Moutourwa

One of my volunteer colleagues lives in a village called Moutourwa which is close to some mountains. A group of volunteers visited him for a week-end and he took us for a walk in the mountains. The rock formations were fascinating but the harmattan spoilt the view somewhat. On our way back from our trek we visited a village where we drank a bucket of bilbil, a local brew made from millet.

Winter

There have been many bulletins from Europe about the unusually harsh winter this year, including reports of prolonged freezing spells in Ireland. Cameroon has also experienced unusual weather and many people point to global warming as a cause.

Winter in the Far North of Cameroon runs from December to February. In December the weather was fairly typical, with the temperature very occasionally dropping below 20 degrees early in the morning and usually rising to the low 30s in the afternoon. By the time I went to work the temperature was usually in the low 20s, which I found very pleasant but which the local people found glacial. While I just wore a shirt, they usually had around five layers, including a heavy overcoat and a woolly hat. Some spoke of their hands freezing on their motorbike and many continued to wear their woolly hat even when the temperature climbed into the 30s. Most people suffered from colds and flu, often bringing on a bout of malaria.

In February the temperature climbed steadily and by mid-February it had reached 46 degrees, which is most unusual for that time of year. Happily I had to travel to the mountains of North West Cameroon for a couple of weeks and the climate there is much milder than in the Extreme North. It rained every day while we were there in what should have been their dry season. We had a similar experience when we visited Douala in January, where there was unseasonally heavy rain.

When I returned to the Far North at the beginning of March the temperature was 48 degrees and people told me that it had been even hotter while I was away. It felt as though we were in an oven which was getting ever hotter but then the weather took another unusual turn with the arrival of the harmattan. This is a wind which comes south from the Sahara and which contains huge clouds of dust, perhaps like the cloud currently passing over Ireland and Europe from the volcanic eruption in Iceland but evidently not as damaging to aircraft. With a weak harmattan everything is grey and the sun looks like the moon. This year it got to an intensity which people said they had never seen, the sun was blotted out, it was relatively dark all day and at times everything was in a yellow fog. The harmattan is very unhealthy, bringing on lots of respiratory problems, and it is very unpleasant since the dust gets into everything. It reminded me of the poniente which used to come north from the Sahara when I stayed in Tarifa in the south of Spain. People in Tarifa used to claim that they had the highest level of insanity in Europe and they blamed the poniente.

The harmattan had a positive effect in that it brought the temperature back down. It has passed now and the temperature drops to the low 30s in the morning and rises to the high 40s in the afternoon. Each day is hotter than the one before and the sun will be directly over us at midday around the end of April. There have been no storms yet so the electricity supply has not been cut much, and hence the water supply also (except that local vandals broke a pipe outside my house and it took six weeks to get my supply restored). My humidity guage stops at 20% and since the beginning of November it had only moved above that level for around three days in March when the temperature was soaring. However this week it has risen to around 50% and this has made the heat almost unbearble, compounded by a power and water failure in Maga.

When the first rains arrive there will be a dramatic transformation. Everything will begin to turn green, there will be loud choruses of frogs or toads at night, snakes will appear and mosquitos and hosts of other insects will proliferate.

St. Patrick's Day in Maga

A number of volunteers told me that they were interested in coming to Maga around the middle of March so I consulted with Grahame, the other Irish volunteer, and we decided to celebrate St. Patrick’s day on Saturday 13th March in Maga. We spread the word around and got a very strong response. Over 25 volunteers and their friends came for the week-end, most of them sleeping on the floor of a (carpeted) reception room in the sultan’s Maga house.

Aicha and two of her friends came to prepare the evening meal, bringing large quantities of food from Maroua since very little can be bought in Maga. I travelled with them and I told the other people in the bus that they were my three wives. A friend had promised me a goat so I asked him for it, and in fact he brough a very fine sheep whose throat was duly cut in true Muslim fashion by a couple of my local assistants. I had kept the sheep in an out-house for the night and when I put him in there I discovered a kitten, which I decided to call “Patrick”.

It was a great night. My night watchman took his duties very seriously and weilded a large machete towards anybody he took to be uninvited. Grahame prepared a quiz with questions like “who drove the snakes out of Ireland?”.

Early the next morning I hired two pirogues to bring the volunteers out onto the lake to see the hippos. To my surprise 25 volunteers surfaced on time, maybe because the sultan’s floor was not very comfortable. On the way out we passed a number of large pirogues packed with local people and their produce on their way to the weekly market in Maga. We duly saw the hippos but they stayed down in the water and at a distance. However although I have done this trip a number of times I do not tire of it due to the landscapes, the birds and the flimsy huts built precariously on islands for the fishermen and their families.

Update on Projects

There are just two months left to the end of my contract with the Maga council and I am trying to finish a lot of things, both on strengthening the capacities of the council and on projects which I have largely worked on separately from the council. The council has made some progress on improving its finances and is in the course of recruitment of more skilled personnel but it still has some distance to go before it will be able to make a significant contribution towards setting up, managing and monitoring projects for the development of the county. I will have no difficulty in using up the funds generously donated from Ireland since there are more than enough opportunities for their use.

There is a set of projects which have now been planned and will be implemented and managed by state departments:

* construction of 4 roads
* electrification of 8 villages
* construction of 10 deep wells
* upgrade of the electricity line from Maga to Pouss from single to triple
* bringing piped water to Guirvidig.

