Saturday, December 18, 2010

Comice and Christmas

Well the Comice have been postponed until January, which I found out when I was on my way to Yaounde after waking up at 4:30 in the morning to catch the three hour bus there. At least I was able to stay in the Case, and I had to buy a few things for my house that I can't get in Lolodorf anyways. Also I took this picture of a dump truck that ran into a building near the Case.
Yup
Apparently this is not exactly the first time that this has happened. According to August the Comice used to happen every four years, but they stopped in 1990. After a ten year hiatus Paul Biya said in 2000 that there would be a Comice in 2004, which was then put off until 2006, and then put off till 2008, and then put off until 2010, and I guess since it will (supposedly) be in January it has been put off until 2011. That seems to be kind of how things work here.  I know a few people just from Lolodorf and Bibondi who had already left for Ebolowa just like me (except they don't get their travel expenses covered by the Peace Corps) and they just got left high and dry when they postponed the day before. There is a volunteer who unfortunately lives in the area that the Comice will be held, and she said that they are using entirely too much concrete in the cement mixture, and none of the buildings they have built are drying. This is of course to counteract the fact that usually they use too much sand in the mixture to save money, and all the concrete buildings start falling apart after just a few years. Sometimes it is hard to keep thinking you can make any difference whatsoever when there doesn’t seem to be anything that works like it is supposed to in the whole country.

At least my work is going really well, and even if the country as a whole is not going to completely turn around any time soon, I can do some good here in Bibondi. I already have some plans for projects I want to work on and just today when August was showing me the school that is being renovated he told me about the garden that they are going to start clearing the ground for in January. 

August is the guy with the cane, and this is the school.
All of the parents of the children are going to help, and when they sell the produce it is going to go towards hiring a new teacher because there are six classes and only five teachers, so the people from the village have to help out and teach some of the classes. I am going to work on the farm, and use it as a demonstration plot for Agroforestry techniques so that the rest of the community can see them in action. He was trying pretty hard to recruit me to teach English once a week for like an hour a day, which I am going to at least try. I also distributed all of toys that people sent me to all of the people I have met with young children to give to their kids for Christmas. I know that isn’t technically development work, but it does make you feel good.

When I was in Yaounde I also picked up a replacement for my broken bicycle pump, and I was able to explore the parts of the village I hadn’t seen yet on bike.
The rest of the village looks a lot like the other parts of the village.
I stopped to talk to a lot of people who where all pretty confused as to why some white guy was riding through their village on a bike, and unfortunately met up with one particularly drunk guy (it was before noon, but that is just how people roll here) who refused to believe that I was not French, and said that it was my fault that he didn’t have a nice house, or food to eat. I tried to tell him I was here as a volunteer, and I could help him if he had any problems with his farm, but I think between my broken French, and his drunkenness he didn't really understand. It kind of got me to thinking though, the developing world really is a completely separate world from the developed world, and I really am just kind of a visitor here. That night as I was on the internet I saw this map which kind of drives the point home.
On a lighter note here is a kid fishing.
I'm pretty sure he told me they were not biting
This will most likely be my last post before Christmas because I won't have my computer, so Merry Christmas everyone. I will be spending it on the beach, but I would trade the beach for Christmas in Michigan with all of you guys any day.

My Christmas Tree in Bibondi, Thanks to my Mom and Dad.
Also Happy Birthday Alex.



Monday, December 13, 2010

Paca-tastic

I feel like I should update right now because I will be traveling to the Comice Argo-Pastoral show in Ebolowa tomorrow early in the morning, and I will probably have a bunch of news from that. The local dialect here is called Ewondo, and everyone here is rather insistent that I learn it even though everyone speaks French which I am still having enough trouble with. The language is really cool but it has absolutely nothing in common with English so all the words are really hard for me to remember. Here is most of what I have learned thus far:

Embolo- Hello (this is really informal)
Mbebe Ngoge – Good evening
Ngoge Mbam – Response to good evening
Mbebe Kidi – Good morning
Kidi Mbab – Response to good morning
One Mvoe – How are you?
Mene Mvoe – I am good
Akeba (abwe) – Thank you (very much)

The PACA meeting went surprisingly well, and everyone seemed pretty motivated to be involved which kind of surprised me. It was held at the Chefferie in Bibondi, and it was reasonably well attended. After I was introduced to the neighborhood the people attending split up into three groups, the men (mostly the important older guys),

The guy in the corner is the Chef


the women,

and the young men.
There where more younger guys, but they where smoking/peeing when I took this

Each group came up with a list of the needs in the community, then they got together and made a list of the five most important. Then I made a chart of those, and they decided through “pairwise ranking” which was the most important.
ASS-GIC stands for associations and Gic's just FYI

As I said this went surprisingly well, as I thought the whole exercise was kind of silly, but it actually sparked quite a bit of discussion and debate amongst the groups. At the end of the meeting the people gave me a village name, Eyene, which is a common name there, and they said that I was a child of the village and that I can go to any ones house and eat dinner (I think that is kind of a form of welcoming me to the community).

