Arriving in Cameroon – Take II

June 17, 2008

Last week I had a chance to relive the excitement and fear of arriving for the first time in Cameroon, this time on the faces of others. Tara and I were chosen to be the two volunteer hosts that welcome the incoming group of trainees. That means we would greet them at the airport and stay with them for their first five days in the hotel in Yaoundé. It would also mean lots of work and responsibility.

We showed up in Yaoundé a couple of days before their arrival to start getting ready. What tat meant was stopping by essentially every Peace Corps staff person in the office and figuring out what they needed from the trainees. It was anything from the IT guy needing them to sign off on guidelines before using Peace Corps computers to immigration forms so that they could get national identity cards. There were also three things that most of them would want/need their first week in country. They would need their US dollars changed into CFA. \The banks here don’t like to do it and/or charge big fees, so we needed to figure out who in the office would be going to the states and wanted to buy dollars. Cell phones – for safety and to be able to talk to their loved ones, we went out and priced phones at the two big competitors. Voltage regulators – you don’t just plug an iPod or a laptop into the wall here because of the power surges so we went and priced these too. During any free time, we stalked the new kids. Peace Corps gave us photos and résumés for everyone so we could start getting to know them and almost half had already found each other and started a group on facebook.

Saturday night they arrived. We met 38 trainees at the airport with the Country Director and lots of other Peace Corps staff. I was surprised at how excited and alert everyone was after 24 hours of traveling. It’s interesting, what I remembered from my arrival in the airport exactly 1 year ago was fear, but what I was seeing on their faces was excitement. They looked ready to go. There wasn’t a single bag lost during the trip so we loaded up everything and everyone on a big bus and headed to the hotel. We all had dinner at the hotel, and despite everyone’s excitement, everyone went to bed right after.

The next day was set aside for relaxation and recuperation. Most everyone took advantage of the free time to do some very small-scale exploring of the capital. Because they had arrived at night, this was their first chance to see Cameroon – people selling things balanced on their heads, what the shops and bars look like, and Yaoundé’s crazy style of driving (which looks normal to me already). While everyone with jetlag was out exploring, knowing how busy the week would be, I took a nap. That night everyone got fancied up for a nice catered dinner at the Country Director’s house. The US ambassador, Cameroonian government officials, and Peace Corps staff were there to welcome everyone to Cameroon. The food was great, but there were about 7 people that got sick later and the speculation was that it was this dinner. If getting sick was something they were afraid of, they got that out of the way early. Welcome to Cameroon?

The rest of the week, for the trainees, was filled with training sessions. They were getting more shots, learning about diarrhea, getting an introduction to Cameroonian culture, and getting ready to move in with a Cameroonian family. For Tara and me it was nonstop all over Yaoundé and the Peace Corps office. We exchanged their money, bought the things they had signed up for, filled out forms, gave a couple of the training sessions, gave back the Cameroonian money that was still owed them, and answered innumerable questions at every step of the way. It was all stuff that we knew we were getting into. We were the ones that had requested the job. And while it was worth it and I’d do it again in a heartbeat, it was way more tiring than we could have expected.

Thursday morning everyone repacked their bags to be loaded on two small buses and prepared to leave the capital for the training village and their home-stay families three hours away. Thinking back to how I was a year ago, words like naïve and clueless come to mind. I remember looking at our volunteer hosts and thinking “Will I really be that integrated and comfortable after one year?” They might have had the same thoughts going through their minds, but it didn’t come across to me. It was a great group. They all seemed mature, adventurous, and ready to take on anything. I think they’ll all make great volunteers.

Tim

What’s Wrong with Cameroon II – Upbringing

May 6, 2008

The first blog in this series got a lot of reaction. In the states I heard of and from lots of people inspired by my “call to action” that plan on sending books. And I even got reactions from Cameroonians. One of my fellow volunteers told me that someone in his village in the extreme north approached him wanting to argue against the points I had made. I was flattered. It means he takes pride in his country. But whether any or all of what I said was right or wrong, starting up a conversation about these topics could only be helpful. This blog’s topic: Upbringing. I’ll repeat the disclaimer. I’m not professing to be any kind of expert in stating my opinions of what I see wrong with Cameroon. They’re just that – opinions. I’ve been living in Cameroon for about a year now. I’ve been living a little better than the average Cameroonian, but no where close to the luxury of the average ex-patriot. I’ve been living among and working with Cameroonians on a day to day basis and this is what I see.

