positive intervention

How does someone in my role make a positive intervention?

 

Going back to my role in the council which I liken to the political leader bringing a consultant in and telling the chief executive he/she is going to help him run the council better. In England the senior management team would not all be positive in their response and it is the same here. They all get horse whipped into coming to the meetings by the 1er adjoint who has ‘la pouvoir’ (power), but the moment his back is turned they absent themselves, mock my French, speak in front of me in Fulfulde which at the moment I have little chance of understanding, or generally ignore me. I have little windows of opportunity where their interest is captured in spite of themselves. This job would be hard if I was fluent in French, finding the words to challenge them because they all consider themselves to be doing a perfect job, but it is much harder to do it in a language I haven’t spoken regularly for 33 years.

 

Outside of that setting I am supposed to model female career potential and preach safe sex. I sometimes think, do people really want us here, but the truth is they do. Ordinary people have such faith we will help them it’s very moving. I do other things. I run BAC English revision classes for a handful of motivated, young intellectuals who think that Bogo will improve if the price of millet remains stable and the road to Maroua gets tarmac – I prompted them with Bogo having a swimming pool which they all fell about laughing at. I am looking in to the potential of starting little land rental co-operatives for some of these young men who can’t get jobs. I pick people’s brains about the culture constantly and ruminate on their answers endlessly. A teacher in the bar said to me that it was essential that these women who never leave their compounds meet someone like me.

 

When I write monthly there may seem to be a measure of calm in the analysis. The process is not calm. It’s lonely and thankless at times and I rage about stuff –mainly the stuff that gets to me emotionally. There is a German hotel owner in Maroua who has been here about 30 years. He came over to West Africa driving cars across the Sahara and flushed with youthful indestructibility bought the hotel and married a Cameroonian woman. He says he never integrated. Couldn’t stand all the superstition and cultural hocus pocus, European culture has moved on etc etc. Yet on the other side he is fiercely defensive against many volunteers’ need to put the African way of doing things within a European context of understanding. ‘It’s just the way things are here Hazel’ he says to me. ‘Many people don’t feel the need to change’. When I think I can’t possibly integrate into this culture and will remain emotionally on the outside for 2 years I think, ‘let’s go home’ and it’s always the general public that pull me back. The other day a little barefoot girl in a dusty dress and flies on her nostrils and in the corners of her eyes took my hand as I got off the bus and walked the 1200 or so yards back home with me chatting to me in Fulfulde as if I understood every word. I wouldn’t remember her if I saw her again, but her gesture touched me deeply. Hakkilo…hakkilo…slowly, slowly.