The Face of Poverty

Finally on Sunday I was able to travel to my target village of Grand-Batanga. It is about a 20-minute taxi drive away but it is relatively super expensive ($20 round trip) because all the locals take moto taxis that we aren’t allowed to take so car taxis don’t want to go all the way there. There are also two checkpoints along the route where government officials demand bribes that taxi drivers are obligated to pay. But I went with my contact from the town and got so much accomplished! The leader of the woman met me right away in her house and set me up with interview after interview, extraordinarily efficient. I asked people about their needs, the village needs, how they define poverty and things that could help them make life a little easier. In total I did 10 interviews, which is unheard of in just 1 day! In general I heard over and over that people need “les moyens” – the means. They told me that if they could improve their little businesses their lives would be a lot easier. Most people sell things like fish they’ve caught, or crabs, or beignets, or other little things that they can make at the house. It brings in a small sum of money that is used to pay for their children’s schooling and food and clothes. Men in the family pay for very little though they make the most, when you walk around the village you see men drinking alcohol even in the morning and sleeping and hanging around. It’s the woman who are hard at work to make ends meet and provide for their children. I ended up interviewing mostly woman and they told me repeatedly that they just need a little money to modernize and make their businesses a little better. Then they can pay for schooling and health and everything else. This was really contrary for me to developmental ideals from a Western standpoint. We tend to want to build schools and install big things but these women don’t even think of changing the system, they just want to be able to succeed better within the existing, broken system. So I think my final paper is going to focus a lot on the difference between Western ideals and village realities and how they meet and should mix to create a development plan that has Western elements but fits within the village context.

My American friend Jozy and I went back to the village today to do our research projects. First I went to the local clinic that is run by a nurse and a couple local volunteers. It is only two small rooms but it the only option for the village besides paying $2 (a big expense here) to go to the town and back. The clinic isn’t free because it doesn’t have funding but it gives treatment as cheap as it can. It was really interesting to see it. I walked around the village just observing and trying to understand what life is like there. I met a Frechman who has been living there for 8 years who helped us understand things we would have otherwise missed. He showed us a house owned by a Swiss person that was for sale. It has many rooms and would be the perfect location for the clinic but it is too expensive for them to buy (even though it is a big house right on the ocean for about $400.) He then led us back to the clinic for probably one of the most life changing things I’ve ever experienced. We walked up to the clinic hearing screams and he told us to look in the back room. We watched a small girl, around 6, squirming and screaming as the clinic workers unwrapped her leg. The bandage was soaked with bodily fluids so I assumed she had a cut underneath it all. Finally, we saw that she had a gaping hole in her shin area. As it got unwrapped more we saw the huge chuck of her knee that was missing. The Frenchman explained that a while ago she got a cut on her leg and developed an infection, this in itself was not a problem, but her parents didn’t have the money to bring her to get treatment, so they just left it. By the time they brought her to the clinic her entire leg was massively swollen from hip to foot. They had to cut out pieces of her leg to get rid of the infection and pulled about a liter of liquid from the area of infection. They cut right through her muscles straight to the bone to get rid of it all. She will never walk the same, if she walks at all, and in Cameroon this is detrimental because crippled people are shunned. And the probability of further infection in this very unsanitary environment is high. She was in the room alone while her mother waiting outside, worrying about how to pay at all for this, and was constantly screaming “doucement tonton doucement” (softly uncle softly.) People call their elders uncle and aunt often, but I was so struck by the fact that a 6 year old child was going through this, without any anesthetic whatsoever, squirming a bit but trying to stay still all while saying please just do it softly. Her reality is unlike anything I have ever encountered. She has to sit through someone cutting up her leg with no medication to ease to pain, or face death, all as a 6 year old child. I don’t think I will ever lose that image from my mind and it proves to me that no matter what academics say about Africa needed to help itself, and no matter how many people criticize different types of aid, as long as there are children like that here, I have work to do. She is my face of poverty. Her story portrays how unfair the world is. The sacrifices I make to be here are nothing compared to the pain she is going through just because of her parents’ neglect. I know this is corny but please take a minute to think about just how lucky we all are and maybe find the time in your busy life to do something for someone a little less lucky.