I feel like I have already done a bunch of work in the little bit of time that I have been here, so that I don't feel to bad about going to the Agro-Pastoral show so soon after getting to post. I also plan on going some where for Christmas to meet up with some other volunteers, and I will probably spend New Years Eve in Yaounde. Also every morning the whole village is completely covered in fog, which looks really cool, but reminds me of silent hill a little too much, here is a picture.    
spooky.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

First Week at Post

As much as I hate the idea of having a blog, I decided that this was the easiest way to keep anyone who cared to stay up to date with what I am doing up to date. So the place I live is called Bikoka/Bibondi which is about 8k outside of Lolodorf in the Southern province of Cameroon. Bikoka and Bibondi are basically the same village, but there is a division about half of the way through pretty close to my house. The two are stretched out about 13k along a paved road, there are a couple of small boutiques, and a bar with cold beer (when there is electricity) pretty close to my house.
This is technically Bikoka

I live off the main road a little bit near the house of the General of Cameroon, and directly behind the house of another military official. Neither of them spend too much time in village, but I'm pretty sure that the fact that the General lives here is the reason that such a small village has running water, electricity, and a paved road. Lolodorf is a pretty small town and it pretty much just has one main street, and even though a lot of stuff is hard to track down, I am close enough to Yaounde that I shouldn’t have too much trouble finding anything I need. 
Lolodorf Main Street


The whole area is Virgin rainforest, and I am in the middle of a small mountain range, so it is all pretty beautiful which makes up a lot for the heat and humidity. 


This is what the rain forest looks like

Lolodorf was first colonized by the Germans (hence the name Lolodorf) and there are a lot of cool old , buildings that are in the process of disintegrating back into the jungle, as well as a surprising number of people who speak German.

This house was actually built by the French but whatever
Yesterday I went out and met the Chef of Bibondi (3rd degree), and today I met the Chef of Bikoka/Bibondi (2nd degree) the Chef of Bikoka (3rd degree) and the Chef of the community forest I will be working with. Apparently the plan is that I will go to each of the 13 different neighborhoods in the village (each neighborhood has its own chief in bringing the grand total to 17) and do do a small PACA event. PACA stands for Participatory Analysis for Community Action, and it supposedly works really well, but some the “tools” seem to be rather contrived, and others seem like things anybody in a new community would do anyways. According to Peace Corps that is all I am really supposed to accomplish in my first three months here, so it is nice to have a counterpart who is going to help me organize all of it, and I will hopefully be done by the end of January. My community host is the director of a technical high school called CAAFBI for girls where I might do some agricultural classes, but I don't really know what type of projects I will be working on yet (that’s what the PACA stuff is for) besides a tree nursery for fruit trees, and Soy, both of which I already know there is a lot of interest in. All of the farmers I have met thus far, and the Chef's have seemed really interested in helping me, but we will see how much motivation there is when it comes down to doing some work.

Moving in to my house has been rather strange, as this is the first time that I have had any time not surrounded by people 24 hours a day in over 3 months. Living with a Cameroonian family during stage was great to learn the culture, but after a few months it gets kind of annoying feeling like you are always under a microscope. It is nice to have a little sanctuary, but if I am not careful I could spend the better part of two years just sitting in my house seeing as I brought a bunch of drawing supplies, bought a guitar in Yaounde, and now I have access to the internet from home. My community host set me up in a pretty nice place with a working bathroom, two bedrooms, a living room, and an attached kitchen. The only way to get to the kitchen is from outside, and as of right now it is still a bedroom so I will have to install a counter, a sink, and buy a stove. For now I am getting all of my meals made for me by my community host, which will be fine for a while, but I don't want to have to eat on their schedule the whole time I am here. They also set me up with a couch, some chairs, shelves, a desk, two beds, and even some curtains for my living room. There is a little bit of work yet to be done in the house, but I am really lucky to have fallen into a mostly furnished house when opening a post because I just talked to someone else that is opening a post and he said that all he had in his house was his footlocker and a mattress. Students in Cameroon receive a grade for manual labor, and the girls from CAAFBI cleaned my house as part of their class which was pretty awesome.
My house

I am going to start getting more pictures of all the people I am working with, and the mountains so that I can post them here, but until then I guess that is all the news that I have.