LeBron, Other PCV Activities

Conversation on ESPN.com: For Cavs Fans

 

Chad Ford: Has there ever been a longer recruitment for a player than Jay-Z's slow seduction of LeBron James? We've been talking about LeBron and the Brooklyn Nets for years, and we're still at least two years away … but perhaps only two years away.

 

Bill Simmons: … As for Jay-Z and LeBron, it's the most underreported story in sports right now. I don't know what else to say. If LeBron isn't wearing a Nets jersey within the next four years, I will walk from California to New Jersey naked wearing only a 2006-07 game-worn Adam Morrison Bobcats jersey.

 

Other Work

 

At the end of my last post, I mentioned the Extreme North Bike Tour, and a little light bulb went on, and I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if I dedicated an entry to work that other volunteers that I know have done instead of my usual bitching and moaning about this and that and declarations of love for Tina Fey.  So, I'll give you some examples of projects and activities to give the seven people (that's including my two cats) that still read this blog an idea of the wide variety of things that PCVs in Northern Cameroon do.

 

Extreme North Bike Tour – A provincial project that had PCVs in the Extreme North province bike between PCV posts for about 10 days last November to give nightly HIV/AIDS "sensibilisations" in open community meetings.  (It was the third year that PCVs in the EN did the Bike Tour.)  The presentations included a testimonial from an infected Cameroonian, skits, and all the usual trappings that come with Grand North fetes/animations.  The organizational and cost aspects of the Bike Tour were huge.  About 20 PCVs participated, the Country Director personally came and biked the entire tour with PCVs, a bike repair guy from the Yaoundé office was there, and a PC Land Cruiser followed everyone the entire time.  It could be argued that this project was anything but sustainable (not much help or assistance was needed by local community members), and most of the budget was used to take care of the volunteers themselves.  Another negative was that it spurred the PCVs up there to make lame Extreme North t-shirts, which, if I see an ENer wearing one, I snicker.  It deserves snickering.  Overall, the project was a big undertaking, at least seven months of planning, and not a usual PCV project.

 

Soy – Sarah and Ryan in Bibemi have been doing a joint project on the importance of soy, Sarah on the health niveau and Ryan on the agro end.  For Sarah's part, she has been emphasizing the nutritional benefits of soy, especially for kids, to women, since women are the one's who do all the cooking in households.  The amount of protein in soy greatly outweighs other protein-rich food in its nutritional content and price, which is shown in neat visuals that show how many eggs or how much beef, both expensive for most people au village, you have to eat to get the same protein as one kilo of soy.  I don't know too much of the details of Ryan's side of things, I tend to space out when agro's talk about their work, but he shows people how to properly grow the soy, with the farmers hopefully spurred on by Sarah's nutrition talks.  A soy project is a good example of a health/agro PCV collaboration. (Soy can be found in markets here in the North, but most of it in the Grand North is grown in the Extreme North.)

 

Camps – There are different kind of camps one can do, day or overnight.  I think Kate in Mayo-Oulo is doing Arts for Life as a day camp this year just in her village, and Marcel and Katy in the Extreme North did a week-long camp in one of their villages last summer.  (These two were also the main organizers of the Bike Tour, so they seem to like organizational nightmares.)

 

Essay Contest – Whitney in Maroua, the capital of the Extreme North, did an essay contest with a local NGO with high school kids about World AIDS Day last December.  For a holiday like AIDS Day (Women's Day is another example) there is a theme/slogan for the event, so the essay topic had to do with that topic.  The winner got a prize, and I can't for life of me even begin to remember what it was.

 

Inherited Projects – For PCVs replacing someone, sometimes an old volunteer's project carries over to the new guy.  This happened for at least of couple PCVs in my training group.  The financing for projects led by the old PCV didn't come through until the end of the PCV's service or at the beginning of the new one's, so the new guy has had to do the follow-through.  (The examples I'm thinking of were latrine and school construction projects.)  Also, an already completed project needs upkeep, so the new PCV has to continue that work.  An example is in Gounougou, the village near me, where a water project by the old volunteer is now a main aspect of the new PCV's work. 

 

World Wildlife Fund (WWF) – WWF loves PCVs.  They were giving away a lot of trees last year, and they used agro-forestry volunteers up here in the Grand North (WWF has been working a lot up here the last couple years) to distribute trees to communities.  They gave out a buttload of trees, thousands, to communities last year and sponsor local community members to maintain them.  ("Buttload" is an appropriate and professional term that should be used as much as possible in meetings with the boss.)        

