Inde am Hazel. Mi goddo England. (Fulfulde)
Inde am Hazel. Mi goddo England. My name is Hazel. I am from England.
This week I had my first lesson in Fulfulde which is the local dialect most less educated people speak in the Far North.
The first 10 days have flown by. It’s so different it feels a bit unreal and that sense of unrealness is also compounded by the heat. It is probably hotter, dryer and dustier than Arizona. The heat means your body is constantly covered with a thin veil of sweat and the sauna effect does not improve facial skin. I am getting white head spots!
I think VSO are actually quite clever and have fine-tuned their induction programme so that you are gradually taken further and further away from western home comforts in such a way that not only do you have time to adjust your body physically, but you mentally adjust.
The first week we started off in a 4 star hotel in probably the nicest residential area of the capital Yaounde. You get an allowance that allows you to eat out for breakfast, dinner and tea. There is fruit, vegetables and meat in abundance with much of the fruit especially of better quality than in England. You go out with your peer group every night and there are bottled beers, wine, pizza, internet cafes etc. During the day you have a highly stimulating and very varied training programme including culture, health and security, an introduction to the common institutional, organizational or educational framework you are going to use with your partners, sessions on finance which is part how they expect you to do financial returns and part how much you can expect daily living to cost, gender, etc. The training is of extremely high quality some done by staff and some where they bring in experts from the locality, a hospital doctor, a university professor. What they all have in common is that they are multi lingual ( moving in a seamless way from French-English-local dialect), highly educated and passionate about bringing that education back in country rather than exporting it to only better their own personal futures. That in itself is quite inspiring.
There were 13 of us in the group and I would classify us all pretty much as white middle class liberals. You become aware of a slight difference in approach between those who are volunteering for 2 months, 6 months or 1- 2 years. Canadians tend to do one year. Serial volunteers do 6 months. By the end of that first week the 2 month group were complaining if they didn’t get fresh towels each day, creeping live things in the salad, were paranoid about getting bitten, the delay in getting to their placement etc. Then there is a division between those who go the North West which is English speaking and the Far North which is much poorer, they speak French and is described in VSO terms as ‘challenging’. At the end of the first week 3 of us took the 16 hour train journey and the 6 hour bus ride to Maroua – me, Claude, a French Canadian male late 20s who has a top job in Montreal customs on a 1 year sabbatical and Iris who I haven’t yet asked how old she is but is probably over 60 on her 7th placement (6 months). She has a partner she met while doing VSO who she leaves behind. We travelled with petit Joe on the basis that they demonstrate to you how to handle the transport issues once and in future you do it alone.
In Maroua we are staying in a missionary style hotel – walled compound, little separate rooms, but flushing toilets, showers but only cold water and air con. Up here there is bread for breakfast but no butter or jam and the only fruits we can currently get are bananas and oranges. You get offered eggs a lot for breakfast. Yesterday I found out in the village there is no bread and there will be no running water and it’s a shock, but you are slowly slowly acclimatizing and downgrading your expectations. People are very thin up here. Last night we met a 6 year old girl and a 10 year old boy and I would have knocked 3 years off the girl and 4 years off the boy they were so delicate. In our training sessions they provide free food and volunteers/staff pounce on it and scoff as much as possible, but they are all stick thin. This must be either that they have worms (apparently serial volunteers buy cat & dog wormers and take them on a 6 monthly basis) or they are not eating. After these first two weeks our allowance goes down to 6,000 CFA a day which is about £6, but if you think that the average Cameroonian lives on 20,000 a month to our 190,000 it’s a princely sum.
Tuesday night I went on a moto-taxi for the first time and used the ridiculous crash helmet we have been given. The Canadians have come with something more like a riding helmet which is better in the heat, but I realized the importance of having it as we went some 9kms into the countryside in the dark on little more than footpaths for dinner at a French Canadian couple’s house. On the way back one of the bikes got a puncture.
The other big thing is that VSO are horrified at the number of marriages that are happening for volunteers in the Far North. These are mostly between women in their 20s to Cameroonian men and men over 50 to young Cameroonian women. It’s interesting that we are two old women and one young man – they must be trying to break the mould. We have had endless lectures on the importance of taking time to make friends, the unsuitability of uneducated Cameroonian men for western women, their polygamous tendencies and no end of horror stories about people in relationships being stolen from, being betrayed by their lovers to bandits who have stolen their valuables and just generally not to be seen as too much of a party animal. From the French Canadian couple we had dinner with I think this is probably the divide between the volunteers – those who shag the locals and those who don’t!
Today we were taken to the two local hospitals to show us what we need to do if we get ill, register here, pay there, ask for a medecin not a nurse, go to the pharmacy ask for the price of medicines, back to the caisse to pay, back to the pharmacy then an equally long process for blood tests, x rays etc. I haven’t really had any extended contact with the client group yet but I think I will shed a few tears. Local people selling food when the train or bus stops at the stations, today at the hospital and stories from Gerard and Raquel about 105 children per class in schools. In the Far North 70% are illiterate. Less than 25% of girls go to school and virtually none after 11. The more privileged Cameroonians are loud and jokey – when you see real poverty they are totally silent – it’s eiry.
Tomorrow I meet my new boss and Saturday I get taken to the village.