Tom in Africa

Cholera outbreak, progress on projects and other news

2011-08-31T08:18:00.000-07:00

Cholera Outbreak

Cholera has broken out throughout Maga again this year. To date (5/9/2011) there have been 982 cases and new cases are encountered every day. This outbreak is extremely serious and is much worse than last year's outbreak. Two weeks ago in response to an urgent request, I sent money to buy a large quantity of drinking water for the three medical centres. The medical centre in Maga had 150 patients, which is around 10 times its capacity. The uses to which this water is being put include making up drips to counter dehydration.

Project Uisce Beatha

The project to repair forages has gone well. To date the pumps in 40 forages have been repaired. There are 13 forages which are so seriously damaged that it would be better to replace them with a new model of forage but to replace an existing forage it is necessary to get the approval of the Ministre de l'Energie et de l'Eau. Correspondence was put in train before I left Cameroon to seek this approval but it has still not come through. Recently I rang the local member of parliament, who was in Yaounde at the time and had previously promised to help, and asked him to talk to the minister and try to persuade him to give the approval. I have also spoken several times to the local delegate of the ministry to try to get him to break this deadlock. This is urgent since the rains have come and cholera is rampant.

To help combat the current outbreak of cholera, Plan Cameroon, an NGO, has promised to contribute 3,000,000 fcfa (€4,500) towards repairing the forages.

Project for the handicapped

As a follow-on to last year's visit of the Fondation de Bethleem to the council to screen people with disabilities, tricycles have been delivered to 20 handicapped. The local council made a substantial contribution to the costs.

Of the two children who had operations to improve their joints, the little girl can now walk for the first time and the boy (who used to travel 500 metres to school on his hands and knees) cannot walk but has been given a tricycle.

Other news

As part of the programme to prepare and launch the council's development plan, two people with experience in development and finance, respectively, have been recruited and their salaries will be paid by the state in the first year and 50% will be paid in the second year. The council has completed recruitment to other posts which willl strengthen it and is waiting for the approval of the Prefet to proceed with this.

A state organisation, FEICOM, has promised to give Maga's schools 1,000 desks.

In July I received the sad news of the death of the Sultan of Pouss.

On a happier note, the wife of my friend Halidou Mal Oumar had a son and they have called him Tom Alipa Saleh.

A website on Maga is now available at
http://www.magacam.com

Safe drinking water in Maga, Far North, Cameroon

2011-04-14T07:57:00.000-07:00

Project Uisce Beatha

The Far North of Cameroon had its worst rainy season for over 20 years in 2010. One storm alone left 5,000 homeless and killed 14 people in Maga. Flooding was widespread, many houses collapsed, crops were devastated and diseases were rampant. In addition to malaria and bilharzia, typhoid and other water-borne diseases, there was a serious outbreak of cholera. The local people, the majority of whom live below the povery threshold of $1 per day, have little capacity for reconstruction or for paying for treatment when ill. The state, the local council and international organisations such as the UN’s UNICEF and FAO have given valuable support but major problems remain, the most important of which is access to clean water.

Virtually the whole population of 85,000 people depends on “forages” for clean water. A forage is an enclosed deep well (over 50 metres deep in some cases) with a manual pump. Maga county has 149 forages but around one-third are currently not working and nearly all are in need of repair. If there is no forage, or if the local forage is not working, people drink water from open wells, rivers, irrigation channels, lakes or even stagnant ponds. Flood waters carry human and animal excrement, fertilisers, weed-killers and general rubbish into all of these in the rainy season each year. There are almost no toilets and people frequently relieve themselves in the proximity of shallow open wells, thus transmitting diseases such as cholera. The quality of the water which many people drink is appalling. I could find no reliable statistics but while I was in Maga there were numerous illnesses and several deaths from water-borne diseases among the families of my friends and colleagues.

It is estimated that Maga needs an additional 190 forages but constructing a new forage costs over ten times the cost of repairing an existing forage so clearly the problem of fixing the forages which are not working, and on-going maintenance of all forages, should be tackled first. The state has launched a campaign to persuade villagers to construct latrines with their own resources and is providing funds to repair six forages but the cost of repairing the remaining forages far exceeds the villagers’ means in most cases.

