Happy World AIDS Day! I'll be sure to write an update about today later in the week but for now I thought I'd post this short message I sent par request of my younger brother's school group. Enjoy!

************

Hi, my name is Kate Millman and I am a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroon, a small country on the west coast of central Africa. I live and work in a large village in the Adamaoua region called Bankim. Accurate and updated statistics are hard to come by, but we have a rough population of about 10,000 people who live in the center of town, and HIV/AIDS is a huge problem. It’s really hard to say exactly how many people have been infected because not only are we dealing with the virus but people are also up against stigmatization. Many people are positive, but afraid to be tested, others are tested and pay people off to say they’re negative, and still others lose their battle with AIDS and yet they go to their grave and their own families are still too afraid to say why. This coupled with large amount of transit workers and prostitutes that move through the area, has created a pretty serious situation in the village. So that’s my home in a nutshell… lots of truckers, lots of prostitutes, lots of stigma, too much fear.

However, even amongst all the fear, all the stigma, and all the despair, hope is not lost. Every time I see a child’s hand shoot into the air to ask a question after I teach a lesson on HIV, I know that child is the future and in the future we won’t be afraid to ask questions. Every time I hear someone from my men’s group passionately explain the need to show compassion to those living with HIV, I know that man is the future and in the future we won’t be afraid to love. And for every couple that comes into the health center to be tested before getting married I know that family is the future and in the future we won’t be afraid to know the truth. These are the things that keep me going.

In today’s world, we have a choice to make; we can choose to feel overwhelmed by the scale at which HIV/AIDS is affecting us. We can choose to turn a blind eye and simply ignore the problem hoping it will go away or someone else will fix it. Or we can empower people to take a stand, seek knowledge, show compassion, and find comfort in the small victories.

WORLD AIDS DAY 2010

Hello Everyone!

I’m working with a men’s group here in my village and we're doing a Red Ribbon Campaign for World AIDS Day on December 1st. The group wrote a pledge together and we’re planning to walk around the marketplace next Wednesday to try talk to people about HIV/AIDS, get signatures, and pass out ribbons to hang on storefronts. One of the things that I’m really trying to show them is that HIV/AIDS is a global problem and that on the 1st all the countries in the world will be united to talk openly about the disease and do HIV/AIDS activities.

Many people in my village think HIV/AIDS is just a problem for poor people in Africa, but the reality is that it affects us all. So I translated their pledge and put it online for people back in the states to sign, and hopefully I’ll be able to show them all the people who took their pledge at the end. If you could take 5 minuets to click on the link below, sign your name and encourage people to wear red on December 1st I would appreciate it a lot.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KNWDZ85

Thanks for all your support, and have a happy Thanksgiving!

Kate Millman
PCV Cameroon - Bankim


********************************************************
Here's a copy of the pledge:

WORLD AIDS DAY
1er December 2010

I pledge to show love and support towards those people who are living with HIV and AIDS. I will NOT be afraid of them and make them to leave the community. Instead I will eat and drink with them, play with them, sit with them, pray with them, and help them how I can.

For those who have already left us because of AIDS I promise to honor their memories by praying for them and helping the families they have left behind.

In an attempt to protect my family, and myself I also promise to be faithful to my husband or wife, use protection, and educate my children so we can have a future without HIV/AIDS.

A Post For Hunter

OK all you west coasters this blog is just for you. Hunter (my new neighbor down the road) asked me to post some pictures of Nyamboya for him cause the internet is really bad at the training site, so without further ado here are some shots of Hunter's new digs.

Hunter's House...





JUST KIDDING ;) This is Hunter's real house





Main street / Downtown Nyamboya



The road leading in to town just in case you want to come visit ;)

Only In Africa

Greetings to All My Stateside Friends,

I apologize that it’s been a few weeks since my last update, but I’ve been pretty busy as of late, and it seems like every time I get myself motivated to write inevitably the power goes out, or I get a visitor knocking at the door, or some other thing happens that takes me away from my task. But alas, I’m forcing myself to sit down, stay focused for a few minutes, and pump out an update (mostly to make my mother stop pestering me :p )

