Rainy Season 2008

Republican Convention

 

"They never came right out and said it, but I could see they were uncomfortable at the prospect of all three network TV cameras looking down on their spontaneous Nixon Youth demonstration and zeroing in – for their own perverse reasons – on a weird-looking, 35-year-old speed freak with half his hair burned off from overindulgence, wearing a big blue McGovern button on his chest, carrying a tall cup of Old Milwaukee and shaking his fist at John Chancellor up in the NBC booth – screaming: 'You dirty bastard! You'll pay for this, by God!  We'll rip your goddamn teeth out!  KILL!  KILL!  Your number just came up, you communist son of a bitch!'"

            - Hunter S. Thompson, joining a Nixon Youth rally at the 1972 Republican convention

 

Well, it's that start of the Republican National Convention when I'm writing this, so you know what that means: I'll be yelling at my blue shortwave radio shouting, "Lies! Lies!"  Luckily, the BBC has its head on straight and doesn't carpet-bomb us with convention coverage, but it's still enough to make me roll my eyes when some tool tries to pretend that they're not the party that produced the George W. Bush presidency.  Case in point: tastefully curtailing festivities given the impeccable timing of another hurricane coming for Louisiana.  Yeah, like that'll really make up for fucking up the first time, assholes.  Dropping fewer balloons on television while appearing Decisive seems to be the Republican strategy for pulling the wool over peoples' eyes these next two months.

 

The nerve of these people is just remarkable: Katrina, Iraq, and a woman more conservative than McCain with her own Jamie Lynn Spears.  What a farce.  No wonder HST couldn't get through the Nixon convention sober… well, he couldn't get through anything sober, but you know what I mean.

 

 

Rainy Season 2008

 

Like my last posts have mentioned, my twenty-seven months in Cameroon are rapidly coming to a close.  By the time I post this, I'll have been here for almost two years exactly, leaving only three months to go.  My stage-mates and I have come an incredibly long way, it's remarkable.  I'll use future posts to reflect more on the experience, but for the time being, I'll talk about what exactly there is to do these last 100 days.

 

Being Replaced Na?

 

The most important factor, I think, that affects your post-COS Conference work is whether or not you're being replaced by another volunteer in your program (health, agro, etc.).  In both cases, the PCV has to sew up any financial loose ends and prepare friends and co-workers for their departure.  If you're being replaced, the outgoing volunteer has to prepare people for the imminent arrival of a new nasaara and needs to organize any on-going projects so that the PCV can step right in and continue them effortlessly, or at least with less than or equal the amount of difficulty the old PCV faced.  To help aid this process, there is a counterpart workshop during training, where all the newbies' official counterparts come to a two-day session on what Peace Corps is, followed immediately by a site visit where the replacement will spend a couple days with the departing PCV to meet co-workers and a get a feel of the village.  (This counterpart workshop is also the most awkward event during all of training.  For me, and others as well, it demonstrated just how bad our French was despite almost two months of never-ending French classes.  The workshop, plus the site visit week, is the beginning of the end of training, our first taste of freedom from the training site, and the realization that This will be our lives for the next two years, so it's a crazy week.)

 

I've known for a while that I didn't want to be replaced, so I'll explain why.  If you've been reading this blog religiously – and I know you have – my work-related experience in Lagdo hasn't been ideal.  The health post in Lagdo was originally created as a partnership between CARE and Peace Corps.  I was the third health PCV on the project, which ended seven months into my service, leaving me without the reason there was a health volunteer to begin with.  No worries, however, because I'd wanted to get out of the CARE yoke since I got there and the PCV I replaced left me with a decent starting off point (she was more optimistic about non-CARE work than actual work with them).  However, the main problem with them leaving is that it left me with a vacuum when it came to work counterparts.  Although I was officially transferred to the Lagdo hospital, I never felt that the hospital cared I was there – not that surprising since they never asked for a PCV to begin with – so I never took the time to cultivate counterparts, abetted by me finding work outside of the hospital relatively easily.

 

As I chugged along post-CARE, I realized that doing work in Lagdo is difficult.  The town is very political (it's the head of its arrondissement, like a county) and developed enough that the basic health work that we were trained to do – presentations on this and that – has never seemed to me to be enough in the eyes of people here.  Lagdo needs (wants more than needs, perhaps) more development of its infrastructure, and the development of that infrastructure has to go through the proper channels, i.e., the mayor has to get his cut.  There's always work at the schools, and also a lot of things to do in the villages surrounding Lagdo, like all the things I've done with my Bamé colleague, but it is completely necessary to have a local counterpart to help you do that to the fullest extent possible, not just rely on another PCV. 

 

So you can see the problem for a health volunteer that would replace me: A strong counterpart at the local hospital is needed, but that strong counterpart doesn't exist, and I don't want to be responsible for putting a new PCV into the same situation I was put in, this time without seven months in Lagdo under their belt like I had. 

 

In addition to the lack of a counterpart and difficulty of doing work in Lagdo in general, Lagdo has seen a lot of development projects come and go: CARE, a European Union project, the Chinese of course, and various PCVs and other nasaaras rolling through.  In addition to all of that, another huge NGO, Plan International, is starting to do work in Lagdo for the next year or two, with a budget and resources that a PCV can't even come close to competing with, so that's another reason I don't want to throw a future PCV into the snake pit.

 

Post Book

 

There are really only two forms of proof in Peace Corps that you were actually living and working at your post for two years: the quarterly report and the post book.  The funny thing about both of these documents is that there is absolutely no way to prove that anything in them is true. 

 

This is especially true for quarterly reports.  A quarterly report is something we turn into our APCD once every three months that documents every work-related thing we've done, so that five-day tour of the Extreme North I took last April wouldn't be put down.  (I think education volunteers only turn in two reports per year given the fact all they're supposed to do is teach.)  While a good idea, given the lack of administrative follow-up and site visits, Peace Corps just has to take our word for it.  Everything that I've written in my quarterly reports can theoretically be a lie.

 

The post book is a different animal.  It's basically an overview of your post, acts as a guidebook, and can include just about everything about it; most importantly, it's given to future PCVs at your post.  Under Peace Corps guidelines, the post book can have maps, random facts, a guide to people you should(n't) know, what tailor to avoid, etc.  Also, each PC program has their own post book, so a health PCV will only get a post book from past health PCVs at that post and an agro would only get an agro post book.  If you're opening a post, you have to start from scratch.

 

The post book I received from Rachel and Danielle has been really helpful.  It's been about 100% more helpful than some post books other PCVs have left at their posts: a couple pages of a Word document or something hastily written the night before leaving village.  I've tweaked it a little bit:  I've made my own comments on people that are mentioned, added my own, and updated different developments about various things: Lagdo politics, Lagon Bleu, prices for transportation.  No matter what, though, it's impossible to capture everything about your village in a post book.

 

You're supposed to work on your post book throughout your service so you won't forget to put things in, and I've done an okay job of that.  I was pretty diligent about it through April of this year – which coincides to when I stopped having things to do – and the most significant change I've made is to make an electronic copy of it.  I'll be spending my next couple months putting the final touches on it.

 

… There are a few more things that'll be happening these next couple months that I'll add on a later post.  Du courage.