A local woman I interviewed

We live in paradise

Spending the afternoon by the beach with Jozy

So many boats!

No words for this.

ISP Begins!

After much debate and many topic changes, I finalized my location in Kribi (gorgeous coastal town of Cameroon) and my research topic on the perceptions of poverty of a local village population juxtaposed with what a local NGO gives them in terms of aid. I am looking to see if there is a difference between the two and if there is, where it comes from and how it affects the quality / effectiveness of aid. I am super excited. I arrived in Kribi on Monday with another American student in the group. We took a typical Africa bus ride, which was quite an experience. There were 42 people in one bus, absolutely crammed in. I was smushed between my friend and an African man, not even enough room for my shoulders between the two. The bus ride was about 4 hours long with one stop on the side of the road so people could squat down and pee right by the road. It was such a relief when we finally arrived in Kribi. We immediately went to meet our host families. Mine seems really nice, 2 brothers and 1 sister and a very nice house. I have my own room which is great. There is no running water but the electricity has been on consistently since I’ve been here which is good when I have to do so much work on my computer. We went to see the office of the local NGO I am looking at and met with our contact there, Veronique. She seems very nice and very smart. I’m looking forward to working with her.

On Tuesday we arrived at the office around 7:30 because the NGO was having an open house starting at 8. However, Cameroon being Cameroon, we sat around for hours waiting for it to start. Finally at 12:30 the activities began, though it turned out to be more of a celebration than an information open house. It finished within the hour and we wanted to leave to visit the beach but Veronique made us stay to eat lunch because in Cameroon it is rude to allow someone to leave without feeding them. So we had some plantain fries then rushed to our houses to grab bathing suits and go to the ocean. It was sooo nice to hang out in the water (it was safe Mom don’t worry) because it is unbelievably hot here. Definitely in the 90s everyday and very humid and of course there is no air conditioning to sit in.

Wednesday we once again arrived too early for an event but it started only a couple hours late. The NGO (WOPA) had invited many women from the town and from surrounding villages to take part in a seminar teaching about microfinance. WOPA is providing these women with abour $200 each to start up a small business that will help them feed their children. It was very disorganized but during a lull period, I was able to identify three women that live in the specific village I am researching and interview them on their needs and also what WOPA does for them. So happy to at least have a few interviews done. After the seminar was over Jozy and I had a wonderful lunch in a local restaurant by the beach. The cook wasn’t there but the waitress called him in to make us some food. He arrived and told us there wasn’t any food but he would go to the market to buy some. After many hours of waiting, we enjoyed delicious omelettes and plantain fries. I got home and the house was so hot and stuffy I leave right away to buy a fan. My fan is my new best friend though I continue to sweat even when sitting in front of it.

Finally, today I had a very relaxed day. Veronique was busy all day and I have to organize my trip to the village with her at least for the first time when I don’t really know my way around so I hung out in my house all day alone. I cooked myself a nice meal and did some background research for my paper and listened to some new African music I bought off the street. I met Jozy in the afternoon to go dress shopping so we can be a little cooler walking around, had a late lunch and met Veronique to discuss details of travel. I’m planning on visiting the village on Saturday for the first time and I’m really excited!

So far Kribi has definitely had its ups and downs. I’m frustrated with the lax way of dealing with time here, and feel my precious research days slipping by unused, but I keep reminding myself it’s the culture here and I need to accept it. Plus, it’s hard to stay upset for too long when I can see the ocean every day! 

Lunch by the beach

So excited in my WOPA t-shirt!

So Many Fishhh

Walk to Jozy's

Does it gets any better?