The Work Front:
Work is going well, as I am typing this I have just walked in the door from visiting one of the schools I teach at. I did two assemblies for classes 6,5,4, and 3 (the equivalent of elementary schoolers), and in honor of the upcoming World AIDS Day we talked about HIV/AIDS. I really like the school I was at today. The teachers are so nice and comparatively the children are pretty well behaved, no one got hit on the head or rapped on the knuckles with a stick today so I consider that a pretty good session (don’t worry I’m not the one doling out the corporal punishment;) ). Random comment about the school children; since working in the schools when ever I walk through Bankim or one of the other villages instead of hearing a chorus of kids yelling “Nassara Nassara (Whiteman, Whiteman)” now I’m greeted with “Madame Kate, Madame Kate!!!” which I makes me smile ☺
The mushrooms are growing nicely, they still have a few more weeks before they’re supposed to start sprouting the part you can eat, but from my novice mushroom growing experience they look like they’re on the right track.
I’m still working with the same Mbororo groups and things are still going well with them. The men’s group is organizing a Red Ribbon Campaign in the market for World AIDS Day that I’m pretty excited about. We’re supposed to be drafting an agreement at our next meeting that will say something to the tune of “ I promise to support and help care for people living with HIV/AIDS, remember those who have died, and do my part to protect myself and family from the spread of HIV/AIDS.” The plan is to walk through the market and talk to boutique owners for a few minutes and ask them if they want to sign the agreement, then if they do they get a red ribbon to wear or hang in the store as an outward sign that they are doing their part. It seems like a small thing but my community’s biggest hurdle they need to jump over is just admitting that there’s a problem. If we can just get people to open up and talk about it, even just for one day in December I’ll feel good about what we’ve done. Little Abdulie has really jumped on board with this and with him at the helm I think/ I hope this will really work ☺

NEWBIES!!!
Switching topics for a second, I have to talk about the new trainees that are being sent up here to the West Adamaoua. They had their site visit last week and three of them came and spent a couple of days with me and Beamer in Bankim. Well, mostly they were hanging out with me, because Beamer was suffering from a pretty severe case of Whiteman Overload (he just gets so excited because all the white people he knows aren’t afraid of him and get close enough to actually pet and love on him. Unfortunately four of us were just a little too much for this puppy to handle, so he spent a lot of time outside). So my new neighbors: Hunter is a recent UCLA graduate who’s being posted about 45 minuets away in Nyamboya, Jackie is from Oklahoma and she’s in Songklong about 1 ½ hours away, and then finally Shannon is replacing the volunteer up in Banyo and she’s about 4 hours away. All of them are great! I’m so looking forward to getting to know them better, but so far I think Aislynn and I really lucked out by getting some awesome new neighbors (thanks Sylvie!)
Aislynn and I talked about it before hand and we came to the conclusion that if these guys were gonna survive their first time on the Banyo Road that we all live on and still agree to come back at the end of training we would have to sweeten the deal with some home cooked American meals and a well deserved break from the homestay situation. For my part I made pizzas with… brace yourselves… cheese (fake cheese, but cheese none the less), banana pancakes, and chocolate cake, and then we went up to Mayo Darlé and had a Mexican fiesta on Halloween (fresh salsa, guacamole, rice, taco beans, and tortillas). I’m sure it must seem strange to some of you, but getting together to eat good food is sometimes the only thing that gets me through a difficult week or a trip on our roads ☺
When they were all in Bankim I took them to see how I work with one of my women’s groups. The women were great. I had made visits to most of their homes the week before to ask them if it was ok to bring some visitors next week and some of them seemed a bit skeptical especially since one of the visitors was going to be a man. So needless to say I was a little bit nervous that I wouldn’t have a good turn out, but to my pleasant surprise I had more women then I’ve ever had at a meeting before, they were all dressed to the T, and they participated (enthusiastically even) throughout the entire lesson. In short they were wonderful! I don’t think any of them will ever read this, but I just want to put it out there… YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME!!!
After Bankim we went up to Mayo Darlé to watch Aislynn teach a workshop on how to make soap. It just magically worked out that the night we were up there was also Halloween, and you know we couldn’t just let that pass us by, so we threw a small fete in Aisylnn’s house. We had pumpkins, candy apples, costumes, and dancing. Aislynn invited some of her friends from the village and they came for a little bit because the word fete was being thrown about, but I’m pretty sure they were thinking, “these are the crazy Americans I’ve ever seen!”, and I’m sure the fact that we were dressed up didn’t help their opinions ;)
After The Darlé we sent them off to their new villages. I met up with them a few days later, took them to Bafoussam, helped them open bank accounts, and then sent them back to the training site. I can’t speak for them, but I had a great time on Site Visit 2010 ☺

