Life's a Beech & then you change the world

Hey friends.

I realized that blogging is not my forte...considering I haven't written about anything since my Spring Break '12 experience after In-Service Training. Well, a lot has happened since then. So much, in fact, that next week is my Closing of Service (COS) conference. This marks the end of my service--well at least the beginning of the end. I'll officially have a little less than 3 months left in Cameroon. Where has the time gone people?!!

About a month ago, my Peace Corps regional recruiter e-mailed me asking if I would be willing to submit a PCV profile to post on their blog to help with recruiting new PCVs. One of the questions was to provide a summary of my primary and secondary projects that I've been working on/completed during my service. I've included this summary (and photos) to give you an idea of what I've been doing in the past year (and a few months?) since my last post. Warning: these are pretty short descriptions of each project, so if you have any questions or want more details, feel free to ask!

Primary Projects:

National Girls Forum: I was asked by my program manager in the beginning of my service to spearhead a committee to organize a national conference to promote girl’s empowerment. The committee consisted of four Youth Development volunteers. On August 2012 and June 2013, Peace Corps Cameroon’s Youth Development program introduced the first two National Girl’s Forums. Both conferences were funded by PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). The conference focused on three goals:

To call attention to the status of the girl child in Cameroon;
To generate a national network of individual and organizations dedicated to the fight for girl’s empowerment in Cameroon; and
To provide a platform for the presentation of best practices, developed and implemented around the country.

With the backing of the motto ‘To educate a girl is to educate a nation’, 90 participants, including 30 Peace Corps volunteers from all five sectors and 60 host-country nationals, met to push together for gender equity in Cameroon. The presenters at the forum included PCVS representing all sectors of Peace Corps Cameroon, their counterparts, and NGOs like UNICEF and PLAN to name a few. The second conference focused on the theme “Keeping Girls in School”.

2. Life Skills Camp for Girls: A collaboration project with a Health PCV on an 8-day Life Skills camp with elementary school girls. A total of about 45 girl participated in the camp where they learned HIV/AIDS awareness and education, building effective communication skills, promoting self-esteem, and how to become a role model in their community through leadership skills.

(Me and some of the girls from camp)

3. Aid 2 Empowerment Scholarship Program: Working with six girls in Ngaoundéré (my post) who have received scholarship money from the A2Empowerment organization. The scholarship money will allow the girls to go back to school during the 2013 and 2014 school years. The girl’s ages range 14-23 years old. All of the girls had to drop out of school, mostly due to lack of funding for school or early pregnancy.

4. Teaching Life Skills with Out-of-School-Girls: I work with a group of 18 girls who are currently not enrolled in school. We meet weekly at the Women’s Center at the Promotion of Women and Family delegation. I facilitate Life Skills sessions that include leadership, decision-making, sexual reproductive health, HIV/AIDS and STD education and prevetion, basic savings and money management, and income generating activities.

5. World Aids Day 2012: On World Aids Day, December 1, 2012, I held an HIV/AIDS sensitization at Djackbol Elementary School located in my neighborhood. The students who participated are in the last two years of elementary school. The goal of the activity was to sensitize elementary school students on HIV/AIDS education on transmission and prevention. 100 students attended the activity. At the end of the training, students made posters with the information they learned to hang up around the school and were instructed to sensitize other students at the school using the posters.

(Students made posters to hang at school teaching other students about HIV prevention)

6. Training of Trainers of Peer Educators of the University of Ngaoundere: I completed a 3-day training on improving facilitation skills and introducing Peace Corps approach to facilitation with 45 university student. All students are members of the Red Cross Club and Peer Educator Leaders Club at the University of Ngaoundere.

(All of the Peer Educators)

7. Regional Life Skills Youth Camp: In February of 2013, I approached the PCVS in my region about planning a summer camp series for the youth in our communities. Together, we organized a Life Skills camp for high school youth. The camps were each 5 days long and covered topics on: leadership, role models, environment, HIV/AIDS and STI education and prevention, puberty, communication and decision making skills, peer pressure, and goal setting. We completed 4 summer camps in 4 different locations and worked with over 120 high school students and trained 13 community counterparts.

(Students from my camp in Ngaoundere)

Secondary Projects:

1. Income Generating Activity Training with the PTA of Djackbol Elementary School: This was a collaboration activity with a Community Economic Development PCV. 35 members of the l’Association des Mères d’Élevés (Mothers of Students Association) at the Bumjere Elementary School of Ngaoundere participated in a 3-day income generating activity training.

We taught women the importance of saving, investing in their children’s education, and gave them tools on how they can better save their money through budgeting. The women learned how to make lotion, soap, soymilk, tofu, and cakes. The women learned the nutritional and financial benefits of using soy in their everyday cooking. We emphasized the importance of good nutrition for their families and how this can help keep their children in school, improve school attendance, and the many financial benefits of keep their families healthy (i.e. less medical expenses).

(Showing the women how to make tofu)

2. Water and Sanitation Hygene (WASH) Training with elementary school students: This was a secondary collaboration project with 3 PCVS in my region. This activity was the final project that finalized a latrine project at the Kognoli Elementary School. We planned and facilitated a 3-day WASH training with the school. We trained the students on waterborne illness prevention (cholera, amoebas, typhoid etc.) and how to build tippy taps for hand washing. We made tippy taps for hand washing stations for the newly built latrine.