Ngaoundéré In Summation

Our time in Ngaoundéré went by so quickly, I guess as all things have here. We worked a lot on our presentations but also had free time to explore. There are very few taxis in Ngaoundéré, almost exclusively motos (too dangerous to take) so we walked a ton - a half an hour to school and back every day, 20 minutes to lunch, etc. On average we probably walked around 2 hours every day, especially when we would go out exploring just to see what we could find. Ngaoundéré truly felt like a different country than the parts of Cameroon we have seen before. The dress isn’t nearly as European influenced, a lot of long robes and felt hats for men and headdresses for women. There is a lack of street food compared to the rest of Cameroon, I think because women aren’t allowed to leave the house and typically it is women who sell street food as a second source of income for the house (even though she will make only about $10 per week.) It is, generally, pretty clean, definitely due to the Muslim presence. Families are extremely different because of the gender power roles but girls go to school now. And the language difference was very difficult, people either didn’t speak French at all, or only spoke a little and therefore had a hard time understanding our accents. Living in Fulfulde speaking families was weird too because they would talk and talk with each other and I would sit there not understanding anything until someone would start talking to me in French. It was lonely at times, but I had a lot more independence than I’ve had which was really nice. And they didn’t force feed me like my other families do. There was a very relaxed atmosphere that we all liked a lot. It was hard to leave yesterday because our families were all so great and the city was so pleasant to live in. But we’re moving on to the next step.. individual study projects (ISPs)!!  

I will never cease to be impressed 

Luxury Flushing Latrine

My Mom, Brother and I

Kitchen Room

Beautiful Morning Train Views

Integrated Development Issue (IDI)

Ngaoundéré marked our final classes of the semester, all that remains is our big individual research project for the last month of the program. We therefore spent most of the our time in the north preparing our research and presentations from our partner research project on a development issue that we’ve been working on for the past 8 weeks. My partner Lauren and I chose to do ours on the informal sector in Cameroon. When we started out the second week of September we really didn’t know where this topic would take us, but we came up with research questions that we hoped to answer. (How big is the informal sector, who are its workers, what are their backgrounds, how much education do they have, what motivates people to work there, what is its future, etc.) We started researching during our Dschang stay. We handed out questionnaires to vendors working on the street and in back alleys and pretty much everywhere because the informal sector here is enormous (90% of the working population.) We asked them our basic demographic questions to get a better picture of what the sector looks like from the people who work there. We then picked two to interview formally. We asked them about their lives and their families, their hopes and their difficulties. Through these interviews we started to understand that working in the informal sector is not a choice, it is a last resort. We heard over and over again ca ne suffit pas (this doesn’t suffice) or seulement pour survivre (only for survival.) People talked constantly about their hardships not as complaints, but as reality. So when we set up an interview with an economics professor in Dschang, we asked him about the advantages and disadvantages economically of having a large informal sector, and also what is next for this population. There are advantages, employment provider being #1, but the disadvantages far outweigh them, and thus formalization is desperately needed. The minister in Dschang reaffirmed this opinion but said that the government had no plans to foster this transition between the informal and formal sector. We returned to Yaoundé with the clear idea of continuing to study the need and potential of this transition. We interviewed another government official who was actually devising a method of accomplishing this, and we were really optimistic after our interview with her, but then we interviewed a microfinance organization who told us the government follows through with nothing here. Corruption permeates every department at every level, and disorganization is a fundamental trait of the government. We finished our research with an interview with a tailor, who told us over and over again that the government does rien (nothing.)

Our final paper and presentation revolved around this transition through the perspectives both of the government and of microfinance and the contradictory opinions they gave us. We concluded however, they while this debate goes on in air conditioned offices, thousands of people in Cameroon are suffering everyday, and it therefore doesn’t matter where the change comes from, as long as it comes. It is very doubtful however that it will come any time soon. We learned so much through this process about people. On average people make around $4 per day, they raise families on that, they pay for school on that, everything. Most people have only a primary school education and nobody is satisfied with their work. I now barter much less hard for goods and respect people working in the streets so much more.