People have written books on nature vs. nurture – whether it’s your genes and biological makeup that make you who you are, or whether it’s the way in which you were raised. I think everyone can agree that it’s some combination of the two, and while I’m not going to argue which is more important, I’ll be sticking mainly with nurture – the way that children are raised.

Also to be noted is that a lot of what I might see as negative, someone else might see as just a cultural difference. Are these things actually impeding the development of the next generation of Cameroonians or am I just refusing to step out of my own perspective? I don’t know (not an expert, remember). I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are good things and I feel bad writing a lot of what I’m going to say, but these are the only things I can rationalize as causes of what everyone can agree are actual problems in Cameroon. Okay, I guess I’ll just jump in.

“A child is not only raised by its parents, but is a product of the entire village.” This is a concept that exists to my knowledge all over Cameroon. At first glance, it sounds great, like lessons and principles are taught by more than just the two parents. But if this idea is used to justify diminishing parental responsibility, it quickly becomes negative. What happens when parents don’t know where their children are or what they are doing? Tara’s two-and-a-half-year-old neighbor who can’t even put together a complete sentence wanders over to her house all the time. When Tara leaves the house, she follows and would be content to walk around with her anywhere in the town were she not led right back to her house each time. Another example is when Tara and I caught a 6-year-old girl smoking. She had found a still lit, half smoked cigarette in a pile of trash and was actually taking drags off of it. We were stunned. We told her sternly to throw it down and not pick it up again. After we walked by, we turned around and noticed that she had picked it up again and smoked some more. We ended up asking her where she lived and dragging her back, kicking and screaming, all the way to her home. When we got there we realized that her dad lives and works in another city and her mom had been away from the house for the last week. Who was taking care of her and all of her other siblings? Her oldest sister, about 15 years old.

Also to do with parenting is the way that children are viewed by society – their parents and others. There are different degrees of this, but a lot of times children are viewed as property whose role is to do chores and fetch things. If someone is sitting in a bar and wants some corn that is roasting across the street, the first thing he’ll do is look for a kid walking by that he can send to buy it. The kids lack identities in many situations too. Before they can talk, there name is bébé (even to most parents). Until they’re about 12, they’re most commonly referred to as petit. With most parenting styles they get little to no positive reinforcement. If they do something wrong, they’ll hear about it and probably get hit. Do something well and they won’t even know. In general, affection is just not shown to kids. In the US, we put a huge emphasis on education – life lessons and classical education in schools. The idea is that the generation below our own will be running the country and aspects of our lives when we get older. It just doesn’t feel like Cameroonians have this same mentality. This is probably an extreme case, but I had one Cameroonian tell me that he didn’t understand Americans’ obsession with their pets. “Once all your kids have grown up and left the house, Americans get a dog or cat to keep them company. But what happens when your wife is at the market? The dog can’t get you a beer.” He told me that when his last born leaves the house and gets married, that child will give his first born child to his parents (in lieu of them buying a dog).

Nutrition plays a role as well. This has mostly to do with poverty. If a mother can only afford starches with hardly any nutritional value and little else while she is pregnant, it can create learning disabilities and other problems with the developing fetus. Learning disabilities happen in all corners of the globe, but they seem more prevalent here. And once the child is going to school, not eating breakfast in the morning or not having money to pay for lunch often creates problems concentrating in class and on tests. Outside of class if the child is busy doing chores and working in the fields, they don’t have time to do their homework.

