn't and then I pointed to the mosquito net through bedroom window behind them and asked what is that?

I understand why some of them lied, they wanted or needed another one. But what bothered me was it was often clear the ones they had were not being used in the first place and they were often tied up over the bed of the head of the household instead of being used for the most vulnerable: young children (and pregnant women).  This was a little disheartening but I used the time to encourage the use of the mosquito nets they had, explained how pregnant women could get them for free at a nearby hospital with a prenatal consultation and explained important details of malaria.

Recent news reports indicate that efforts to fight malaria have been working and showing impressive results.  However, as I have seen, efforts by governments and NGOs will only show truly significant results if individuals are as active in fighting malaria.  I also performed house visits in Bolinting where my counterpart Housseini was extremely active in promoting health in the community. Sure enough the difference was impressive. Many more people used their mosquito nets each night.  However even there far from the whole community had and used them, which is so important in fishing villages like Bolinting and Mbakaou.   I hope to see improvements in the future, since as of now, the malaria vaccine is far from ready and personal practices are the greatest protections from the number one killer in Africa.

I hope you are all well and I promise to get back to writing these on a more regular basis.

Fishing Season

Before arriving in Mbakaou for my service, I learned that Mbakaou was a major fishing town and that fish would be an essential part of my diet.  I was very concerned.  At the time, I was in training in the small landlocked village of Mengong, and I ate fish every single day with my host family.  They were good cooks but the quality of the fish was decent at best and I was eating EVERY SINGLE DAY.  Thus when I first learned I was going to cattle country (Adamawa is Cameroonian cattle country) I was very excited, until of course I found that the town in particular was the center of the regional fishing industry.  I didn’t know if I could do fish every single night for the next two years.

 However my concerns were soon washed away.  First, it’s still cattle country and beef is always part of the local diet. Second, when fishing season did start (last February, but really in full effect the last month or so), the Fish was amazing!!! On top of that, the fish is unbelievably cheap (even compared to other regions).  If I wanted a fish for lunch, namely one that had been caught that morning, I would go to one of the fish stands, choose my fish, watch it get grilled and then pay $0.40 to $0.80 cents for it!  For a good sized delicious fish!  Yes, translated into US dollars!  Also, it is well prepared healthy fish.  It’s not like other cheap things that seem too cheap to be considered healthy.  Like the vodka in Russia I heard about when I was there that costs less than a dollar.  STAY AWAY FROM THAT!  Like other seemingly innocent things in Russia, it could kill you.  Thankfully (and hopefully I am not jinxing myself), it is not the case for the fish of Mbakaou, Cameroon.  On top of that, mango and avocado season coincide with fishing season, which is a good sign for nutritional intake in town.

Despite the nutritious fish and increased incomes in the town, the fishing industry also has a few negative impacts on the area as well.  To start, many young men who would otherwise attend high school drop out to work in the relatively profitable fishing trade, much the same way several decades ago in the American rust belt, young men would drop out to work in coal mines (as a broad example).  This may provide immediate income for their families, but it is seasonal still relatively low income, and deprives both the town and Cameroon of educated individuals.  Also there are other negative effects to making one industry the center of a town’s economy especially when that industry is (legally speaking) seasonal.  Farming is also important, but aside from cattle raising it is often subsistent farming and is not as large as the fishing industry. 

Recently, I have also been learning more and more about the high HIV relevance in the fishing villages because of men who travel to the lake, fish and have relationships (or other sort of connections) with local women and then leave them behind. 

Finally, another concern has been raised in Africa in general and was particularly brought to light by a New York Times article, is the use of mosquito nets as fishing nets.  I have heard of it used in lake Mbakaou yet, however I have not seen it, but their use raises a lot of concerns.  First, people are not using their mosquito net to protect them from mosquitoes.  Living by a lake only makes them more vulnerable and most families only have one.  I am already having trouble convincing people to use their net primarily for their young children and pregnant women, who are the most vulnerable to malaria.  Moreover, while the nets are very effective in scooping up many fish (sometimes too many), they kill many fish because of the insecticide they use on the nets and they leave those toxins in the lake. 

All in all, fishing is an essential part of the town’s economy and lifestyle (including cuisine) and these problems need to be overcome so we can continue the fruits of the lake without major consequences.  I hope you are well and eating good food too!