I have recently come home to Ireland and do not plan to return to work in Cameroon but this is one problem that I do not want to walk away from. Before leaving Maga I launched Project Uisce Beatha to repair as many of the broken forages as possible before June, when the next rainy season is likely to start, and I got agreement from the local council that it will take responsibility for maintenance of forages in the future. Repairing all the forages that are currently broken and doing initial preventive maintenance on the others is estimated to cost €42,000 (including 15% contingency). This is an appreciable sum but the benefit will be enormous since the project will materially benefit the health of over 40,000 people, including a high proportion of children who are the most vulnerable to water-borne diseases. It is a goal worth striving for, and given the urgency of the situation I have provided funds (including some left over from previous donations from my friends in Ireland) to fix the 20 forages where the need is greatest. After allowing for this, for villagers’ contributions and the undertaking by the state to fix a small number of forages, €30,500 remains to be found. There are 15 forages which would be particularly difficult to repair and which would cost an estimated €13,000 and I have made it clear that it is unlikely that funding will be found for these. If these are omitted or deferred, the target reduces to €17,500 and the greater part of the benefit will still be achieved. Any contribution that you can make, however small, would be most welcome. The average cost of repairing a forage is €300, ranging from €50 to €900, but every €1 donated will materially improve a person's health and possibly save their life.

To gear up for on-going maintenance after the pumps which are currently defective have been repaired, the council is recruiting a technician who will visit each village once a month from June to inspect the forages, do preventive maintenance and do major repairs where necessary. Monthly contributions by villagers will be used to pay for replacement parts and the technician’s costs. The model which I have proposed is like medical insurance, where all contributions are put in a common account administered by the local council which will be used to meet the costs of repairing whatever forages are in need of repair in the future. This is different from the model used up to now, where each forage had its own account. In many cases these accounts proved insufficient on breakdown, and in cases where contributions would have needed to be made for a further number of years to pay for the repairs the forages tended to be abandoned. To the best of my knowledge this is the first time that an insurance type approach is being adopted in Cameroon. The common account has some other practical advantages. It can be monitored more rigorously to prevent individuals in the forage management committees from diverting the money collected to their own personal use, as frequently happened in the past. It will also help with management of the repair process where in the past some technicians disappeared with the money collected and did not carry out the required repairs.

Before leaving Maga I did seminars for the councillors and for the village chiefs to get their buy-in to the proposals. A local development organisation, ACEEN which has extensive experience in forage maintenance, backed by a Swiss NGO, International Project Aid, agreed to do an initial inspection of all the forages detailing and estimating the cost of the required repairs. They have also done training for two people who are currently doing “sensibilisation” in the villages. This consists of ensuring that there is a management committee for each forage, that they are effectively managing the use of the forage, that they are collecting usage charges to enable them to pay their contributions to the council and also that villagers follow good hygiene practices. Before scheduling the repairs to a forage under Project Uisce Beatha the sensibilisation team must confirm that they are happy with the management committee and the management committee must contribute 10% of the cost of the replacement parts.

It is sometimes argued that water is a human right and that all should have free access to it. Unfortunately the history of water projects in Cameroon indicates that people do not appreciate free water. Indeed in some cases where forages were provided free and where there were no charges for usage, villagers neglected them and after just a few years as many as 90% of the forages were no longer working. In any event, my funds are limited and the council’s funds are extremely limited. Hence in order to motivate them to look after their forages, in the project to repair the forages which are already defective and also in the on-going maintenance by the council, the management committees will be asked to pay a percentage of the cost of the replacement parts.

Programme to Provide Safe Drinking Water in Maga

Project Uisce Beatha forms part of a larger programme to provide acess to clean water in Maga. There are three towns in the county, Maga town, Pouss and Guirvidig. Maga town has piped water but the number of users is very small. A project to bring piped water to Pouss has been approved and funding has been obtained for it. With the help of donations from my friends, I brought teams of engineers and other experts to Gurividig to plan and estimate a project to bring piped water to that town. The council is currently looking for state or other funding for this project. Even if the three towns have piped water, it is unlikely that it will serve more than 5,000 people in the short term. Thus 80,000 people will remain to be served by forages. This gives a ratio of over 500 per forage, over double the number of users recommended by the UN. As mentioned above, it is estimated that around 190 new forages will be needed at a cost of between €5,000 and €10,000 each, depending on the terrain. Thus a project costing around €1.5 million would be needed to provide the new forages. In the following programme, Project Uisce Beatha consists of steps 3, 4 and 5.