That leads to the education system itself. First problem – class size. Classes in any grade can easily get up to and over 100 students. This makes distractions more prevalent, makes it harder to hear the teacher and see the board, and takes away individual attention to the students and their questions. One other thing it probably takes away is the ability of teachers to plan dynamic lessons. Most of the emphasis in Cameroonian schools is placed on memorization and passing standardized tests. Most students are never taught critical thinking skills or encouraged to be creative. One example of a lack of creativity was Tara’s English class on Halloween. She taught them about the American holiday and made a short trick-or-treating skit that each student would reenact asking for candy and telling what they were dressed up as. They were encouraged to be whatever they wanted and to ask for the word in English if they didn’t know it. Of her 90 student class, all but 2 said they were dressed up as a witch or a princess (even boys) which were the only two examples she had given in class. The other two, if you’re interested, were a doctor and a Christian. Maybe also because of class size, class control and discipline are big problems. Although it is illegal, the most common forms of discipline are physical punishments. Students are hit all of the time. Some teachers carry around a rubber strap that they use to strike the kids with and just about every education volunteer has a horror story about someone coming into their class and hitting their students. Most teachers that refuse to hit their students make them kneel on their knees on the concrete floor for the rest of the class. Kids are also given cleaning and yard work responsibilities for misbehaving. Last but not least within the education system are payoffs. I’ll get more into corruption in my next blog, but this is one place where it happens. Money or sex for the high school exit exams, college entrance exams, and other things are not uncommon. This reduces students’ motivation to learn and doesn’t bring them to the realization that hard work pays off.

I wish I had a way for everyone back in the states to feel good about doing something to help some of these problems like I did with the reading issue. But I think the best way to go about dealing with most of these issues is for people to start having open conversations here in Cameroon. You can agree or disagree with anything I’ve said but the truth is that Cameroonian kids are the future of Cameroon and we should always be thinking of ways to mold them into better educated and more capable leaders and citizens.

Tim

Business Classes

May 30, 2008

Yesterday rapped up my first full round of business classes. I taught business and math skills at a girls' center in Baré early on, but it felt more like a warm-up to teaching. There were a couple of girls that I was proud to have taught, but a lot of them would talk, not pay attention, sleep, or just not show up. For the classes that I just finished, I did everything from start to finish. I marketed them, I found the classroom, I enrolled local entrepreneurs, and I taught the classes, adjusting preexisting Peace Corps-provided lesson plans to the needs of my community and my own teaching style.

There were 12 classes, each one lasting two hours. I only once a week, so finishing up a project that lasted 3 months felt like a pretty big accomplishment. The classes covered entrepreneurship, feasibility studies, goals and action plans, cash books, inventory, budgeting, marketing, income statements and balance sheets, leadership, financial services, and business plans. Planning the lessons, even already having lesson plans, was pretty time-intensive because (shhhh!) the majority of these things I’ve not even done in the US.

The last class was a couple of weeks ago, before my trip to Yaoundé, but last night was a reception that I planned so that I could give my students certificates proving completion of the course. Everyone paid $10 to take the class to offset the cost of photocopies and the classroom as well as to motivate them to be there each week. Photocopies are pretty cheap so there was a lot of money left over. It paid for a great spread of food and a room for the reception at my neighbor’s house. She runs a catering business and was the perfect person to know for the occasion.

For the vast majority of our work here as PCVs, we don’t get to see the fruits of our labor. Development is a slow process. Occasionally I’ll run into someone who’ll talk about a volunteer 10-15 years ago who changed their life, but in the here and now, we just have to hope that we’re making those kinds of positive impacts in peoples’ lives. So the reception last night was a rare and special occasion for me – an opportunity to receive positive recognition for the work that I’m doing here right now. There was even an impromptu moment where each of my about 20 students stood up one by one and shared why they thought the class was so important to their individual lives. I think the words that spoke to my the most were when someone stood up and talked about how those who have the means tend to leave the country for Europe of the US. The general thinking among far too many Cameroonians is that those living in Africa are suffering while everyone in the developed world is just living it up. This student was saying that my class empowered him to realize that he could succeed right here, that his hard work would pay off – the American Dream in Cameroon if you will. It was great to hear.

After everyone finished eating, I handed out the certificates one at a time and then we took pictures. Lots and lots of pictures – more than I took at my high school graduation. I even took pictures with the photographers that were there. This is a very Cameroonian thing to do and you just get used to it

So after about a year living in Cameroon, this was a nice boost to motivate me to continue doing what I’m doing. Next week when I pick up the new volunteers at the airport I’ll have one more positive experience to share.

