... Into a pea soup dust storm

The ridiculous heat of the past few weeks ended abruptly yesterday. I woke up to find a morning haze. At first I thought that it was imminent rain, it had stormed in Garoua two nights before and it had been overcast in Kaélé for the better part of the week. It had even smelled like rain which was an otherworldly experience after the dry heat we had been having. But rains in March, a rare occurrence as it is, is just unseasonable. As the day progressed the haze grew in intensity and everything got covered with a fine talcum powder. I am not using “everything” lightly either. Even indoors all objects and surfaces are filmed with this cream-white dust, me included. I can see my fingerprints and footprints so clearly that I get the impression that my home is a crime scene. Everyone is saying that the dust is going to bring a plethora of illnesses and I do not doubt them. My nose and mouth are caked with dust and anybody with breathing problems is going to have a fine time. People in town walk with handkerchiefs wrapped around their mouths and noses, giving the impression that we are in the wild west and that the bandits have come to stay. Sore throats will abound, I am sure. Eyes are getting irritated but you can’t really rub them. I have noticed how useful eyelashes are in keeping most of the dust out of your eyes. It really is a bizarre season and everyone is anticipating the first rains with relish.

On other news my business classes started this past week. Though there are not as many participants as I had hoped for, the classes themselves are fun to do and they put me in a good mood. More and more people have been arriving, so with hope next week we should have 15 to 20 participants. Some of the students have enough experience to understand a lot of the concepts I am throwing at them while most are struggling to see where I am coming from. It is those students who I am more concerned about. All the women are in that group and they are shy and meek amongst their male class-mates who, in good Cameroonian fashion, will not hesitate in bringing down their self-worth. So far my strategy is to engage them more in the classes and to give them positions of responsibility in group activities. But that has not seemed to work yet, I will have to devise another method of getting them to speak up and speak out. If anybody has any suggestions, tell me! I could use any help available at this moment.

The partnership I had with a local NGO broke down last week. Though I did my duty and taught accounting to 51 GICs I left immediately afterwards since I have no interest in doing any further work with them. It all came to head in a final meeting before the date of the formation. Teaching modules, which were supposed to be completed and ready for printing, were not finished (presented at midday the day of the formation, halfway through the seminar). Likewise the schedule was changed and changed again. The budget was out of control and in all honesty I do not know if the NGO made a profit or not and I am sure that they do not either. It is principally the frustration of watching a group unravel all the planning ahead that was done 3 weeks in advance by simply continuing to do things their way, even though the agreement was that my post mate would be overall in charge and I would take care of the budget so that we could show them how a training seminar is organised efficiently and effectively. My opinion is that if someone does not accept your offer of help then you look for greener pastures; I am not going to waste my time with people who are unwilling to heed my words.

On a completely different note the new Peace Corps Country Director for Cameroon visited Kaélé this week. The Country Director position is the head of the Peace Corps in a country, so basically the new boss is in town. She was very engaging and was also very curious as to how things worked in Kaélé, what work I was involved with and what life in the Extreme North is like. I wish her all the best in her new role.
On a sadder note my cat died about a fortnight ago. I will miss his black and white cow splotches and his crooked tail. He was a fun little creature.

Hopefully the next time I update this blog the dust will have cleared but I doubt it. It will probably diminish somewhat and be accompanied by scorching heat until the first rains arrive. That may be May or June...

From the frying pan...

The cold season ended early this year. From a “cool” 13˚-35˚ Celsius temperature range we are now in the full blast of 17˚-50˚ Celsius range, and I am not exaggerating. Clothes drying out on the line don’t dry per se, they combust. I can’t wear jeans an hour after I’ve put them out to dry, not because they are still wet, far from it. It’s because the metal buttons and zippers on them are so hot that they burn my skin. Nowadays I wake up earlier than usual only because by 10:30 am it’s too hot to do anything. I am discovering new and novel ways of keeping my house cool. Shade jumping, something I’ve mentioned in my earlier posts, has become an art form now. Evenings and nights are blessedly cool but my house is still warm enough that it is unbearable to fall asleep inside... The lemon grass I planted next to my house is constantly dug up by my dog since it’s in the shade and watered twice a day. The cat also takes advantage of the industriousness of the dog... I am sure that I will find some fable that touches on that theme, perhaps there is a Muondang Aesop walking about.