 

Teaching – As a secondary project, some PCVs, like my post mate, teach English or some other subject at their local high school, where the administration there is always willing to give some hours to a free teacher who actually knows the language they're supposed to be teaching.

 

Animations, Animations, Animations – A lot of work that we do are just various animations that we constantly do throughout our service to a wide variety of groups, students, women, men, people living with AIDS, etc, and a wide variety of subjects.

"Moto" Tour

The HIV/GYD Committee has decided to do a project in the North and Lagdo has been selected as one of the villages to take part.  (Peace Corps Cameroon has several committees that volunteers can be a part of: Environmental Education, HIV/GYD (Gender and Youth Development), the Volunteer Action Committee (VAC) – a PCV rep from each province goes to Yaoundé and voices concerns to admin, and various committees within each PC Cameroon program – Health, Agro, etc.)  This project is going to be in early September in Ngong, Lagdo, and Bamé in successive days, and it will stress the importance of girls' education.  It's a continuation of an HIV/GYD project in Ngong and Guider last April where a couple high school girls and an adult female mentor from each PCV village in the province came to a two-day long seminar reiterating how important it is for a girl to stay in school and for there to be adult female role models in a community.  (As you can see, PC Washington likes HIV/GYD, they receive a lot of money.  HIV/GYD also has money set aside for PCVs to apply for a maximum 50,000 cfa for a project in their village.  We got some money for Arts For Life last year from HIV/GYD.)

This time around, the same message will be spread to a wider audience in our three villages, selected because Michele in Bamé and I are friends and geographically close to the PCV president of HIV/GYD, Harvard in Ngong.  (Harvard is who taught his students to play American football.)  Like the project in April, several logistical problems are creeping up on us, the volunteers who are actually doing the legwork.

The problem here is not the actual message and execution of the event, which I'm sure will go swimmingly (no sarcasm), but on the Yaoundé level.  Yaoundé basically put the project on the shoulders of the PCVs without giving us much information.  Really, the only thing that we know is the budget, which is missing some things, and the dates.  All the other information that I've gotten is from Harvard, who is relaying whatever information for the project that Yao has, which is not much.  I'll explain.

Nearly all of our work is the organization of the project, the legwork, while Yaoundé will do the actual event, the activities, etc.  In the meantime, there is protocol.  And more protocol.  However, how are we (Michele, Harvard, and I) supposed to do protocol when we're not even sure what is actually going to happen?  All we know is that the project entails some sort of event about the importance of girls' education.  All the details that we need to know for the protocol – which we have to do soon – haven't been shared with us.  For instance, part of the event is to have the big leaders in the village, the mayor, for example, make a speech.  However, what kind of speech is it supposed to be?  What aspect of the topic is he supposed to cover?  When is he supposed to speak?  And, while we're talking about time, what time is the event?

Now, these are all details that will come in time, but it is a little frustrating when admin puts us in a limbo because we don't want to look like fools when meeting the mayor and I can't explain what the project actually is.  It's also frustrating when Harvard is currently on a month-long vacation, and right when he comes back, I go on vacation and have COS conference (Michele will be at COS conference, too), only really leaving a week or two when all three of are all up North at the same time.  I've enlisted Yotti as my help, and he'll do a great job with the organizing, he knows the proper way to go about asking the Big Men for things, so basically I'm going to do what I can before I leave (I have about five weeks before congé) but have Yotti do whatever needs sorting out in my absence; I set 'em up, he knocks 'em down.

(Another irksome detail with this project is that it's a "moto tour," which is completely unnecessary since I'm assuming whoever comes up from PC admin will be using a PC Land Cruiser, and since Michele and I don't have to be present at the events in villages not our own (Harvard will have to be at all three, though), we won't be toted around from place to place.  Also, it's not that impressive of a tour.  Our three villages are connected by the same road covering 20 kilometers.  The emphasizing-the-transportation angle comes from the Extreme North Bike Tour last November, which covered a lot of ground and was a spectacle given it involved twenty PCVs riding there bikes between a ton of villages across their province.)

