Prochaine Step

It's a blessing and a curse.  My NGO leaving leaves me wide open to almost anything I want to do.  Now that things are winding down with CARE, I'm finding myself searching for that "almost anything."  In other words, I'm about to live the life of a "normal" PCV in the beginning of their service: everything is up in the air.

 

Here's what I kinda have going on maybe sorta:

 

1. PVVS (Personnes vivant avec le VIH/SIDA) - There's a hospital-funded structure déjà in place, but there isn't an actual PVVS support group that's maintained by the infected themselves.  The structure s'appelle Unité de Prise en Charge (UPEC) - "prise in charge" doesn't fully translate, but it basically means following the doctor's orders.  UPEC in Lagdo checks up on known PVVS and makes sure they're taking their ARVs if they can afford it; the nurses who do the "prising en charging" even do housecalls as well as having patients come to the office at the hospital.  They also organize various "sensibilisations" in the community to encourage getting tested.

 

Obviously, I won't be doing the housecalls anytime soon: anonymity is a top priority and I can't come waltzing into their compounds asking how their AIDS is doing.  So what I want to do now is get familiar with the ins and outs of UPEC and its staff.  In the long term, I hope to actually work with PVVS directly.  Most of the nurses knew Rachel, the first PCV, so that helps get my foot in the door.

 

2.  Arts For Life - A provincial project with all the North PCVs that takes place in three different villages over three weekends in August.  I'll go into more detail at a later date.

 

3.  Lycée - A common place for health volunteers to start is the health club at the local high school.  Lagdo has the Club Santé, as well as Club 100% Jeune, an ACMS-based club (more details on ACMS below, numero cuatro), and I want to work with them.  However, I've had trouble organizing any kind of meeting with them for a few reasons:

     a. The responsable is a nurse at a nearby health center who also teaches the health curriculum at the high school, so he's stretched pretty thin as it is.

     b.  Since there are essentially two health clubs, that means the responsable has to go through two different bureaucracies to organize a meeting.  This is just silly on so many levels, I don't know where to begin.

     c.  The 100% Jeune club has asked me to come to their meetings before to an animation.  Good, right?  Well, they asked me while their meeting was going on.  Someone from the club came to my house to tell me they were having a meeting... right now!  Give me some time to prepare messieurs et mesdemoiselles, I'll be more than happy to come.

     d.  I actually have a couple things prepared I can do with them, but May/June is tricky because kids have their exams and then they split for the vacation.  Some kids also just stop going to class this time of year... An education volunteer can explain this better than I can, so I won't try.

 

My plan is to copy another PCV's idea in her village and have a "summer" health club for kids that are here and interested.  In a perfect world, we would meet four or five times before September in order to hit the ground running in the "fall" (I put quotes around the seasons because they have no meaning here).  I want to have a meeting with them before this school year ends to set it up.  On va voir if it'll work out; I might just have to wait until septembre.

 

4.  ACMS (l'Association Camerounaise pour le Marketing Social) - ACMS is an NGO that is very well known throughout Cameroon, especially for it's publication 100% Jeune (not the best site, and it's in French), a health magazine for 14-24 year olds (age range of high school students here...) that treats sexual health very seriously in a comfortable forum that appeals to lycée kids.  (It's also how I learned Wayne Palmer was the president!)  Who knew you had to leave the stifling sexual health environment in the States and go to Cameroon to find something like it. (What's the GWB countdown now?  He has to be the lamest of the lame duck presidents.)

 

ACMS sells a lot of health-related products, from condoms to mosquito nets to rehydration salts to help people with diarrhea.  These products are sold to a middle man - boutique owners, community groups, lycée health clubs - for cheap, then the groups use them as income-generating activities (CARE Lagdo uses ACMS-made mosquito net insecticide kits as part of the malaria project).  But like a lot of NGOs in le Grand Nord, ACMS's resources are stretched thin.  They haven't done a very good job, atleast in Lagdo, of pimping their products to boutique owners and creating "points of sale."  They also love PCVs.  They've implied to me they want PCVs to help pimp their rides because we can help create a demand for their products while doing our own health-related work.

 

To create these "points of sale", ACMS will have to do a lot of the groundwork themselves, but I'll be glad to help if I can when the timing is right.

The Saga

Two things before I go into my saga: if Paul McCartney circa 1964 was a tall, Brazilian soccer player, he'd look like Kaka; and I got malaria.

Yes, the infamous palu. Despite the mosquito net and the weekly Larium pills, I still got it. Looking back on it now, the symptoms started Monday after IST when I started sleeping like a rock, got worse Wednesday when I got a splitting headache, then I woke up Thursday with a fever and my entire body aching, especially my knees.

