IT'S A BOY

It’s official! The count has gone from 17 to 18 next door with the arrival of baby Ibrahim. My neighbor Ieassatou had her baby yesterday evening and both baby and mom are doing great. As I’m writing this I’ve actually just come from visiting and congratulating the family and there is a contagious sense of excitement in the air. Now seeing as how babies have never really been my forte and in the past I’ve lived by the general rule of thumb, "If you can’t hold your head up, I can’t hold you,” I had intended to make it a short and sweet visit, but I should have know better, because nothing in Cameroon is short and sweet.

I entered the compound, greeted the husband, and gave him some soap (the traditional baby gift in these parts). Then someone grabbed my hand, led me past an assortment of distant relatives, and next thing I know I’m sitting on the bed with the baby in my arms. Now I’m definitely not the baby whisperer, but I did manage not to drop him or make him start crying (and he didn’t suck out my soul) so I would say overall it was a good visit.

In other news I now have my garden up and running (by that I mean there’s dirt and there are seeds in the dirt). It’s just the beginning of rainy season so everyone is scrambling to get their farms ready and I thought, well it couldn’t hurt to try. Normally my thumb is more brown than green, but from what I hear things grow really well in this part of the country, so what the heck I went for it! I enlisted the help of Kerry and Hadison (my 6 and 9 year old neighbors) and in about an hour the three of us had dugout a little garden in the back yard. I planted tomatoes, carrots, and green bell peppers, so now all I have to do is water and wait. Keep your fingers crossed that something pops up.

Nothing else all that exciting has been going on. I’ve been working en brousse (in the bush) this week talking about why vaccinations are important, but the normal nurse I work with is out so I’m working with someone else and I’m not exactly his biggest fan. Needless to say it hasn’t been the high point of my week. Hope all is well back in the states.

Until next time.

Kate

P.S. Thanks Adele and Dave for the Christmas card and ornament. They just arrived and absolutely made my day J

Greetings all!

First off I’m sorry that this post is coming so late in the week but I had my official site visit Wednesday and subsequently spent the first half of the week stressing out and trying to get things ready/making sure people didn’t flake out on me. I find that you have to repeat things multiple times on multiple days if you want people to remember appointments or meetings. Thus why even after I had told him two weeks ago, again one week ago, again last Sunday, and on Monday, on Tuesday (the day before site visit) my supervisor said and I quote “Your supervisor is coming tomorrow?!” But even with the short-term memory loss issues my colleagues face, all the prep work paid off because Sylvie (a.k.a my boss) had a great visit!

So how it works is, the APCD (head person for each sector) every three or four months will drive through the country and visit all the volunteers for their particular program and do research on new posts. My APCD is named Sylvie and she came through the West and Western Adamaoua this past week. She got into town at about 10 and we went strait to the Sous Prefecture to do protocol with all the important government officials. Only problem was that when we got there, there was no protocol to be had because all the big wigs were out of the office (even though I had gone and talked to them and made appointments ahead of time). It wasn’t exactly how I had hoped to kick things off, but it really wasn’t that big of a deal either and Sylvie didn’t seem to care too much.

Next up was a visit to the hospital where we had a meeting with Bernadette (my counterpart) and Hamajida (my supervisor). We talked about the work I was doing at the health center and what kind of assessments we had made together over the past couple of months. Everything went well and Sylvie seemed to be satisfied with things.

It was around noon when we left the hospital so we decided to grab some of Bankim’s famous grilled fish and took a break for lunch. After lunch we went to a meeting I had setup with Abdulie (president of MBOSCUDA) to talk about what kind of things we had been doing together. We talked for about an hour and all parties involved seemed really pumped about the collaboration. It was definitely the high point of the visit. I think it helps that Abdulie is such a passionate advocate for his people. Once he gets going you just can’t help but want to work with him!