Nuggets

A couple pop culture nuggets before a work-related entry…

*** I recently watched the first season + the first three episodes of season two of 30 Rock thanks to DVDs a recently COS'd volunteer left.  It's a really funny show.  It's like a combo of Arrested Development and Larry Sanders, including guest actors that starred in both of those shows.  (Gob from Arrested Development plays the gay GE executive who likes the NBC page, and Rip Torn was on Larry Sanders and plays the GE CEO.)  The show reinforces my crush on Tina Fey, who, I have to say, is fighting a Celebrity Deathmatch-like fight with Scarlet Johansson for #1 on my celebrity list, a PPV I would buy.  Also, Alec Baldwin is a comedy powerhouse.  Including The Departed, was he always this funny?  I can't really remember anything he's done besides The Hunt For The Red October before Harrison Ford took over the Jack Ryan character (and Ben Affleck destroyed it).  I need to stop with this minutiae, I just mentioned six movies and TV shows and seven actors in this paragraph.

*** In addition to numbing my mind on TV, I read two novels in a row written in the last few years that re-imagine modern Jewish history, The Plot Against America by Philip Roth and The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon.  I didn't realize that they both were based on kinda the same idea until after I read the Roth and in the first chapter of the Chabon. 

The Plot Against America is narrated by a young Philip Roth and is about what would have happened if Charles Lindbergh, an anti-Semite in real life, beat FDR in the 1940 presidential election on an isolationist ticket and aligned himself with Nazi Germany.  The novel follows how Lindbergh's policy affects Roth's family and Jewish neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey.  It was a great book, one of the best I've read since I've been here, a cool idea, so imagine my surprise when I opened up The Yiddish Policemen's Union the next day, and, what do you know, another parallel universe modern Jewish history. 

The history this time is that after World War II, Israel loses the 1948 war and the Diaspora is allowed to live on land in Alaska with a "lease" of 60 years.  Yiddish is the spoken language on the settlement, the English language is called "American," and slang for "dude" or "guy" is "yid."  It's written like a noir from the 40s or 50s, which I realized anyone could do if they write in the present tense and use strong imagery.  ("Landsman weighs the sholem in his hand now – a cute little Beretta .22 with a plastic grip – poisons himself on nicotine, tries to understand the lamentations of this black Delta yid, Mr. Johnson.")  I liked the Roth book better, but it might be a situation like The Prestige and The Illusionist, two movies revolving around the same subject released around the same time: you prefer whichever you saw first.

I Prefer Opiates

Matt Taibbi Quote from Smells Like Dead Elephants

 

"The Wolfowitzes and Cheneys and Feiths who were the alleged brains behind Bush's Iraq campaign were 'intellectuals' in the same way that Koko the signing gorilla is a 'linguist'…"

 

Hunter Thompson Quote from Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

 

"One afternoon about three days ago they showed up at my door, with no warning, and loaded about forty pounds of supplies into the room: two cases of Mexican beer, four quarts of gin, a dozen grapefruits, and enough speed to alter the outcome of six Super Bowls."

            - How his editors helped him make his book deadline

 

A Wash, No More Whammies, and May Sweeps

 

April and May were a wash.  These two months were the lowest points of my Peace Corps career, which is saying something after going through ten weeks of training – but that's more of low point you don't realize until much later when a new training group comes in and you think, "You couldn't pay me to do that again" – and getting thrown to the wolves with CARE.

 

It started off as a normal event in my two years here, a natural convergence of the End of Things that leads to a few weeks of uselessness until something else pops up.  The few weeks this time around sustained itself for nearly two months.

 

The beginning of April was a triple whammy to the face, with the start of spring vacation for the high school – which doubles as the end of school because after the two week break, the only kids that show up anymore are the ones that have to take end-of-the-year exams and can't be bothered with much else besides a futile effort to pass – a bout of malaria, and a temporary halt of activities in Bamé due to the PCV there taking a vacation, then after a brief return at the end of April having to leave again for temporary medical reasons, and the sexual perversity of the head nurse at the Bamé centre de santé.  The nurse had been pulling the wool over our eyes until a perfect storm of village gossip came to Michele's attention and led to our disassociation with him.

 

April and May was the apex of the shine of Cameroon wearing off since coming back from vacation and mid-service conference in December and January.  When the time came around to leave Lagdo for vacation in the South and in Paris, I was chomping at the bit for a change of scenery – I hadn't been outside of the Grand North since April – and a chance to reflect on life au village. 

