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.