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.