Tim

Two Weeks in the Capital

May 18, 2008

Sorry about the hiatus on the blogs. My last blog got a lot of reaction and I’ll get back to that series in a short while, but I wanted to keep you updated with what I’m doing.

Last Thursday, I wrapped up my business class that I was running in Nkongsamba. It was a pretty rewarding experience. I think everyone really appreciated the information that was imparted and there are a few people that are already actively looking for ways to put it into practice. The class was 12 weeks – one 2-hour class per week. I taught business startup and feasibility studies, basic accounting, financial planning, and leadership among other subjects. When I head back to post, we’re going to have a small banquet and ceremony with the proceeds of the enrollment fees where I give everyone that passed a certificate from Peace Corps.

The day after my last class, I headed to Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital. This is where the Peace Corps headquarters is and where I and 15 other volunteers are planning the training for the next group of volunteers that get here on June 7th. The first week we spent discussing and making improvements to our own training. Then we put together the 11-week schedule and figured out who was going to teach what sessions. The program directors and other staff help teach, but it’s mostly current volunteers that run the sessions. We also put together arrangements for the incoming volunteers’ first few days in Cameroon. Tara and I were chosen to be “volunteer hosts” and will be greeting them at the airport, answering their many questions, and trying to help things run as smooth as possible.

This week, my second week in Yaoundé, will be spent doing “Training of Trainers.” This is where Peace Corps training staff will try to impart to us knowledge about learning styles, adult learning principles, and methods to make our sessions as effective as possible. These two weeks of seminars have so far been productive and well-organized, but exhausting.

It’s nice to be able to get out and relax when we have free time, but Yaoundé is expensive on a Peace Corps volunteer’s salary. I had a rather depressing moment yesterday as I went to a full-fledged supermarket for the first time in 12 months. The variety and selection were amazing, but so were the prices. Pretty much everything was imported and about twice the price of what I was used to in the states. All this while I’m making about 10% of my small non-profit salary I had back home. I ended up getting balsamic vinegar and a couple of soup mixes and forcing myself to pass on the incredibly tempting, endless varieties of cheese and ice cream.

Restaurants are expensive too, so we have been trying to make one big meal that everyone can chip in for each night. Enchilladas and soul food were the highlights, and we’re trying to put together some pizzas tonight. Staying in the volunteer transit house here in Yaoundé is nice: there is a washer and dryer, hot showers, lots of kitchen supplies, and a great DVD collection. It’s kind of like a little slice of home, but it gets old pretty quickly too. It’s kind of like a Peace Corps version of a frat house. There is a decent amount of drinking, people don’t get to bed until late, and keeping the place tidy is a constant struggle.

So that’s what I’m up to. Sorry for taking so long. I’ll try to get back to being more regular with my postings.

Tim

What's Wrong with Cameroon I - Reading

March 25, 2008

The national crisis a couple of weeks ago pushed back my “What’s Wrong with Cameroon” blog. So here’s the first installment. I’ll add the disclaimer again: I’m not professing to be any kind of expert in stating my opinions of what I see wrong with Cameroon. They’re just that – opinions. I’ve been living in Cameroon for almost 10 months now. I’ve been living a little better than the average Cameroonian, but no where close to the luxury of the average ex-patriot. I’ve been living among and working with Cameroonians on a day to day basis and this is what I see.



Reading, or lack thereof, is a problem with Cameroon. It took me a while to realize. It was actually another Peace Corps Volunteer, Autumn, that brought it to my attention first. In America I remember having existential conversations well into the morning about God, the meaning of life, and why we’re here. Autumn and I have similar feeling conversations about what’s wrong with the Country we’re living in and the best theoretical “fixes.”

“Cameroonians don’t read for pleasure.” She said. And right then I realized, she was right. I just doesn’t happen here. Whether for pleasure, for current events, or to further their own knowledge, Cameroonians, or the vast vast majority of them, don’t read. Autumn, although a Small Enterprise Development volunteer like me, has been teaching English classes at her local HS and trying to promote reading to her students. Most know how to read and write. That’s taught in schools, but once they’re out, and even while they’re in school, there are no books in their hands. That’s right, not even textbooks. They’re too expensive for most to afford. They average Cameroonian class consists of the teacher reading their notes and the students copying them down, essentially creating their own textbooks that they can study at home.

