Aicha

It is said that volunteering is a life changing experience and benefits the volunteers more than the people they are trying to help. While this can be a bit trite, in my case there is a lot of truth in it. Shortly after arriving in Cameroon I formed a friendship with Aicha and we have become very close over the past 14 months. It has made a huge difference to my life here and some time ago we decided to get married. We were married in Maroua on Saturday 6th June. If this comes as a sudden revelation, please accept my apologies. As events developed they seemed too personal for my blog but as I am travelling to Ireland for three months I have to tell people at this stage. We had originally planned that Aicha would come with me but her visa application was rejected and although she has submitted an appeal she has been told that this will not be heard until late July. Hopefully she will be able to join me for part of the three months after which we will return to Cameroon.

Aicha lives in Maroua and up to a few weeks ago she worked as a nurse, specialising in HIV/AIDS counselling and awareness. She was based in a hospital in Mindif which is about 25 kilometers from Maroua. A few weeks ago she received a letter from the Minister for Health saying that the programme on which she works has been suspended indefinitely due to lack of funds. International donors have stopped funding the programme because of corruption. While this is bad news for Cameroon it is timely for Aicha. She had not been paid for nine months and although she had negotiated leave of absence to come to Ireland in any case, life had become too difficult for her since she also runs a bar in Maroua.

Aicha inherited the bar from her mother who died in 2007. She used to stay up until around 2:30 most mornings, depending on the clients, and then get up at 5:30 to organise the bar for the evening and make the journey by moto on an unsurfaced road to Mindif. She kept the bar going in order to pay for the education of her two brothers who are at university in Yaounde. She and the bar are very popular with volunteers. This is also true of her cookery skills and she is frequently called on to provide food in her bar for volunteers’ celebrations.

Aicha was born to a Christian father and a Muslim mother and she is a practising Muslim. She was her mother’s first child and her father subsequently divorced her mother. Her father died nine years ago.

Aicha was brought up by her grand-mother in Foumban. I have met her grand-mother, who is a most impressive person, and her family was most welcoming and hospitable. Aicha is a member of the Bamoun tribe. The internet has quite a lot of information on the Bamoun whose king lives in a grand palace in Foumban. Foumban is recognised as the centre for Cameroonian art, and is also a clearing house for art in neighbouring countries. I visited Foumban twice and an account of the first visit may be found in my September 2008 post.

Some people have asked me whether Aicha was previously married. The answer is “no”. When Aicha was 17 her family tried to marry her to a man whom she had not met but she ran away from home and hid with friends in a neighbouring village for a few months before being accepted back into her family without having to marry. When she was 20 there was a man whom she wanted to marry and who wanted to marry her but his family vetoed it because the two tribes were hostile. She subsequently did a two-year course in HIV/AIDS care and then came to the Far North to live with her mother in Maroua and work in Mindif.

Although the Bamoun come from West Cameroon, which is like a different country from the Far North, there is an influential community of Bamoun in Maroua. Aicha is active among them and among other things is captain of a hand-ball team, of which she is the main play-maker. There were 180 at our wedding, of whom the majority were Bamoun. We also had a wedding celebration in Maga on 30th May with around 130 people at which, among other things, I was given a sheep and two cocks. These have since been égorgés for the Maroua celebration along with various livestock which we were given there.