While we were in Ireland last summer a friend, Atapassing Ajaccio Evele (more commonly known as Ezekiel) became a father and called his son “Collins” after me. Most people here think that my surname is “Tom” and that my christian name is “Collins”. Thus I am usually referred to as “Mr. Tom”, or as “Papa Tom” by children. Another friend whose wife is pregnant said that if it is a boy it will be called after me. This one will be called "Tom". I worked closely with Atapassing on projects for roads, electrification of villages, building wells, providing piped water to one of the big villages and also on various projects for the handicapped. He brought valuable knowledge to these projects and his initiative, energy and endurance must take the main credit for what we achieved.
One of the major council activities in which I was involved on this occasion was the preparation of the its development plan. This will be a five-year plan setting out the proposed development of the county’s infrastructure and is vital to attracting investment. The work is sponsored by PNDP (Programme National de Développement Participatif), a Cameroonian Government organisation. The funding is provided by the World Bank and by bilateral aid from governments involved in Cameroon’s debt forgiveness programme (the French Government is the largest bilateral donor, and in the case of the Far North the German Government is the main donor). The production of the plan takes about six months. A private company (CAFER in Maga’s case) is appointed as service provider and it puts together a team of around twelve people who are divided into smaller teams which spend four days in each of the villages of the county determing the needs and priorities of the villagers. The planning and methodology of these activities are very impressive and were clearly put in place by a very competent international development organisation for use throughout Cameroon. The plan will consist of a set of development project proposals and once it is ready one of these will be selected and PNDP will implement it with the council, thus transferring knowledge and expertise on project management. After that the council will need to attract funding partners from among Cameroonian Government organisations, domestic and international NGOs, the EU and supportive governments. Implementation of my own plan, to strengthen the capacities of the council (which was initially very weak and still is weak), is necessary to prepare it to take on responsibilities such as these. When the council’s development plan is produced it will provide a context for development of the county which Atapassing and I lacked in the work that we have done to date.
My role in relation to the development plan over the past few months was one of quality assurance. With Maga’s national volunteer, Doubla, I visited the teams working in the villages to verify that they were doing good work and to add value to the process where possible. Some of the villages were very remote and even finding them could be difficult. On one occasion when we stopped to ask for directions from a group of boys who were carrying basins filled with some produce on their heads, they were terrified (maybe by my white skin or my crash helmet), they dropped their basins, spilling the produce, and they scattered in all directions. On another occasion we were advised to follow the “grande route” which turned out to be a dirt track often barely wide enough for our moto and taking us through fields of millet, over very bumpy ground and at times through muddy streams. Sometimes we had to wade through them and somehow get the moto across. We came across one enterprising person who had a pirogue to ferry people, animals and motos across a deep stream but it capsized twice, dumping our moto into the water. However it was a privilege to visit and experience the hospitality in the villages and even in very remote villages they usually knew about my work with the council and said that they appreciated it. I have offered to be available over the internet to help with the completion of the development plan, if that proves feasible.
These visits underlined for me the enormity of the needs of the county and reminded me of a week that I spent, shortly after arriving in 2008, visiting the villages and sometimes sleeping out in the open. On that occasion I accompanied a man who was inspecting the county’s “forages” (deep enclosed wells with pumps) and while he did his inspections I spoke with the village chiefs and elders about their needs. On both occasions access to safe drinking water was the dominant priority in most villages. On this occasion the need is more acute. More pumps are now broken (perhaps as much as half) and there was a serious outbreak of cholera in the county in 2010 which continued to the end of the year and will probably flare up again when the rainy season arrives in June. Large areas flood in the rains and human and animal excrement, as well as fertilisers and rubbish in general, are carried into open wells and ponds. People drink the water from these open wells and even from ponds and streams. In one village that we visited the only source of water was from a stagnant stream with very murky water where some local fishermen passed the day immersed in the water with their nets. In addition to cholera, typhoid and other water-borne diseases, there is a very high risk of bilharzia (it is thought that over 90% of the population suffers from bilharzia).
It is very difficult to walk away from such problems. I decided to mount a project to repair all the broken forages in the county before the start of the rainy season. Preliminary estimates indicate that 59 out of 134 forages are currenly non-functional and the man whom I accompanied in 2008 is currently carrying out fresh inspections to enable the project to be scoped. I have set up structures in Maga and Maroua so that I can manage the project from a distance. It will be the subject of a later post.
Before coming home, Aicha and I visited her family in Foumban. Her grand-mother had been very ill but happily had recovered. Visiting Foumban is always a very pleasant experience because her family is very welcoming and she has connections everywhere. In my youth in Ireland many people used to love “tracing” such connections and you had only to mention a name and they would be off: “He would be the son of X whose brother …” The Cameroonian equivalent is far more complex due to polygamy and my own efforts at understanding relationships often run aground very quickly. Everywhere we go in Cameroon we bump into Bamouns (often selling African art) whom Aicha knows and refers to as “petits frères” and “petites soeurs”. Foumban, and West Cameroon in general, has a much higher standard of living than Maga and the Far North but even so there were power cuts every day and there was no running water for most of the time that we were there. Also cholera was not far away: Bafoussam, a city about 30 kilometers from Foumban, has recorded 100 cases. In Maga it is impossible to get statistics and I expect that the mortality rate is much higher there because of difficulty of access to treatment and lack of money to pay for it.
It is lovely to be home in Ireland and I am quite happy to pay some extra tax to carry us through our own little crisis.
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