The only way to buy books in my town is from people on the sidewalks with 4 or 5 large stacks (and this is a big town – 200,000+). Most are “textbooks,” all used, all outdated, and all too expensive. Looking for something to help teach my business management classes, they didn’t have what I wanted and they wanted too much. Ten dollars is what he started at. I probably could have gotten him down to six, but for a used, outdated, 150 page softcover textbook in the developing world, it was too much. 20¢ for 5 tomatoes but $6 for a crappy book?

Let me jump back to my midnight conversation with Autumn. I was showing her a book that my mom had sent me in a package. It was a new release paperback that cost $14.99. Taking an average Cameroonian salary of $1920 (80,000F/month is estimating high), a 15 dollar book is 0.78% of their annual income. Taking an average American income of $30,000(estimating low), 0.78% is $234.00! Would you pay $234 for a new release paperback? No wonder no one reads and no wonder there are no real bookstores outside of the two largest cities in the country. To sell that book at the equivalent price in Cameroon based on the income difference would be to reduce the price to 96¢. Not only would that be impossible for publishers to do, but no one is accustomed to reading, and so they probably wouldn’t even pay 96¢ for a book.

That brings me to my business proposition, the 100F Bookshop, the final result of my midnight conversation with Autumn. My plans for after Peace Corps might include starting up a non-profit. The idea would be to collect used books in the states, ship them over to Cameroon (to one of the Anglophone provinces), and sell them for 100F (20¢). The books would be donated by average Americans, anything from trashy romance novels to quantum physics textbooks. The money to ship them would come from tax-deductible contributions. And the booksalses would pay the salary of a Cameroonian working in the shop. Everyone that I’ve talked to so far, Cameroonian and American, seems to like the idea.

And here’s where you come in. Beyond whether my idea is economically feasible or not, I want to know what kind of impact it can have. I want to get some experience putting books into people’s hands. So if you’ve got the money to ship them here, give me your books!

You can send ‘em here:
Rev. Tim Hartman
c/o US Embassy
B.P. 215 Yaoundé
CAMEROUN

Cameroon’s got some things wrong with it, but maybe you can help me slowly get things going on the right track.

Tim

CONSOLIDATION Vacation

March 6, 2008

You probably missed it, but there was a national crisis in Cameroon last week. It was bad enough that Peace Corps in Washington almost evacuated all of us. It started Monday, the 25th, with a strike of all the taxi and moto drivers because of the price of gas. It should be noted that this halted probably 95% of transportation as only the rich own cars. After the drivers decided to strike, the rest of the population soon followed. They decided that the cost of living had gotten too high and that they would strike too, to lower the price of soap, cooking oil, and other products – prices all controlled by the government. So on Monday morning, everyone was on foot, and by the afternoon, all businesses were closed. At this point, Peace Corps told us that we were on ALERT status, meaning we shouldn’t travel (not like we could), we should be keeping up to date with the news and letting administration know what was going on in our towns.

Dan, who lives in a tiny town in the mountains, was planning on traveling to Baré that day. He never got the ALERT from Peace Corps on his cell phone, so he tried to travel anyway. He got all the way to Nkongsamba before realizing he couldn’t get any further so he ended up crashing at my place until it was all over.

The next day, the strike continued. It was kind of creepy to see the country on lockdown. There were a few people on the streets, but no stores were open. Talking with my Cameroonian friends, everyone was mad. They weren’t happy with their quality of life and were ready to tell you about it. This kind of frustrated me, being a political organizer in what feels like another life. The real strike was for gas prices, something that, while controlled by the government is totally dependent on foreign oil prices. Cameroon has oil that they drill and export, but don’t have refineries big enough for changing it to gasoline. Therefore, they import all the gas and are at the mercy of the foreign market. Not a great reason for the whole country to go on strike. They were demanding lower prices for other goods, but the movement wasn’t organized. It was just angry people on the street airing their complaints to TV station cameras without any leader to actually talk to the government.