Committees & Training:

I am also a member of the Youth Development Steering committee, where YD volunteers work closely with our Program Manager (Amadou), the Manager of Programming and Training, and the Country Director in improving the program and training of new Peace Corps trainees. Since Cameroon’s YD program is brand new, we had the opportunity to revise the project framework of the program (project goals, objectives, and indicators for monitoring and evaluation). We did such a stellar job that D.C recommended our framework to Peace Corps Morocco as a guide (we’re pretty awesome if I say so myself).

I was also selected to help train the new PCTs who arrived in September 2012. I spent two weeks at our main office working alongside fellow PCVs to create the schedule and developing sessions for the 8 week training (same training I went through during my first three months in country).

Hey y’all. This blog is waaay overdue, so I’m going to cut right to the chase. Let me take you back to March 18-30: In-service training and my first trip to the beach (which also marked my first 3 months at post—granted I’m currently in month 10...crazyyy!).

In-service training was a weeklong workshop held after the first three months of our service. This year, it was held in Bamenda, the regional capital of the Northwest region. Bamenda has a similar climate as Ngaoundéré (except during the dry season), and it is also located in a beautiful valley; the whole city is surrounded by a wall of mountains and trees. In the rainy season, they say you can see waterfalls. The Northwest region is also one of the two Anglophone regions in Cameroon, so everyone speaks English/Pidgin (local dialect)/”special English (best way to describe this: speak normally, but with no contractions or conjugated verbs).

So anyways, the week was filled with sessions on how integration at post was going, how to develop projects, how to work effectively with your counterpart, how to fund projects…that sort of business. I’m not going to bore you with details, but that was the basic premise. The highlight of that week was enjoying spending time with friends who I hadn’t seen since training. It was great hearing about everyone’s post and how well they were integrating into their communities—helped remind me that I’m not the only one experiencing culture shock and having to find the courage to leave the house every day and face this new world. Today, that timidity has slowly gone away, but there are still moments where I dread having to walk down the street when I’m the only woman/white person within a miles radius (and all eyes are on me).

The real point of this post is to tell you about the mini-vacation I took after in-service. A group of us decided to head to one of the popular beaches in Cameroon, Limbe. Limbe is located in the Southwest region of Cameroon, where Mt. Cameroon is located (the largest active volcano in Cameroon). The beaches sit at the base of the volcano, so naturally you will find that the beaches are black! My friends and I decided to stay at a popular Peace Corps hotel called Madison Park, located about 20 minutes outside of the center of town. Instead of sleeping in an air conditioned hotel room, we opted to pitch tents on the beach and rough it for the three days we were there (I mean, how often does the opportunity arise where you can camp on a blank-sand beach?).

I can’t even begin to describe how beautiful this place was. The backdrop of the hotel was lush, green, jungle, and a beautiful mountain that I thought was Mt. Cameroon, but was just a mountain the locals called “mini Mt. Cameroon”. The beach was away from the hustle and bustle of the city and tourists, so we were pretty much the only people there except for the fisherman that would go out in the mornings, or the mama’s walking around, selling their catch of the day in the local markets.

The first night in Limbe, we went to the popular fish market in town to grab some dinner. We headed to Downbeach, where we were faced with the task of choosing the best fish mama to give us the best price on all the fresh grilled fish, shrimp, crab, and calamari you could get your hands on. The first night, I went with some grilled carpe and grilled shrimp (which I accompanied with some grilled coconut I had bought from a little kid who was walking around, selling packets of grilled coconut flakes—coconut shrimp…yum!). The second night we ate there, I decided to go a little crazy and get the works: grilled fish, grilled shrimp, crab, and grilled calamari--in one sitting.. Heaven. That’s what it felt like. Heaven—in my mouth. And get this--it only cost me about $10…with beer. If you know me, you know I love me some good food, and this was probably the best food-high I’ve had in a long time.

Previously that day (before stuffing my face with seafood), we spent some time at the Limbe Wildlife Center (check it out: www.limbewildlifecenter.org). It is a wildlife rescue and rehabilitation center for primates and various other animal species found in Cameroon. We ate lunch at a restaurant inside the center, called Arne’s (“Arnies”), where we drank the most amazing smoothies and mojitos in country, accompanied by the best cheeseburger I think I’ve ever tasted in my life (better than many burgers I’ve had in the States). Not to mention, we are enjoying this amazing spread next to a gorilla enclosure! Literally, 10 feet away from us, gorillas (including silverback gorillas) were chillen under the trees, snacking on some mangoes. It was seriously one of the most unique experiences I’ve ever had. After eating, for 3,000 FCFA ($6—all proceeds going towards the center’s rehabilitation efforts) we toured the center to see all the different species of monkeys they had in captivity (many of which are endangered due to poaching for “bush meat”), as well as various other animals (python, crocodile, and birds). Fun fact: one of the sponsors of the center is Florida’s very own Busch Gardens in Tampa Bay! It was such a pleasant surprise to see something from home all the way over here :)

The rest of our time in Limbe was spent soaking up the sun on beach chairs, eating all the mangoes and bananas to our hearts content, showing kids our awesome pyramid-making skills, swimming, and catching up on life. It was a perfect getaway, one that I will be sure to make again before my end of service.

Here are some pictures of the trip! Enjoy :)