Bonsoir!
Greetings, not just from anywhere in Bazou, but from my HOUSE in Bazou where I have internet access now!!
Last week, I picked up my lovely little laptop from Yaounde, and last Friday I finally got internet access!! So how does internet here work?
I bought an Internet USB Key, and then now all I do is pay $10/month for 100 hours worth of internet per month! While it certainly isn’t super reliable and can be a bit slow, I have been able to Skype and even download some new songs! Not too shabby 
In other news, power is back! After nearly 6 days without electricity (and, consequently, running water), it has finally kicked back in this evening! Though part of the week was a brown-out (I could charge things but had no light in my house), it was still un-fun in the evenings. It seems that rainy season came a whole month early (a phenomenon that started 5 years ago, everyone says), so I’ve been able to catch water off my roof each night when we’ve had torrential downpours. Hello, buckets! Others aren’t quite so lucky and have to go fetch water from some other place far-far away. So I saw a lot of kids walking around with big jerrycans the past few days. Cheers to water/electricity being back!
Before: The bookshelf was mostly empty
Anyways, this past week, I’ve found myself busy at the library once more. Our one book-shelf, which was once looking a little bit empty, is now totally packed with books. In fact, we’re holding off on coding/shelving more books until we get new bookshelves built! There was also a big party for the new minister-of-something who comes from Bazou, and a lot of important people who were there came to stop by the library to take a peek at the new books, the new map, and just the library in general! We had 30+ visitors in one day, which is a LOT for our little village!
After: The shelf is packed with books now, and there are still plenty more to add!
Aside from that, Timothy and I also went exploring out “in the bush” when we went for a long run. Although my runs here are significantly shorter than my runs were in the States, it is SO hilly here. I struggled to do 2 miles when I first got in. However, last week, we did around 5-6 miles through SUPER hilly terrain. We went all the way out to a village where my friend, Romaline, works. When she heard that we had run all the way out there, she was totally shocked. Timothy and I may or may not have bragged to other Cameroonians about our feat. Sadly, though, one of our friends who is in ridiculously good shape had to one-up us by telling Timothy that he regularly runs out to that village…and PAST it…and then comes back to village. Darn.
The meat and taters of this blog entry: What do I do?
So I’ve kinda answered this before in previous blogs, and I think I’ll definitely need multiple blogs in the future to follow up on it as time goes on. However, right now, I’m still in assessment phase, and will be until late March, when all of us PCVs in my training group will have a big meeting to start thinking of slightly larger projects from the long-run.
Right now, I’m finding solid people to work with. I want to find people who WANT to work with me, but even more importantly, I want to find people who WANT to work for the good of the community. That can be tough.
So I’ve been attempting to have meetings with a lot of different groups and people thus far. If they immediately start asking me to provide them with incentives to work (“oh, maybe you should bring food to the next meeting.” “Oh, you should pay for our transportation.”), then that’s a huge red flag. I try to reason with them and tell them that that’s not sustainable, and I try to provide them with a different approach. Most of the time, that just doesn’t suit their wants, so they stop coming to meetings. It’s also totally normal to show up 1 hour late to a meeting (sometimes 2) in this country, so having a “packed” schedule just isn’t possible. It’s really weird to think how in the States, I could have literally 10 meetings in one day, but here, it’s a success if I have one good meeting in a day.
Sometimes I really wonder if I’ve let myself slack-off too much in this country. Should I have pushed a little harder for the meeting? Should I have reminded someone one more time to make sure they come to the meeting? Should I try to go to even more meetings? But after reflecting on this a bit, I’ve realized two things.
The first is that if I am the one constantly pushing people to do things here, then it can’t possibly be sustainable. Who will push them when I leave village? Who will remind them to go to meetings? Who will come up with the ideas? I’m trying to hand the power back over to the community, even though that can mean REALLY slow progress. I’ve already seen many failed projects because the NGOs weren’t in touch with the capabilities, wants, and needs of the communities themselves, and I refuse to spend 2 years in a country to end up with such dismal results. Even huge NGOs like UNICEF continue to “aid” the developing world in ways that end up either not working, or worse, crippling communities. I’ll get into that some other time.