Cameroonians do have real reasons to be mad about their quality of life, though. One of their actual problems is that the salaries of public servants (anyone paid by the government) were cut by half or more in the ’90s. Public servants, including teachers, represent the vast majority of non-entrepreneurial jobs in Cameroon. If they had double their salary, they wouldn’t have as much trouble paying a little extra for soap. Another problem is corruption. Cameroon just moved up from number three to number one. We’re now the most corrupt country in the world according to a study from a couple of weeks ago. So gas and soap…I didn’t get it.

That afternoon, Tara and Abby, with the help of a friend with a car, got a ride from Baré to my house. The logic was that the house was safer and that we could worry all together about what was going to happen. With this addition, we were now four in the house.

The next day, according to Cameroonian news sources, the gas prices had been lowered to where they were two weeks ago and a lot of taxis were back on the streets. The reduction of about 17 francs worked out to about 10 cents/gallon. What I saw on the ground was very little taxis operating and only a few businesses open, the ones selling essential food products. BBC was reporting that there were burnings of some government buildings and some deaths during the previous night. Peace Corps told us to stay put; they were working on plans for what to do if things got worse. That night, the president addressed the nation saying that the streets were not the place to have this discussion, that everyone should go back to work, and something else about sorcery that I didn’t understand.

The next morning, Peace Corps moved from ALERT to STANDFAST status, meaning pack a bag in case we have to CONSOLIDATE in a few strategic places around the country and/or EVACUATE. Cameroonian news was still showing taxis back on the streets, but the night after the speech that didn’t include any acknowledgement of the struggles people were going through, was when most of the violence took place – looting and burning of buildings (not in Nkongsamba, even though there was a rumor that the mayor’s office was burnt down). For Nkongsamba and elsewhere, that morning was when things, strangely, started going back to normal. Shops were open, taxis were running, and only a very small military presence which in Nkongsamba is normal because of the military base here. People were on the streets and going about their business. Talking with my Cameroonian friends again, everyone was happy. This frustrated me again. They were livid just a couple of days ago, they didn’t get what they wanted, and now they were acting like nothing ever happened. When pressed, they would say “We’re a peaceful country. We didn’t want a war.” But I didn’t get it. They didn’t even get cheaper soap. Peace Corps wasn’t convinced either. There were rumors that more riots were going to take place on Monday. They decided to take advantage of the calm and the available transportation and CONSOLIDATE everyone on Saturday.

Mickie and Autumn, from Kumba and Kekem, came to consolidate with the four of us here at my house in Nkongsamba. Kumba was where the riots were probably the worst in the country. Mickie heard gunshots and helicopters as he was going to bed one night. But by now, as I said, things were getting back to normal. My neighbors didn’t even understand why everyone was at my house and not going back to work. The situation worked out in our favor, though. The markets were open with everything we needed and we weren’t worried about our safety at all. It was like a little vacation – a CONSOLIDATION vacation. We relaxed, played games, read, and ate great food. During the vacation we had two pizza nights, a lasagna night, an enchilada night, and a movie night where we had popcorn, peanuts, and cookies for dinner while watching Raiders of the Lost Ark. Everyone did their share of keeping the place clean, and while we spent a pretty penny on cheese for all of our dinners, I think it was a big success.

Monday rolled around and there was no change, still peaceful. Tuesday, the same. On Wednesday morning, Peace Corps gave the all clear for everyone to go back to their posts – catastrophe averted.

While it was a fun vacation with friends, it gave me a lot to think about too. I didn’t want the Cameroonian people to go to war and force me to evacuate, but I did want them to fight a little harder for a better life. If they’re not ready to work for it, then what am I doing here? So that’s what’s on my plate – figure out what I want to give and get out of the rest of my service. Tim

I'll be back...promise

Sorry about the short hiatus. Some thoughts have been circulating in my head about my next post, and I think it's going to be another longer one about what's wrong with Cameroon. There are plenty of resources and Peace Corps has been here since 1962, so why haven't we succeeded yet. I'm not an expert but I'll give my analysis on what I've found in my first eight months. Thanks for being patient.

Tim