Random Little Antecdote
This was a story that as it was happening, I just kept thinking, “only in Africa, only in Africa”. Here’s the back-story first. So normally the rainy season ends at the end of September or the first few weeks of October (it might rain from time to time but for the most part the dry season has started to set in), but here we are into November and it’s still raining almost every day. As a result of this nonstop precipitation the roads are in TERRIBLE shape. It’s gotten so bad that if it rains during the night cars will refuse to even set out, and sometimes motorcycles won’t even give it a shot. Huge pot holes and ravines of water crisscross the route all the way up into the foot of the mountains and the trip to Mayo Darlé that normally takes 2 hours at max in the dry season took me 6 ½ hours a few weeks ago. People who live on this route including people in Bankim don’t seem to be capable of going 10 minutes without either commenting on the continued rain or the state of the roads (I’m totally guilty of this too). Now if you get in a car or hop onto the back of a moto it’s just commonplace to say something about the roads, and if you don’t people tend to think there is something wrong with you.
Ok now, back to my original story; after site visit I was coming back home in an agencé vehicle (a 16 passenger van with 25+ people in it) and found myself stopped on the road at a place Aislynn and I commonly refer to as “The Swimming Pools.” It’s right outside of Nyamboya (where Hunter is going) and it got the nick name because there are two holes in the road that are each roughly the equivalent in size to an in ground swimming pool. Just to help paint this picture, in the dry season I stood inside one of the “swimming pools” with my hands in the air and you still couldn’t see me from the road. Were talking massive massive potholes filled with water and mud that eat big 18 wheelers for breakfast. So, on this particular day everyone was stopped because one of these big trucks had jackknifed and tipped over on to its side completely blocking the road except for a small passable part that was playing host to a bush taxi that was sunk in the mud up to the drivers window (so on second thought not very passable). Predicting that we’d be there a while because there were at least a dozen trucks and a handful of agancé vehicles and bush taxis waiting to pass in each direction I got out to walk around and pass the time.
Whenever the road gets blocked like this people from Nyamboya trek out to sell oranges, bananas, peanuts, ect. to people stuck there and the place that a few hours before was nothing but a bend in the road is suddenly transformed into a busy market place with food stuffs from the tipped trucks strewn across the road and mommies and kids hawking their bowls full of this and that. Even though things are pretty lively after about 15 minutes you’ve seen it all and then the boring task of waiting for your car to be pushed/pulled out of the mud begins. Our car took about 2 hours to make it through, but I didn’t really have to much to complain about because I spent the time sitting on a prayer mat in the shade under one of the big trucks with two new friends. (side note: in my opinion the ability to make friends on the fly is one of the most useful skills a peace corps volunteer can have in their back pocket… thanks Dad for passing that one down to me ☺ ) One of them was a driver and the other was an Allahjihi (a Cameroonian VIP) from Banyo. They saw me walking around and when I greeted them in my very very very limited Fulfuldé, I guess they were impressed, because then they asked me to come sit in the shade with them to wait for the car. It was a so surreal and at the same time no big deal… there I was sitting on a mat, an Allahjihi to my left and a huge truck wheel to my right, drinking fresh milk out of a gourd and shooting the breeze with two people I’d just met 10 minutes before like we’d been friends for years. Only in Africa ☺

Super SuperPlus SuperGlue

This week was great, I’ve had legit work related stuff to do everyday and I’ve decided that working with kids is way way way easier then working with their parents. First off if you catch the kids when they’re in school they tend not to misbehave for fear that their teachers will whack them on the head with a stick. Another plus; as of this point no primary school child has asked me to “motivate” them to make them participate. And lastly I think I have a much stronger knack for talking to kids then talking to adults. All in all they’re a much easier crowd!

So to recap on the week, I spent Monday in Tchim, a village about an hour outside of mine, Tuesday in Dekie, about 45 minuets in the other direction, and Wednesday and Thursday in Bankim. In each place I met with class 5 and class 6 students in the primary schools (pretty much the equivalent to 5th and 6th graders) and gave assemblies on germs and diarrhea. The funny thing about the whole week was that in each of the 4 schools (Dekie has 2 schools) the entire day pretty much played out the exact same way. I’d walk in and go through all the protocol with the Principal, and then I would walk into each classroom to great the teachers until I made my way down to where I would be teaching. Upon entering each room all the children would very formally stand up, do a little bow/curtsy thing, and then in the most robot monotone voice you’ve ever heard they would say, “good-mor-ning-ma-dame.” I always responded with a cheerful “good morning!” back at them and then they would look at me like I was crazy.