Note: Maga, Pouss and Guirvidig are the three biggest villages in the county.

For each of these projects it was necessary to bring teams of people from the relevant state departments to Maga to prepare the plans and estimates and it was necessary to pay the expenses of transport, accomodation and food for the teams. It was necessary to write to, and in some cases visit, a number of influential people to look for their support, including ministers, the local member of parliament, the governor of the region, the Préfet of the district, the Sous-Préfet of the county, representatives of ministries at various levels and the lamido or sultan. It was also necessary to send somebody to Yagoua (300 kilometers), the district capital, and to Yaounde (1200 kilometers), the capital of Cameroon, to lobby for approval of these projects. The costs per project ranged between €75 and €2000 but the benefits for the county are much greater, e.g. state investment of €2,500,000 on roads.

As reported in an earlier blog, I financed a person who has done a census of handicapped people and this has revealed that there are more than 350 handicapped in the county. We are working on getting them the handicapped persons’ identity cards which are necessary for state assistance. As yet the state has only agreed to provide tricycles to two handicapped people and crutches to a few others. However a local Catholica organisation, Fondation Bethleem, has agreed to provide tricycles to 35, of which 5 will be free and 30 will be paid for jointly by the foundation, the council, my funds and a little from the handicapped or their parents. I am paying to have the foundation send a team to Maga to survey the handicapped and agree which ones need tricycles or crutches, which ones could benefit from operations, etc. The foundation is an excellent organisation and is considering setting up a branch in Maga as a result of our initiatives.

A team of German doctors came to Ngaoundere, a city around 500 kilometers from Maga, offering to perform free operations on children suffering from “bec de lièvre”. This is a congenital condition for which I do not have the English name. It translates as “hare’s beak” and is a deformity of the lips and mouth. People suffering from this condition are treated as outcasts here since the local belief is that the condition results from sorcery or some evil which attaches to the family. The operation consists of taking flesh from another part of the body and building the lips. I paid for the transport and accomodation to enable four children to avail of this opportunity. Two were operated on successfully and one is to return at a later date for a more complex operation, the fourth not being judged suitable. Since then we have identified seven more sufferers from this condition and we have got approval for their operations when the German doctors return at a later date.

In a previous blog I have mentioned that there is a complicated and expensive process which needs to be gone through to get a birth certificate for a child who was not registered at birth. Children cannot get into secondary school without a birth certificate and a birth certificate is needed for many purposes such as applying for state jobs. There are several thousand unregistered children in Maga and I hoped at an earlier stage that I would work out the process and costs by putting through a pilot group of 114 children. We prepared the files and sent them to the chairman of the appropriate tribunal but despite several visits we did not manage to get answers from him as to what process to follow and what costs to pay. A local judge who is a member of the tribunal told me that unless I gave the chairman some money for himself he would not act on the files, and this I refused to do. Then the minister responsible announced that he would give birth certificates free in our district on a one-off basis to encourage children to continue in education. There followed frenetic activity to put files together and submit them for approval. I supported 33 additional cases and after much difficulty managed to have these and the original 114 files included in the free category. However six months later we still have not got the birth certificates, apparently because others from Maga had submitted files which were incomplete (all mine were complete). I think the birth certificates will eventually come through for the 147 children but I am disappointed that we will not have worked out a process for getting the birth certificates for the thousands of other unregistered children in the county.

The mayor made a video on the state of schools in the county with the objective of looking for support from NGOs and other external organisations. The video runs for over an hour and the scenes which have a strong impact only begin to appear after 15 minutes. With the mayor’s agreement, I remade the video, keeping it to 15 minutes and concentrating on the high impact scenes. Unfortunately the people who had put the original video together had deleted all their source files and it was necessary to film a second time. This was done in one morning just after the school holidays and a large number of children had not yet returned to school. Thus general overcrowding and class sizes of over 200 are not evident. Nevertheless I hope the video still has an impact (see below). The council is responsible for primary schools and the needs are enormous. The council has built seven classrooms and this year the state is going to build two classrooms, supply 60 desks and build toilets in one school. However the county needs 83 classrooms, over 5000 desks and 183 trained teachers and almost all 48 schools need toilets and drinking water. We have begun to approach NGOs and other organisations for help and the video is proving very effective in this respect. The Fondation Bethleem has promised to supply 200 desks free and to give us a very good price on others if we can find the funds elsewhere. We are currently talking to UNICEF and other organisations and are hopeful of some support.

In other areas the needs of the county are as great as in education. The greatest need of all is for drinking water. A survey of all villages has indicated that the county needs 190 deep wells and that a large number of the existing wells have broken pumps which need to be fixed. We will need help from a large organisation, such as the European Union, to tackle a problem of this magnitude. Strengthening of the council’s capacities will also be vital since effective maintenance will be essential.

Links have been set up for the schools video on youtube:
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTbyC1jmjxE
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g5nWBg-aJY
Alternatively join the Facebook group "Tom In Africa" which has the video as one clip and allows sharing of notices/information: http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=100000537972574&k=Z6E3Y5RXRWYEZE1JY1Z4QVPUR6BAX44DT3HT&oid=106811042686531