 

I concluded that work-wise, I didn't have much to look forward to for Year Two.  I stepped off the train on my return to the Grand North and my bus trip from N'gaoundéré to Lagdo via bush taxi in Ngong knowing that I wouldn't be replaced here in Lagdo.  I decided at some point late in Year One that this would mean a focus on small projects and nothing major like the school construction project (I'll get into that a little later), and I comfortably drifted into a nice routine: a couple days a week in Bamé and a couple days a week at the lycée doing HIV/AIDS courses trying to convince kids that the White Man didn't put HIV in condoms distributed to black Africans. 

 

Then the school vacation came and Bamé was put on hiatus for May sweeps, and I was left to my own devices and malarial parasites destroying my red blood cells.  I did do some traveling visiting other volunteers – never breaking any Peace Corps Cameroon travel policy rules, of course, which I regard like Alabama judges view the Ten Commandments in their courtrooms – but I mainly spent my time moping around Lagdo and watching movies and Season 3 of Lost and figuring out what in the world I'm going to do these next seven months.  One thing I did accomplish is the piecing together of the failed school construction project that's been hanging in limbo for eight months now by our democratically elected mayor of Lagdo, a man of the people, a man of "just wait 'til after…" and "don't worry," and a man who uses a school project as a tool for political vengeance.  Here's the story with blanks filled in by Yotti, who's knee-deep in the mess and who also withheld information that would have made things clearer for me, my razor-sharp mind, and information gleaned from other folks.

 

Dead sous-préfets & Bullshit Detectors

 

A few years ago, enough money somehow made it through the sticky palms of bureaucrats in Yaoundé and Garoua and Lagdo, and some quasi, government-funded development agency ended up doing community development surveys for all the major villages that make up Lagdo the arrondissement.  In each village, an association was created in order to act on the surveys, basically to point people in the right direction if millions of Cameroonian francs fell into a village's lap for development projects.  In Lagdo Centre (Lagdo from now on), Yotti engineered himself as president of Lagdo's association, my guess is that he was the only one that wanted to do it.  Yotti is also head of the Lagdo (arrondissement) chapter of UNDP, a Grand North opposition political party, and several members of the cabinet for the development association (CCDL) are also UNDP supporters.  (Paul Biya, monsieur le president de la republique, is RDPC.)  Also on the CCDL's cabinet are several people who supported the ex-mayor of Lagdo, including the ex-mayor himself, who lost to the current mayor in '97 or '02, I think '02.  Either way, the CCDL was stacked with Lagdo elite who aren't on the current mayor's good side.  Guess where this is going.

 

Flash forward to the summer of 2007.  Because the government and whoever funds the government loves to see their money disappear in a murky abyss, a position was created that would make some lucky woman plus cabinet – god forbid you don't have a cabinet – the voice of all the women's groups in Lagdo (arrondissement).  In a bundle of good intentions, this reseau des femmes would take all the concerns of women in Lagdo and report it to the government, where in turn a previously underrepresented and disrespected group of society, namely half the country and 100% of our mothers, would get the attention and support they so richly deserve.  In Lagdo's case, it became a bitter political scene and I'm not 100% sure on the details.

 

The current head of the reseau, a Madame Tokoma, was not Mayor Abakai's choice.  Abakai's choice was a nurse in Djippordé, the market village on the lake a couple kilometers from Lagdo.  Mme Tokoma is also on the cabinet of the CCDL.  The CCDL is the association I worked with for the school construction project.  The school construction project got off to a rip-snortin' start, and while this good start was in progress, Mme Tokoma and some other female members of the CCDL approached me to help with their newly formed women's GIC.  (A GIC is a legalized community group.)  I agreed, and here's what I found out:

 

The women were actually two GICs newly created, formed and legalized in a rapid time in the wake of the school project's current success, so obviously the women in charge of the GICs know what they're doing.  They want to do income-generating activities, but the two ideas they have are heavily capital intensive, grain-stocking and dry fish-selling schemes.  I emphasize over and over again that step number one should be to open a bank account at the local bank, Credit du Sahel.  The minimum balance to begin an account is 20.000 cfa, which is nothing for the women involved in this GIC.  Tokoma is the wife of a retired gendarme, a profession based on an ample supply of dirty money; another woman is the wife of one the most powerful men in Lagdo who used to work for SONEL, the power company, and is a lawyer; another woman is from the West province and is the principal of a Lagdo elementary school and has a husband who is a grand at SONEL; and a couple of the other women are the wife and daughter of the ex-mayor.  These women have money.  By the time I left for vacation in December, two months after the GIC formed, they couldn't come up with 20 mil ($40), and given the ride-the-coattails-of-le-blanc-after-the-success-of-the-school-project timing of the GIC's creation, this didn't come as much of a surprise.