Once I was actually in the classroom and everything was set up and introductions had been made I would start my lesson off by asking what is a germ, and every time without fail I would get nothing. It’s important to note that I wasn’t getting nothing because they didn’t know, it was more because I was asking them to participate in class. I mean I could have asked, what country do you live in and I still would have heard nothing but crickets chirping. After a bit of harassing finally one brave kid would raise his hand and spit out a textbook response. It’s the response that’s been drilled into their heads but upon further discovery I found that most of them don’t know what they’ve just said. So while yes, in fact, a germ is a tiny organism you can’t see with your naked eye, where germs come from, how they get in to our body, and what they do once they’re in, is something most of the students have never really thought about before, and that's kind of the crucial part of the equation.

So that was my goal for the lesson, and to answer those questions. We did some experiments, sang a song appropriately entitled “Comment es que le caca entre dans la bouche”, and played with puppets and green slime. I have to mention the puppet not only because he’s an homage to my creative genius ;) , but also because he was a big hit in the classroom. His name is Freddie the Fly, and Freddie has bit the dust not once, not twice, but three times this week and yet somehow he’s still managing to hang on. First Freddie was just made out of paper, which was fine until one kid decided Freddie needed to be washed with soap and water to get all the germs off him… I’m sure you can guess how that ended (but hey, at least he was paying attention). After I got back to Bankim I made a few alterations and Freddie got an upgrade to a tape laminated fly with a body of sewn together fabric scraps.
Day two he really held up well until I was on the way back to Bankim and Freddie the Fly literally flew out of my hand and off the motorcycle I was on.

Me: AHHHHHH STOP STOP STOP!
Driver: Hun? What? What happen, are you ok?
Me: Freddie!
Driver: Who? What?
Me: Wait you have to stop!
::moto stops, I jump off, run back down the road to retrieve the fly, and run back to the moto::
Driver: What is that?
Me: It’s my fly puppet
:: Driver looks at me like I am the craziest white man he’s ever met, and did I really just make him stop so I could go pick up a piece of paper?::

Thankfully apart from a bit of my personal dignity, the only thing lost was a few of Freddie’s legs ☺. When I got home I decided to use some pipe cleaner to replace all the legs to make them sturdier and bendy. When I was finished I steped back to take in my handy work and I was pretty satisfied. I figured this was gonna be the finished and final product… but no ☺
When I had finished it was getting late so I decided to hop in the bucket bath and then head to bed, but when I got out I saw that Freddy hat met his match as he was dangling from the jaws of my cute, cuddle, and destructive puppy. At that point I knew it was time to pull out the big guns, and by big guns I mean the Super, Super Plus Super glue (which is actually what was written on the container). It was one of those little bottles where you have to pierce the top with a pin to get it open. Now, I don’t have great lighting in my house so my face was up really close to the glue, and I was concentrating really hard to stick the safety pin in it. When I went to pull the pin out I wasn’t ready for the pressure release and I got superglued strait to the mouth. Unfortunately for me my mouth was open and the glue got all over my front teeth. After the initial panic that my lip was in fact stuck to the front of my teeth was painfully resolved, I got my toothbrush out and tried to get the glue off. I was brushing as hard has I possibly could but alas I couldn’t get the stuff off.
So there I was standing in my living room, toothbrush in hand, contemplating whether or not getting Super, Super Plus Super Glue stuck to my pearly whites was in fact a medical emergency. On the one hand how toxic could it really be if they were selling it on the street, on the other hand the man who sold it to me did pull it off the very top shelf of his boutique and the bottle did have a distinct, bootleg, blackmarketness look to it and what if it ate away at the tooth enamel! Ultimately I decided I needed a second opinion so I call Amanda (volunteer in the south) and she convinced me to just go ahead and call the medical duty phone. I’m gonna go ahead and say that calling up the medical officer (who happens to be bran new and whom I have never actually met) at 10:00 at night to tell him I got super glue stuck on my teeth has by far been one of my more embarrassing moments in this country to date. After I explained what happened he assured me it was probably not a big deal and that the glue would come off after a few days, but that I should try not to swallow any of it when it did start to come off because super glue tends to be toxic when ingested :0 It’s been two days now and it’s pretty much all off, so I think I’m in the clear.

Lessons Learned:
1. Don’t hold super glue up close to your face with your mouth open.
2. Three supers is two to many for any kind of glue ☺

WHAT DAY IS IT ???...