We ended the day with a visit to my Wednesday community group where I gave a quick presentation on water sources and did a community mapping activity. It was short and sweet, and nothing to get super excited about, but I got my point across and proved that I am in fact capable of doing my job, which was the objective. All in all the visit was a big success. The boss is happy so I’m happy J

Other points of interest on the work front this week included, seven year old vs. snake, and first time mommy vs. health center staff. Snake first; so I went in on Thursday just to say hello and thank everyone for helping me out with site visit the day before, but when I got there I found everyone huddled around the door to the last room at the end of the ward. I made my way down there and immediately saw what we were all staring at. It was seven-year-old boy who had been bitten by a snake in his concession. It happened 3 days ago, but instead of coming right into the hospital the family waited and used some traditional medicine on it which ended up getting it infected and caused it to spread like whoa! The good news is that they put the kid on meds and he’s coming in every day to get the bandage changed so he should be fine in a couple of weeks, but its frustrating to know that the worst of it could have been avoided had they come straight in.

The other run in was similarly frustrating. It was Friday and I was helping out with the CPN visits (prenatal consultations) when we got a first time mother that came in refusing to get vaccinated. My initial thought was, well maybe she doesn’t know what it’s for so we tried to explain that these vaccinations are important to have a strong healthy baby… nothing. Then we asked her why she was refusing and from what I gathered her husband had forbidden her from having a needle pierce her skin. I should back up for a second; a lot of people in the Grand North practice scarification as part of their cultural tradition and once you do that you’re not technically supposed to let anything else scar your skin. Now from how it was explained to me most people take this to mean that you can’t perform the actual scaring ceremony more then once, but some people take it to the extreme, thus why this new mother wouldn’t let the nurses get more then a foot away from her with a syringe in their hand. For me the right thing to do is easy to see, but at the end of the day you can’t force a patient to receive treatment so that was that.

Other Random Things To Report

My rain dance paid off because the rainy season started Sunday. This is great news because the temperature has cooled off and the dust is for the most part gone. The only draw back is that rain = termite swarms, and at night they come out in full force. Sadly I learned that lesson the hard way when I left my door open and had my kitchen invaded.

This week has also been marked by power outages up the wazoo. I’m not really sure what their cause is but the power has gone out just about every night this week and a couple of the days. I am by no means complaining, cause some other volunteers never have electricity, but it has been the talk of the town as of late.

Finally, I got a surprise phone call at the beginning off the week with news that my college roommate is engaged! I’m very excited for her, as are all of my neighbors. How do my neighbors know you ask? Well when the power is out at night it’s pretty quite and when I found out I may or may not have done a little excited high pitch squealing, and my neighbors might have thought I was in trouble and they may have all come over to make sure I wasn’t being attacked. Anyways, everyone in my neighborhood is very happy for you Krista!

International Women’s Day 2010: Thanksgiving Meets The Prom At An Outdoor Music Festival

First a little bit of a work update, Wednesday I met with my Bamoun women’s group and they kind of blew me off, which was really frustrating because I had spent a good amount of time prepping for it. I even went next door ahead of time and told Raschiatou (my neighbor/the president) that I needed at least 30 min. for my lesson and she told me no problem, but then when I got there they only gave me like 5 minutes and I didn’t end up getting anything done. At first I was super pissed off, but then I found out why they cut me off early and felt kind of bad. Apparently one of the women in the group’s child had died the night before. They asked me if I was going to the Duoiy (the wake) with them and I didn’t feel like I could say no, but I was not mentally prepared for it. When we got there the father came out and said something (I have no idea what was said because it was all in Bamoun but according to Raschiatou he was explaining what happened. Apparently the kid was sick for a long time and when he recently got malaria his body was too weak to fight it off). Then there was a round of prayer, they passed around a picture of him, and then 10 painfully long minutes of silence except for the mother who was crying. It was terrible and all I wanted to do was cry, but no one else was and I didn’t want to put any attention on myself. In my experiences Cameroonians have very different ways of expressing grief, there’s no sobbing, no condoling, it seems like everything is internalized, but I would imagine that it’s a way to cope with death, because it plays such a major role in life here. I don’t know that I’ll ever get used to it.