I went to the Lagdo hospital Friday, but I had to wait inexplicably until Saturday for the test, a blood smear. It was positive of course, and I bought 5000 cfa worth of pills the doctor prescribed, all of which the PCMO (Peace Corps Medical Officer) wouldn't let me take. No worries, though, PC give us a 3-day (proven) treatment called Coartem that worked like a charm. The irony of it all is that I'm assigned to a malaria prevention project...

CARE
So I really haven't talked about my actual work-related activities. Just keep in mind that the first few months in a PCV's service are usually the hardest and most frustrating. Also, I've hesitated to write about my inevitable criticisms of CARE because my experience with them has been anything but a picnic, so realize that these are all my observations and, in reality, development work is very confusing for a foreigner who's learning the language and culture on the fly.

I'm the third PCV on this project in Lagdo. The first PCV was a superstar who was fluent in the local language and was in Lagdo a few months before CARE came to Lagdo. She helped out with the beginnings of the more agricultural/community development-bent project, not my malaria one, but she did shift into helping the malaria project get started near the end of her service (Fall 2005).

The next volunteer, the one I replaced, ran into some trouble. The palu project manager is a middle-aged bureaucrat who came over from the Ministry of Health (or something like that). His management style is very top-down and is anything but open to anything, especially PCVs and the people under him. This PCV faced the problem of dealing with this guy and also not being the first volunteer (legacy issues always affect the next PCV in various ways).

She ran into a brick wall when she came to Lagdo in January 2006, atleast with the project supervisor. She did a very smart thing by focusing her work with the project animateurs (French for people who give presentations, etc, doesn't exactly translate) instead of dealing with the Wall. The main problem with the Wall is that he makes the PCV feel like they are on the outside looking in on the project they're supposed to know all the ins and outs. Along with that, even after writing out a detailed job description, her frustrations were still present since the Wall basically doesn't give a shit.

Now I come into the picture. The first sign that this CARE experience was going to a pain in the ass came during training in November, when we had a "counterpart workshop" where we meet our official PC-assigned, umm, counterparts, that leads into a site visit the next week. This is very stressful for all of the trainees because we just got our site assignments the day before the workshop, a whirlwind to say the least.

My official counterpart is the Wall, but he decided to take a vacation that week. An animateur (one of the two, the male one, not the female, fyi) was sent in his place. Also, this being a time when I was knee-deep in French lessons, my shaky confidence was pretty much demolished when I couldn't understand something the animateur was saying, then he rolled his eyes in frustration and said the word in English. Not a good sign. (The word? Actually, it was a phrase: "And I'm the personable one.") My site visit didn't exactly relax me either.

When I actually got to post in December, I found myself just wondering what in the hell CARE wanted me there for. The project actually seemed to run smoothly, it was in its final six months, and every activity was already planned out. This is great news for the NGO and for the communities affected, but what in the hell do you want me here for?

CARE runs like a 9-5 job, and since I didn't need to be in the office because I had nothing to do, I just start not showing up. When this happens, the Wall calls me wondering why I'm not there. We have this conversation in person a few times:

Me: What do you want me to do?
Wall: What do you want to do?
Me: Punch myself in the face.

After a couple months of punches to the jaw, I just gave up and demanded to speak with someone in CARE in the Cameroon HQ in Yaounde. The Wall is, like, whatever, and eventually a guy from Yaounde shows up and tells me I should organize the project's documents on the computer. The Wall is at this little meeting and doesn't say a word while the Yaounde guy is putting a happy face on everything.

I think if I got this computer assignment right when I first got to post, I'd been pissed. By this time, February-ish, I was just happy to have something to do.

So how did things get this way? I have some theories:

1. General indifference by the Wall that leaves the PCV outside the project's activities
2. CARE wanting PCVs and not really thinking past that point.
3. Timing: A PCV is more useful at the beginning of a project before it actually gets started because our whole training is basically how to go about needs-assessments within the community, not jumping onto an already tight ship.
4. Personally, I wasn't forceful enough in demanding a clearer role and better transportation from the beginning.

Honestly, I should of quit the project in January. Honestly, since the only reason I'm living in this very nice house with very nice things is because CARE pays for it all, so I'm not stupid and realize they have me by the balls. It's just unfortunate my first 4-5 months, already stressful enough, had to be dealing with a mammoth like CARE, and specifically, the Wall. My overall criticism of the CARE/PC relationship is that CARE sucks you in and becomes all-encompassing whether you want it to or not and doesn't give a PCV much wiggle room to do other things when our job is supposed to be very fluid, especially in the first six months of service.

So where does this leave me now? I'll let you know later, I've written enough for the moment.

(NOTE: This is just a basical overview of my CARE experience. I feel like my criticisms are just and fair, but the CARE people in Lagdo are very good at what they do and do a lot of good work. Also, some PCVs have a great CARE experiences, some don't, so it all depends. It's just my role there has been a mess/non-existent. I also hope this has been clear, so if you have any questions/want clarifications, let me know.)