In any case, aside from the heat I have had a lot of work these days. Since it’s the end of the final millet crop before rainy season there is little work for farmers. In the hot season there is nothing growing so the landscape looks more like a barren wasteland than ever before. People have more time on their hands and this is the time of year for meetings, formations and councils to take place. Incidentally I will begin teaching business classes in mid-March and continuing GIC formations with a group I have been working with since last December. A GIC is a French acronym for Groupement d’Initiative Commun or in English, a Common Initiative Group. It’s an entrepreneurship group to get businesses started. It was initiated by the government several years ago in an effort to build local businesses. These groups are exempt from paying taxes for the first 5 years after their formation as a way to encourage people to create more start-ups. Invariably, here in Kaélé at least, most if not all of the groups are dedicated to agriculture and livestock. There is not really a local market for anything else and transport costs are prohibitive. Thus I’ve been working with a local development organisation called ASPLAD-MK and my Peace Corps post mate to teach things such as project planning, financing, group management (amongst other things) to over 100 GICs in the Mayo-Kani Division (a division is basically a province of a Cameroonian region, of which there are 10 in the country).

As for the business classes, those will be starting on March 16th and I am aiming at having 30 people enrolled. In this respect I am continuing my predecessor’s work and using the material he left behind to see how things will work out. The first set of classes ought to finish in mid-April by which time I shall decide if I continue with a second cycle immediately afterwards. Other work has been continuing consulting with the clients of the Micro-Finance Institution I work with and teaching them business skills. Considering that these clients are mainly agricultural GICs, it’s not too different from the big formation I have been doing. It certainly seems that my work is heading towards agriculture at the moment. More information about the results of that will be coming soon!



This is also the beginning of the parade season. Last February we celebrated youth week with a grand old parade in which all the school kids paraded in front of our division prefect (highest representation of the government in the provinces), all the local ministry delegates and the Grands of Kaélé. It was a 3 hour long celebration of “youth” so ranging from the incredibly cute and funny toddlers “marching” in something resembling an order, to the sombre and serious student teachers who seemed to embody the meaning of “grim”. Local cheerleaders, called majorettes (for Europeans reading this they are like cheerleaders but are not, find your nearest American and ask him/her what the difference is) marched and “cheered” (if that’s the verb!) with one of the Kaélé high schools winning the competition. What follows the parade is Kaélians’ favourite past-time: drinks and bili-bili (millet beer). Invariably by the evening most people are too jolly for their own good and I took the opportunity to slip away and sleep. A couple of days before the youth parade I visited my stage mate in the village of Lara, 10kms away, to assist here Lycée’s bilingualism day. Poems were read, songs were sung and for a brief instant my English became garbled enough that I may not have passed my Key Stage 2s. Nonetheless it was encouraging to see some of the students make an honest attempt. The one thing with the Lara Lycée’s uniform is that its bright orange. When I first visited I got the impression that I was in a prison ward, followed by believing that I was at an Easy Jet training centre.



The other parade was Women’s day. I made a suit out of the green Women’s day pagné (cloth that you can buy and have made into clothes, or furniture covering for that matter) which led to many men asking me if I was a women and my chiding them on standing up for women’s rights. The speech before the parade was along a similar vein. A woman made a speech to the prefect with one phrase being “Thank you Mr. Prefect for giving us women’s day. Thank you our husbands for allowing us to leave our homes to celebrate Women’s day”. I may have been amongst the few who raised our eyebrows at that. The parade consisted of the prefect, the ministry delegates and other Grands (mainly men) sitting in a covered parade stand watching women parade ahead of us in the scorching sun. I came to the conclusion that these fêtes are not a venue to air out the issues to which they are dedicated. Nonetheless Women’s day was fun; a lot of debates with random men and more and more bili-bili as the evening progressed. By 8pm I made the effort to go to our local “celebrity” bar and was pleased to see women dancing. It is the only time I’ve ever seen women dance and a refreshing change from the rule of thumb. Normally it is only men who dance and when they do so they dance alone or with their reflections if there are mirrors handy. Nonetheless I was happy to leave promptly and go to bed around 8:30pm... a habit that is fast developing this hot season.




It is only the beginning of this heat, it will stay until the first rains arrive which may be in May or June so I will try and keep my head cool in the meantime.

Happy New Year to everyone!

My apologies to anyone following this blog, I have not kept it up to date since October. Many things have occurred since then, and I will make a greater effort at posting new entries more regularly.

