First Meetings

Hello! Sorry for the delay of this post, partly due to lack of electricy/internet, and partly due to poor health (feeling much better, thank you!), I now present you with this weeks’ tales!

This past week has been extremely enlightening for me. I got a chance to really work for the first time. Alice, the volunteer that I replaced, worked with a group of women called “Meres Communitaire” (mothers of the community). I’m not sure if she founded the group or just pointed it into a different direction. Regardless, I inherited this group from her. They meet once a month to discuss a different health topic and then spend that month doing one-on-one, non-formal education with people in their neighborhood. The idea is that they can pass this information on while shelling peanuts together in front of their house. It’s a method to relay basic health information to the community and also to have a point person for someone to go to if they have basic questions without having to go to the hospital (there aren’t any private doctor offices here) or the traditional medicine men (I’ve met a few, they are great, and sometimes surprisingly well informed. One, in fact, practices according to a French textbook called “Plants for Health”- that’s roughly translated- this is ironic considering that A: most people can’t read at all, B: few people speak French let alone read it, C: he has this book in the first place-book stores are hard to come by, D: he practices a “traditional” art using information from a modern textbook).

So I went to the meeting a little blind, not quite sure what to expect or what was expected of me. Needless to say, I screwed that part up quite a bit. Unbeknownst to me, I was supposed to text everyone in the group the night before reminding them of the meeting, and I was supposed to have a presentation ready and be ready to actually lead the meeting. An hour and a half after the meeting was supposed to have started, there was me with one other member (my very good friend). After I had figured out about the texting part and sent everyone a text, about half the members showed up, about 3 hours after the meeting was supposed to have started. Please note, late start times are not unusual for Cameroonians. Time means very little to them, as it probably does in many agricultural-focused societies. There’s a bunch of theories I have surrounding this issue, but I’ll go into that on a later post.

Peace Corps greatest advice in training: fake it till you make it. So that’s what I did, and, by the way, I feel I did an amazing job of this, considering inside I was dying of self-consciousness. I got up and led the meeting. I had my friend translate into Kapsiki for me. I told them that I was using this meeting to introduce myself, and meet them, rather than for instruction on a topic. We had a question and answer session about their last topic (diarrhea in children, signs, symptoms and treatments, and when to go to the hospital) and that was it. And it went well! People were happy at the end of it. I felt good about it! Or well as good as I could feel, considering. And it’s a project to start on, to make my own. For next month, I’ll be presenting on basic childhood nutrition: food groups, amounts of food, ect.

The next day, I had my first veteran’s group meeting. This is also a club that Alice belonged to, but I feel like her role in this group was really just for fun. They play soccer sometimes on Saturdays and it’s a group of pretty prestigious men and women from the community. Unfortunately, my first meeting with them, was their first meeting of the year, meaning they elected a new board, reread and redid their constitution, made and changed rules and fees, ect. It ended up being almost 5 hours long. Comedic break of the day, I was nominated to be their secretary. I’m literally laughing just thinking about it. Those of you who know me know my chicken scratch handwriting. I have never, ever met anyone with worse handwriting than mine, excluding children below the age of 6. In addition, they choose the person least fluent in French in the whole room! (this was a group of well-educated, fairly well off people who had all attended school, and were therefore well-versed in French) I laughed and gracefully declined, but it felt good to be included and thought of.

It felt great to be out and about and seeing the kinds of projects that I could and would be doing. This week, I met with the principal of one of the schools and we talked about some possibilities there. I went “into the bush” with one of friends at the hospital and helped with vaccinations. Work just got going this week. I’m feeling more and more hopeful and seeing more and more possibilities for future projects. I keep saying future because, according to Peace Corps policy, the first three months are for us to assimilate and integrate, starting nothing new, just assessing our community and getting involved. After In-Service Training in March (at which point we will learn about funding opportunities and other project-oriented information) we may start projects in our community. So for now, I’m just scoping out the lay of the land and trying to pick up where Alice left off.

After the veteran’s club meeting, I came home to find that my power had gone out. It was in fact out in the whole town. No big deal I thought. I pulled out my headlamp, and proceeded life as usual, thinking the power would be back in the morning. But it wasn’t. I was out for almost a week. My computer was dead before the power shut off. My kindle died day 3, as did my phone. My ipod died day 4. For the first time in Africa, I was experiencing a no-technology life. I had gone for a long time in Bokito without power. But we could always hop over to Bafia and charge up for the day. It was an interesting, enlightening, and in some ways empowering experience. I don’t really think that I’ve ever been that disconnected: not even having a phone, or at least not in a very long time. Come on, I’m coming to Africa directly from MIT where every corner of campus is wired with high speed wireless and everyone has a smart phone attached to their hands at all times. It’s a different life here.

And at night, it was absolutely amazing.

 It was completely silent.

I mean no crickets, no electric hum, no music playing somewhere down the street; completely quiet. Every once in a while a donkey bray can be heard, or the puppies getting hungry in the middle of the night, but other than that: nothing. Just astounding. The stars too, just gorgeous. If the moon hadn’t been so bright, I bet you could have seen just about any star. I’m in the mountains in the middle of the desert, I am so lucky. When the weather gets a little warmer, I’m going to sleep outside and just stare at the millions of stars that can be seen from my backyard. There’s never a cloud to block them out, no light pollution to blot them out, they are crystal clear and bright.

So yeah, that’s my week in a nutshell. It’s been an interesting one. As always, full of new experiences. I learned how to make a new dish with one of my friends: it’s called Briulle. It’s like a porridge that you drink, very high calorie, a breakfast food. I make a mean Bruille. Anyways, like is good. Missing you all back home, enjoying life here. Salutations from Mogode!