On a much much lighter note Saturday I had my usual weekly meeting with MBOSCUDA, the Mbororo women’s group. Can I just say that they are my hardest group to work with because of the language and cultural barriers but they’re also hands down my favorite group of people in Bankim, and this past weekend just proved that once again.

So some background; the president of the groups daughter Rahinatou (aka my translator) was sick in the hospital all week so I had been to visit her and I was just trying to make small talk so I asked her how the Mbororo women celebrate Women’s Day and she told me that they don’t and that most of the members don’t even know what it is. From there I decided that that was not good, so with the permission of the Presidents of the men and women’s group we had a small women’s day party during our meeting.

We started off by talking about women’s day and how it started and what it was for and then went into why women are important and all the important things that we do to help our families and communities. We ended by eating a chocolate cake I had made and had a dance party with my ipod. Now if you know me you know dancing is not really my strong suite, but because they needed a little encouragement to get the dance party hopping I took one for the team and jumped into the dance circle (“hands in the air like you just don’t care” style). After a few minutes of my uncoordinated flailing everyone was up and dancing and having a good time. The group even taught me one of their dances and when they asked me to teach them an American dance I opted for the cupid shuffle. You can’t go wrong when they give you step by step dance instructions as part of the song ;)

Sunday I had an equally successful meeting with the Men’s side of MBOSCUDA. We had pretty much the same discussion but without the dance party. I was so happy with them and I think they actually got my point, or at least I know some of them did.

I started off with an icebreaker where I split them into small groups and asked them to pick the one thing that their wives do that is most important, and then I had them act it out in a little sketch. Going into it I was thinking this activity was kind of a crapshoot. I didn’t know if they would be into it but come to find out men pretending to be women is cross culturally funny. Some of them got really into it and it got everyone loosened up and laughing which made it much easier to move into the more serious discussion. We talked about how women’s day started and what it celebrates and why it’s important, and then wrapped it up with a brainstrom about the different ways to celebrate. I encouraged them all to say thank you to their wives, daughters, mothers and grandmothers on Monday.

Now in a perfect world I would have asked them to let the women’s group participate in the parade or the sports day or any of the activities with the rest of the women in Bankim, but in light of my recent gender faux pas I was trying to take baby steps so I had decided right off the bat to save that for next year. But then at the end when I asked if their were any questions one of then men (one that’s usually very quite and stern looking) out of the blue asked me how their women could participate with all the other women’s organizations. I was so surprised at first I wasn’t sure I had heard him right so I told them about how to get they could do it and it looks like next year MBOSCUDA will be represented in the festivities.

I went home on such a high. I was feeling great! Some days my job is frustrating and hard and seems impossible, but when things go right it makes it all worth it. The icing on the cake was the next day at the official celebration I ran into one of the Mbororo wives who told me her husband came home after the meeting and told her he wanted her to come today J Ahhhh Life Is Good!

Last point of interest for this week and probably the most obvious thing to hit on was the actual 8^th of March International Women’s Day. It was kind of a two-part affair. The first half of the day was a parade at the sous prefecture and the second half was a food expo in the center of town. If I had to sum the experience up simply I would say it was thanksgiving meets the prom at an outdoor music festival. Except that instead of limos and prom dresses we had motos and less than flattering women’s day fabric (you know it’s bad when yellow is your safest bet). Even so, when the motos pulled up everyone got presented over the speakers and then everybody else took that chance to look at what you were wearing and give you the one over. Personally I think I could have been wearing a potato sack and if it were in the women’s day fabric they would have been ecstatic. Anyways, once everyone showed up (easily a few hundred women) all the big wigs made speeches and then there was a parade of all the women’s groups in the area.

After the parade was over everyone migrated to the center of town where each of the groups set up and sell food native to their village or culture group. It was delicious! I ate way too much and I couldn’t really tell you what most of it was, but you can’t say no when some old mama puts a plate of food in front of you. My own contribution to the event was a small booth on how to cook with soy. It went ok, but I think next year I need to get someone to actually cook with it and have food to try because they don’t seem to be quite sold on it yet. I understand that it’s hard to change when you’ve been cooking the same way for hundreds of years, but it such an economically and nutritiously strong source of protein (that God knows most of these kids need badly) that they’re aren’t many down sides to using it except not knowing how.