So a lot has been going on since I last posted. Throughout the month of October I’ve been settling in more into life in Kaélé. The rains did not stop until November which was unusually late and made people concerned. When you measure your life by the seasons I suppose that the smallest perturbation is enough to make you worry. Nonetheless everything is dry as a bone aside from the Neem trees now, and it’s the cold season meaning that mornings are chilly (12-15˚ Celsius) but afternoons get hot, round the 30-35˚ Celsius mark. Considering that everyone back home is suffering from cold snaps and freezing, I feel somewhat content where I’m at right now!
During October I worked with individual entrepreneurs as a consultant. Things changed in November when I was asked to help organise an Artisan’s fair for the province of Kaélé, which is called Mayo Kani. Despite working for 3 weeks and enlisting over 100 artisans, overall organisation was stymied by last-minute rushes which were irritating since a lot of things could have been far better planned. Nonetheless there were a lot of people and most people seemed to have had a good time. The top 10 contestants went to Maroua for the regional fair and the top 3 winners were a traditional tools group, a soap and body-lotion making group and a traditional dance and music group (the last of which I am not entirely sure if it could be included in an artisanal and/or handiworks class but they were). There were a variety of crafts represented, from pottery to leather work, tailoring to metal work and more variety of crafts that would fall into handiworks. I was also asked to be the president of the jury which as it thankfully turned out was nothing as grand as the title seems to imply. At least it was good to see how a jury works and also what controls are in place to prevent rigging of the competition.




After the fair, which took up a considerable amount of my time, I travelled south to Yaoundé and to the beach resort town of Kribi for what is called In-Service Training (Peace Corps, loving its acronyms, calls it IST). That was most of mid-December and that was an incredible change from being in the North. For one thing, it was all green. Fruit cost a tenth of what I would pay back in Kaélé (if there were non-local fruit to begin with) and it was very humid. Being back in Yaoundé was also a drastic change in that there were cars everywhere, not motorcycles and I had my first Chinese meal in over 6 months. Likewise it was refreshing to be called “le blanc” rather than “Nassara” and I had gotten far used to the Grand North since I was shocked by women wearing trousers, jeans and skirts that end far too above the ankle to be deemed acceptable in villages I had visited.




Kribi was an even bigger change since the humidity was oppressive, it had been the first time I’d seen the ocean and eaten fresh fish and shrimp in over 7 to 8 months and also the first time in 3 months that I saw everyone I arrived in country with. Why Peace Corps thinks it’s a good idea to have a week-long work seminar at a resort town is beyond me, but I was very thankful for it! The beaches were white sand and lined by palm trees. The sun set regularly in Brazil’s direction and the water was incredibly warm for being the Atlantic. It felt more like the Mediterranean in July, but I expect that that is what you get at tropical beaches, especially a stone throw’s away from the Equator. The work itself was acceptable though there were things that could have been jettisoned from the program and others that could have been better planned out. But when you have 29 Americans and 29 Cameroonians to cater to, I suppose you have to find a middle ground. After work we invariably went to the beach to hang out and pass the evening sunset or went for meals in town or at the beach. As I already said, I hadn’t had fresh fish and shrimp in a long time but what was available there was simply incredible, and those of you who know me well know that I’ve never been a fish person. So I suppose that it is no surprise that the crustacean that Cameroon got its name from is simply spectacular.

All beach excursions have to come to an end though, and on my way back up I spent Christmas Eve in Ngaoundéré, the final stop of the train to the Grand North. It was only a couple of volunteers and I in our transit house in the city but it was a very enjoyable one. We made do with what ingredients were available to us, so we managed to order a roast chicken and made salad, ratatouille and potatoes au gratin to go with the main meal and baked an “apple crumble cobbler” for the desert. It was spectacular to say the least! Ngaoundéré is also a beautiful city when you leave the area around the train station, and I consider it the closest thing I’ve seen to Switzerland in Cameroon on account of houses being made of stone and some even having chimneys. It’s obviously not Switzerland though since I woke up to the minarets calling the faithful to prayer on Christmas morning. Christmas day was spent travelling to Kaélé with my other postmate and it was a relief to finally arrive home. Pazzo had grown a lot in only 3 weeks of my being away and my kitten, which is called Furbo, had likewise grown up some. Things had gotten drier and browner in the time I’d been away but everyone was incredibly welcoming when I got back, so all in all it was a great first African Christmas.



The past couple of weeks I’ve kept myself busy with a project planning and management seminar as well as by hosting some other volunteers who decided to spend the holidays visiting the Grand North. Aside from that I believe that I may relax from all the hectic travelling and decide with what Lycées I will be working with and how I will go about teaching business classes to the women´s group in Kaélé.
So a brief update of what has gone on, and a lot has not been included, but rest assured that I will be more rigorous with my blog from now on!