Programme to provide safe drinking water to Maga’s population:

1. Implement the project to bring piped water to Pouss.

2. Get funding and implement the project to bring piped water to Guirvidig.

3. Sensibilise the villagers on the need for latrines and for good management of forages.

4. Repair the forages which are not currently functional.

5. Do initial preventive maintenance on the forages which are currently defective though functional.

6. Introduce an on-going programme to repair the forages which break down in the future.

7. Get funding to build 190 new forages.

If any person or organisation would like to help with Project Uisce Beatha or with other elements of the programme, please make contact in the first instance by sending an email (in English or French) to the council at communedemaga@gmail.com.

Taking Stock of Achievements in Maga

2011-03-20T11:34:00.000-07:00

In March 2008 I became a volunteer with VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas) and I took up a position as Institutional Development Advisor to the Local Council of Maga in the Far North of Cameroon. This post is an attempt to take stock, on my return to Ireland in March 2011, of what has been achieved and of what remains to be done.

The diagnosis which I carried out in 2008 revealed that Maga council’s capacities were very weak indeed. The mayor made all the decisions and he and the Secretary General did virtually all the work. The executive had never met as a group and the council subcommittees had never been convened. The annual budget was prepared by the mayor and Secretary General without the participation of the councillors, including the four deputy mayors, who received the budget proposals at the council sessions at which they were approved. Around two-thirds of the 40 councillors do not speak French and are illiterate (the mayor is the only one who has a little English). Around two-thirds of the council’s 30 staff never did any work at all and most of the others did only occasional work. Only one (the Secretary General) had finished secondary school and several had dropped out of primary school. The council’s finances were in a very sorry state, partly because the previous administration had not had accounts approved during their five-year term and because a large sum of money had gone missing. It was impossible to apply to Government and other organisations for funds because their first demand was to see the accounts for the past three years. Nothing worked in the council offices, and in particular the computer and the photocopier had not been working for a very long time.

Maga is in a remote and disadvantaged area. For example, there are no surfaced roads in the county and in its 50 primary schools the average class size is around 150 and there are almost no desks. The electricity supply in Maga is very unreliable and may be cut for weeks. The rainy season, usually from June to September, can be devastating (as it was in 2010 when 14 people were killed and 5,000 lost their homes in one particular storm) and floods prevent people from coming to meetings. The city of Maroua is only 80 kilometers away but the road is bad and the buses which were in use in 2008 and 2009 broke down several times on most journeys.

Despite all the weaknesses and defects, there has been very good commitment to improve on the part of the mayor, his deputies, the councillors, the staff and the community. I did workshops for the executive, the councillors, the chairmen and secretaries of the subcommittees, the staff, the tax collectors and the village chiefs and the response was always good. It was necessary to begin at a very basic level and I needed to write plays and get local people to present them in Mousgoum (the most common local language) to get the messages across. For example, one of the workshops which I presented to the councillors, the staff and the village chiefs had to do with behaviours such as turning up late to meetings, or not turning up and not sending a message, taking phone calls in meetings and having conversations at meetings, behaviours motivated by prejudice, behaviours such as finding excuses for not taking action on difficult issues and also general lack of proactivity. On behaviours, as on the other areas mentioned below, there is consensus that there has been a good improvement although there is great scope for further improvement.

In relation to building the capacities of the council, the main achievements were:

* The mayor now communicates more, consults with others and delegates responsibilities.

* The executive has regular meetings at which important issues, including reports on receipts and expenditure, are discussed.

* The council subcommittees now meet and were involved in producing the annual budgets for 2010 and 2011.

* The finances of the council have improved, partly because tax receipts have increased under active management by the executive, and the accounts have been brought up to date.

* The council now has an IT room with two computers, a printer and an electricity generator and training of some staff in IT has commenced.

It has to be admitted also that there has been regression on many of these improvements, particularly in periods when I have been absent.