Secondly, my postmate has pointed out that just living here in Cameroon is a job, on top of our regular “job” as Peace Corps Volunteers. I know it sounds like a really lame excuse, but here’s the reality: I don’t have a car here, I don’t have a laundry machine or a dryer, nor do I have a microwave or access to a supermarket with pre-made foods. So that means that when I want to go to buy my unprepared food, I have to walk over a mile to the market and a mile back home, only to come home and to have to prepare everything made from scratch. If I want to do my laundry, I can’t just dump it into a machine, so I have to fill my buckets and then wash my clothes by hand. If I don’t want to run out of water during the day, then I have to take time to fill all my buckets each day. It’s not that I don’t LIKE doing this stuff, in fact, it’s kind of nice to take things slowly. But the reality is that all of these things just take up a lot of time, and I guess it’s something that I didn’t quite anticipate being such a time-eater.
So, while, in theory, there is a LOT that could be accomplished in village (I would never deny that), I’m trying to strike a balance between letting my community take the initiative for their own needs while trying to assist them to meet their goals, and also just taking over an entire project that they neither have ownership over or enthusiasm for. And also, I’m trying to balance my “work life” and trying to just get through the day without running out of water!
And with that, HIGHS and LOWS.
HIGHS:
- Timothy and I made homemade fried Vietnamese spring rolls the other day, as well as chocolate cake (and we put Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in! Thanks Mom and Dad!). We (i.e. Timothy) made onion rings as well.
- Having my laptop with me means that not only am I connected to people back at home more easily, it also means that I can be more productive in work! It’s amazing how useful it’s been already. I’ve looked up cool science experiments to do with kids, prevention methods for different diseases, etc.
- The map looks great! We numbered all the countries and we’re on the home stretch now!
- I love sitting in my hammock.
- It’s actually nice and cold at night!
- Pumba keeps me highly entertained at all times. The other night she kept trying to go through my mosquito net to jump on my bed. After pushing her paws of multiple times, and then finally yelling at her, she trotted out of my room indignantly, to my relief. Five seconds later, she comes charging back into my room and tries to tear straight through my mosquito net. Silly dog.
- Pumba now has a hot pink neckerchief. Be jealous.
Hot pink bandana: CHECK! Poshest dog in Africa: CHECK!
- We got the old computer to start working in the library!! It’s pretty stinkin’ old, but we’re going to try to hook it up to internet and cool CD-ROMs that were donated to the library.
- I finally got some new songs on my iPod since I left the States. If you have any good songs to remember, send them over or send me the names of the songs!
- Light is back!! As is water!
- We showed an episode of Planet Earth to some of the library board members using the projector that belongs to the library. They thought it was pretty cool.
- I made it past day #150 in Cameroon last week!
- I love my post.
LOWS:
- There was a GIANT spider on my wall when I walked into my house the other night. Oh man. It was the size of my hand. When I sprayed this flat-wall-spider with insecticide, it suddenly un-flattened itself it popped up into 3-D life!!! Ahhhhh I almost had a heart attack!!!!
Huge spider! I'm standing far away though so it's kind of hard to see.
- Even though it’s nice to have rain, after the rains, if the clouds clear, we’re stuck with hotter and more humid weather. However, some days it just stays cloudy, and it’s super comfy.
- The early rains mean that crops get messed up here. That’s not cool.
- Most of my meetings with people this past week were a total fail for various reasons. But at least I had free time, right?
- Some guy told me that he wanted to marry me. When I declined, he told me he wanted to eat my dog.
- I couldn’t wash my hair on my normal every 4 days (it’s not as gross as it sounds…promise). But due to the water cut, I had to go 7 days. Less than pleasant.
- I found out through-the-grapevine that some lady that I had met a few weeks ago lost her newborn child due to complications. She had walked up to me and started asking me all about my work and wanted to help me out. Super super nice lady, and it was sad to hear the news.
- My neighbor’s latrine is full and overflows every time it rains. Which has been every night for the past season. Awesome.
Also, I just read this article: http://matadornetwork.com/change/7-worst-international-aid-ideas/. I found it really interesting.
Anywho, it’s bedtime for me! Au revoir!
Peace and love,
Wes