 

Meanwhile, by October, the mayor had stopped the school project, which was currently in the middle of a successful fundraising drive, although we weren't anywhere near reaching the cost of the school building.  The ostensible reason was a legitimate property dispute, and the mayor said that all that was needed was to form a joint commission with the Lagdo sous-préfet to make a more official site selection.  The mayor has been saying that now for eight months.  It didn't help when the sous-préfet, a useless lump of a bureaucrat who didn't even speak Fulfuldé, keeled over and died during the middle of evening prayers in March and hasn't been replaced yet; it really hasn't helped that Mme Tokoma has also proved to be a slippery weasel who took her petty bickering to the press and tried to make herself out to be a wounded woman viciously attacked for no reason.  Here is what she did.

 

March 8 is International Women's Day – and more importantly, my mom's birthday – and it's a big deal, at least among the women with a little bit of money to buy the March 8 dress fabric.  Usually, Lagdo holds a parade open to all the women of the arrondissement.  Except this year.  Mme Tokoma was the reason the whole thing was cancelled, and women in Lagdo had to go to Ngong or Garoua to march in a March 8 parade.

 

Remember back when the mayor didn't want Tokoma as the head of the reseau of women's GICs?  Well, that reared it's ugly head back in January and February when there was a power struggle over who would lead the reseau, currently headed by Tokoma, and the March 8 organization.  Tokoma was accused of, get this, corruption – No! Get out! Really? – and there was so much dispute among the women over who would organize the fete, that the sous-préfet, before he died, just cancelled the entire March 8 celebration in Lagdo.  Just cancelled it.  He said, or maybe the mayor told him to say, like Cartman, "Screw you guys, I'm going home," because he had enough of the bullshit.  Barring the misogyny here (would a male sous-préfet cancel a male-organized fete without trying to resolve the situation?), I have to applaud the guy because I am anti-Women's Day because it is the biggest joke.  It would be like all the bureaucrats of Cameroon taking the day off to celebrate Anti-Corruption Day.  Tokoma then ends up in a creampuff interview in the major Grand North newspaper, a weekly called L'œil du Sahel, explaining that March 8 in Lagdo was cancelled because of a conspiracy perpetrated by the current mayor because of Tokoma's support for the ex-mayor.  Yeah, it's a real big conspiracy because that's what happened.  Tokoma, as head of the reseau, kicked out members of the original cabinet sympathetic to the mayor without telling them and put in people sympathetic to the ex-mayor.  Did you not think that anyone would notice?!  That sound you hear is me banging my head against a wall.

 

Before the March 8 debacle and me finding out that it was a continuation of a months-old dispute, Tokoma always came off as slick, a feeling not helped by her alcoholic gendarme husband who would corner me and try to convince me to work with his GIC, who's goal is "to help people."  Are these the same people you hustle at self-determined roadblocks along the highway?  I was weary of getting back involved with the women's GIC after returning from mid-service conference before hearing all of this Women's Day crap, but that put the icing on the cake.  Besides Tokoma, the women in the GICs weren't fully invested and were being dragged along by Tokoma, who saw me as her payday.  Not so fast, missy.  My Bullshit Detector is a finely tuned machine after two years here, and you, mon amie, are off the charts.

 

In conclusion, local politics have undermined the school construction project.  (I view whatever "work" I did with the women's group as just an attempt to extort money for Tokoma, a wrinkle that reinforces the story.)  The mayor isn't really pressing to have a project headed by political enemies become successful, even if it means that he is intent to keep an elementary school in the mud.  In addition to the school project, April and May have been two months where a perfect storm of ineffectiveness, homesickness, and frustration that had been building for a good period of time kicked me in the balls, and were I someone different in a different place, I would walk around the mall in a Kurt Cobain t-shirt listening to The Smiths on my black iPod.  But I am beyond these stereotypical selfish introspective moments, I prefer opiates, and I know that according to the bestselling Peace Corps Cameroon Medical Manual, typical low points "are usually at four to six and twelve to eighteen months."  Well, tie me up and call me Sally, you're right, PCCMM.  Things are only going to get better.