My role was to develop the capacities of the council so that the council could develop the infrastructure of the county and provide services to its citizens, including disadvantaged groups. During my time in Maga I found that there were many opportunities to launch projects for infrastructure development and to help disadvantaged groups. There is a lot of scope to access Cameroonian state funds for infrastructural projects but it is necessary to bring engineers and other experts to the county to prepare the estimates and plans. With the help of donations from some friends in Ireland I was able to support the preparation of proposals to the state

* to build 80 kilometers of roads to remote villages (unsurfaced but hopefully accessible in the rainy season),

* to bring piped water to Guirvidig (one of three big villages, the others being Maga, which has piped water, and Pouss for which a project has already been approved),

* to build ten “forages” (deep enclosed wells with pumps),

* to bring electrity to nine villages

* and to strengthen the electricity connection between Maga and Pouss.

In relation to disadvantaged groups, I supported a census of 350 handicapped people in the county and supported bringing a team from a local NGO, the Fondation de Bethlêem, to examine them. The Foundation is currently constructing tricycles for 20 of them and has performed remedial operations on two and there are plans to provide crutches for others, the costs being met jointly by the Foundation, the council, my friends and the families of the handicapped. I have also supported operations for 17 people suffering from hare’s lip, a condition which tends to have them treated as outcasts since local people believe that they are under spells and will bring misfortune on anybody who associates with them. Discussions are in progress on providing operations for people with cataracts.

At this stage, two years of the five-year plan to build the capacities of the council have been implemented. The work which remains is very real. The council has recently got approval to recruit six new staff with experience relevant to key roles and has also decided on a revised organisation in which existing staff will have their roles redefined. Once these changes are in place there are many actions in the plan which need to be carried out, starting with training and including the introduction of good people management practices. With support from the Government-backed PNDP (Programme National de Développement Participatif), the council has started work on preparing its development plan. This plan will set out the infrastructural and other developments which will be prioritised over the next five years. It is likely to be completed around June and the projects referred to above will be integrated into it. The council’s capacities will certainly need to be strengthened if it is to manage effectively the resulting projects.

One project which could not wait has to do with repairing pumps in forages, most of which are in need of repair. There was a serious outbreak of cholera in the county in 2010 and this is likely to flare up again at the onset of the rainy season in June in addition to the “normal” water-borne diseases, such as typhoid. I initiated this project before leaving for home and am coordinating it by telephone and email. I will cover this in a subsequent post.

VSO has been looking for a replacement for me for over a year without success and my return to Maga in October 2011, following completion of my original contract in May 2011, was an attempt to maintain progress while the search continued. I think that my return made a big difference but it is vital that VSO find a replacement for at least two years to carry through the remaining actions in the plan, particularly those which follow the recruitment and reorganisation of personnel and the preparation of the development plan. The main requirements are experience of management and passable French. The latter might appear intimidating to those not fluent in French but in reality people are very tolerant and helpful in relation to language (only one-third of them speak French in any case so they are very used to language difficulties). There is also a very good national volunteer in Maga who works closely with the international volunteer and helps with language as well as with cultural, social, legislative and other practical issues.

Maga's Development Plan and My Return Home

2011-03-09T04:27:00.000-08:00

Apologies for not writing for quite some time. I was very busy and did not manage to fit it in. On this occasion I had committed to returning to Maga for only three months. I extended this for one month to the end of February but although there clearly was much to do I chose to work intensively and then leave rather than endure the increasing heat yet again. Maga really needs a volunteer for another two to three years and having worked the best part of the past three years I feel that I have done my bit. Aicha and I are now safely back in Dublin and I will do a few posts over the next few weeks for completeness. I also have to finish out some work in progress from here, including constructing a website for Maga and remotely managing a project to repair the pumps in a large number of the wells in the county.

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.