Anyways, it’s now Tuesday and the party is over, and tomorrow it will be back to work, but overall I would say for my first 8^th of March celebration here in Cameroon I couldn’t have asked for a better experience!

first annual Mbororo women's day party

women's day skits with the mens group

This girl made my day!!!

Me and Bernadette at the parade

Hell Freezes Over!

Yesterday I sat down to write this but I really didn’t have anything to exciting to say, so I opted to wait a few days and I’m glad I did because I have I got a story for you, but first some background: Monday March 8^th is International Women’s day, but in true Cameroonian fashion you can’t just party for one day, you need a whole week of celebrating to lead up to the big day. Thus Women’s Day is actually Women’s Week, and the official festivities started today with Sports Day (kind of like a field day). Also in true Cameroonian fashion the planning process for women’s week didn’t start till today either. Now I’m not complaining, I’m all for a week long throw-down ;) but it does make it hard figure out what exactly is going on. So difficult in fact that one might find herself signed up to run in a foot race through the center of town…

Yes that’s right, unbeknownst to me one of my community groups, Femme Pour Christ, volunteered me to represent them in the “cross country” race (they call it cross country here, but It wasn’t as long as a American cross country race. However, it was still far for me; the non-running, walk-loving, Kate Millman. If you know me at all you know exactly what I’m talking about). Anyways after breakfast Beamer and I walk down to the Sous Prefecture (kind of like the equivalent to fair grounds) to watch the festivities. I was planning on doing the March with Beamer and Bernadette so I had my “fair de sport” clothes on, but when I got there to sign up much to my surprise I was given a runners ticket. My initial reaction was there’s no way in hell I’m running in a race in front of everyone in Bankim so they can see me red faced and wheezing, but then I figured if 40 year old mamas can do it so can I (and at least I wouldn’t finish last) Only problem was that I was in the youth bracket so i didn’t end up running with the mamas, I was with the very physically fit (because they work at the farm all day) twenty-somethings. By the time I realized this it was to late to back out, so I reasoned everyone would already be staring at me so what the hell… let’s do this.

The course itself was probably about a mile long and it went down main street, through the market and then back to the Sous Prefecture. Not super hard except that because everything runs on African time it didn’t get started till almost noon, so it was HOT HOT HOT!!! About half way through the race I had to run past a bush taxi passing through and they had opened all the windows and slowed down to a crawl to get a look at me. At first no one was saying anything, just staring, and it was kind of awkward because I was running at the same pace as the car, but then i heard a familiar voice. I looked in and it was Haua hootin and hollering for me (she’s on her way to Banyo for her sister-in-law’s wedding). Finally I was reaching the light at the end of the tunnel and I heard yet another familiar voice, only this one was on a microphone. Bernadette was the M.C. for the event and right as the finishing line was coming into sight I heard her on the loud speaker cheering me on. It was cute and it gave me a little extra push for the finish.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the race itself was actually kind of fun. Granted my performance was nothing to get excited about, to quote an old coach, “I looked like a fright train going in slow-motion”, but I did run the whole thing, and I didn’t finish last (or second to last ... or third to last for that matter J ) and I enjoyed seeing and hearing my friends in the market cheering me on by name. When I walked home later on every person I saw on they way said I “made sport quite well” and that they were happy to see me in the race… total lie about the running, but go for the ego none the less ;)

Other events for sports day included a speed walking race, sack races, basket ball (quite literally so, the object was to toss a ball into an actual basket) football, handball, and my personal favorite a beer chugging. The icing on the cake for that one was that the contestants for the chugging event were these two old beignet mamas.

So there you have it, it’s officially women’s week …let the festivities being!!! Not a bad way to celebrate being a member of the fairer sex if I do say so myself ;)