"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.)