...(no it's not gameday) It's Global Hand-washing Day WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Here are few pictures of some of the men's group I work with making table cards in French, English, and Arabic reminding people to wash their hands with soap before they eat. Now every restaurant in Bankim has a card and a bar of soap for people to use in honor of Global Hand-washing Day!

The Good, The Bad, and The X-Men

written on Oct 6

::Deep sigh:: Man it feels like it’s been forever since I’ve had a chance to update this thing because I’ve been so occupied these past two weeks. However I’m not complaining because being “busy” is a luxury for Americans living in Cameroon. The pace of life is so much slower here than back home so when that rare moment comes when I can truly claim to be busy I like to relish in it a little. Since I last wrote I’ve been en brousse teaching about cholera (yes the thing that killed little Sarah on the Oregon Trail) as per the request of the district hospital because they’re pushing a big campaign on cholera education. Thankfully we haven’t had any cases in Bankim but that could change very quickly so they’re trying to get everyone prepared. I think it’s a good call because prevention of cholera is pretty standard for all waterborne diseases, and because the look on someone’s face when you tell them you get cholera from eating poop never gets old, I mean never. gets. old. ☺

Things are moving forward really nicely with the mushroom project. I’ve actually just returned today from the west where I met up with a volunteer who showed me how to make the medium they grow in. It was messy but not too hard and I think I’ll be able to handle it on my own now☺ I also met up with The Mushroom Man in Bafoussam. Side note: every time I started to talk to him I couldn’t help but start humming “Do you know the muffin man” except I changed the words in my head to “do you know the mushroom man, the mushroom man, the mushroom , oh do you know the mushroom who lives in Bafoussam” In case you’re wondering, which let's be honest I’m sure you are, the answer is yes. Yes, it is incredibly difficult to appear attentive, professional, and 23 years old with that minorly altered nursery rhyme playing on repeat in your head. In the end I was able to pull myself together, and ended up with a lot of great information and two mayonnaise jars full of mushroom spores. I decided to start a small test run this week with one or two women and if it works go full steam ahead. I know this is an odd request but if everyone could say a special prayer that I have a good mushroom harvest that would be greatly appreciated ;) ( I never in my life would have foreseen myself uttering those words!)

So that was the good part of my Bafoussam visit, but silly me I decided to end the afternoon by eating a street salad. Oh I should have known that was a bad idea from the start but it tastes so good and I never get to eat lettuce so I decided to take a chance. I’ll spare you the details but let's just say it was not my lucky day and I spent the night getting very well acquainted with the bathroom floor… BLAH.

The car ride back home today was pretty uneventful except that I was the last one to buy my ticket so I was stuck in the back row with a family of 6 (three on the seat three on the laps and me, aka 7 people in a seat made for 4). I had the window seat so it really wasn’t that bad 'cause I could stick half myself out the window but about three hours in one of the kids got sick. Now, have you ever seen that episode of the office where Pam’s preggers and Dwight makes her vomit by eating a hard boiled egg in front of her and then there’s a chain reaction throughout the entire office… ya well it was kind of like that. The one girl started it and then the other two chain barffed and no lie, it took every ounce of self control in my body not to keep the wave going…it was gross. I only got a direct hit from one of the three but it was a doozy. Needless to say not one of my favorite memories of Cameroon, but noteworthy nonetheless.

Ok I don’t want to finish this entry on a bad/gross note so I’ll end with this one. Last Saturday while waiting for a meeting to start I was sitting with a bunch of women in someone’s living room watching The X-Men with French voice over. (Keep in mind most of these women live en brousse without electricity, so needless to say they don’t watch a lot of television). We turned it on right around the end of the movie when there’s that epic good-guy bad-guy battle in the Statue of Liberty. I told them that I had actually just seen the Statue of Liberty a few weeks before I came to Cameroon and that seemed to interest them a bit. I answered a few questions about it and then we all kept watching the movie. About five minutes later there’s this other scene where Magneto uses his super powers to fly up to the very top of the statue, turn everyone into mutants, and then take over the world. It was at that moment that the women sitting next to me turned and in all seriousness asked, “Can people in America Fly? Madame Kate CAN YOU FLY?” After I finished laughing for a solid 2 minutes I told her that no I unfortunately can not fly even through some days I wish I could (especially the days I have to do banking in Bafoussam)… I’m telling you, I can’t even make this stuff up ☺