Operations for Handicapped Children

2010-12-26T08:09:00.000-08:00

In May, before I left Cameroon, we brought a team from the Fondation de Bethleem to Maga to examine around 70 handicapped people to decide whether they could benefit from tricycles, crutches or operations. Among 350 handicapped people whom we had identified in the county these were the ones who appeared to have these needs. It was envisaged that around 35 of them could benefit from tricycles and the Foundation had intimated that it could supply five free and 30 for each of which it would contribute €150 from a total cost of €200. The council undertook to contribute €30 per tricycle, I undertook to contribute €15 and the family of the handicapped was to be asked for €5. After returning to Maga in October I visited the Foundation to enquire about the results of their examinations. I was told that donations to the Foundation (mainly from Italy, its country of origin) had fallen substantially and that it could not deliver on what had been envisaged. It now proposes to give tricycles to 20 handicapped, none of which will be free and for each of which it will contribute €82. The tricycles, which it builds in its workshop, will not be ready until after Easter. The team which performed the examinations has selected their 20 highest priority handicapped and we plan to ask them to include a few others, children who did not make it to the list but have an urgent need for tricycles to get to school. The Foundation also plans to perform operations on a few handicapped (see below) and to give crutches to some others. It had originally planned (with the backing of another organisation) to give financial assistance to around 50 handicapped who plan revenue-generating enterprises but now says that it will be unable to do so.

The Foundation said that they were bringing doctors to Mouda early in December and proposed a list of 11 handicapped for further examination to determine whether they could benefit from surgery. We were asked to have the relevant limbs xrayed in advance and to transport the handicapped, each with an accompanying person, to Mouda (around 40 kilometers from Maroua which in turn is around 80 kilometers from Maga) for consultation. For each scheduled operation we would have to pay in the region of €120 (the Fondation would pay certain other costs) and the family would have to provide an accompanying person and food for a hospital stay of one to three months.

Because of logistical difficulties, we managed to bring only four handicapped for examination on this occasion, three girls and a boy. The boy travels 500 metres to school on his hands and knees, protecting his hands from the scorching and rough ground with flip flops. One of the girls has to crawl but she cannot use her hands and has to use her elbows in stead (Not included in this group is a girl who cannot use her hands or her feet and who uses her elbows to pull her body along the ground.).

The doctors were to be available in the Foundation on a Monday. We got agreement from a hospital in Meskine (around eight kilometers from Maroua) to do the xrays on the preceding Saturday. Each child was to be accompanied by an adult and they were to be housed with relatives in Meskine from Friday to Monday. One of the Maga councillors took on the difficult task of looking after the four handicapped and their accompanying adults from Friday to Monday. He had them brought by moto from their villages (some very remote) to Maga where we took a bus to Maroua on Friday afternoon. Happily the bus did not break down on this occasion. The councillor organised a taxi to take the four handicapped and four accompanying adults to Meskine (it is not unusual to put ten people in a car in the Far North). I went to my house thinking all was well but at around 9:00 p.m. I got a call to say that the families did not have the capacity to house them. The hospital lent them a vacant house which had no furnishings and no floor coverings. The temperature currently falls to the low 20s at night, which local people find very chilly, and although I was in my comfortable bed I spent a somewhat sleepless night thinking about them sleeping on a bare concrete floor and worrying about whether they would all catch cold (a serious condition for people as poor and undernourished as these). The next day we bought mats and blankets and organised food since their relatives had not taken up this duty. The xrays went smoothly and morale was restored. However we then got a message to say that the doctors had not arrived because their flight was cancelled (this can be a euphemism for their flight being taken over by a government minister and his retinue) and that the examinations would have to be put back to Wednesday. All agreed that the best thing to do was to stay in Meskine until Wednesday.

The councillor brought them to Mouda on the Wednesday and the visiting doctors selected two (the boy, aged 12, and the youngest girl, aged five) for operation on the following Friday. This was much earlier than we expected but we got permission from their parents to go ahead with the operations and we got their commitment that an adult would stay with each of them in Mouda for a two to three-month recovery period and that they would provide food for them throughout this period. The councillor brought the other two handicapped home and then returned to Mouda. The operations went ahead and the doctors were very happy with the results. The councillor spent a few days with them since the parents only speak Mousgoum and nobody in Mouda speaks that language. They are well housed by the Foundation but are now struggling to find money for food. I visited them to-day (St. Stephen’s Day / Boxing Day) and brought them stocks of rice and smoked fish.

Initiatives such as these pose difficult questions in relation to how to deploy the limited funds which my friends in Ireland have donated. I estimate that the costs will come to around €500 per operation (the estimate given to me originally by the Foundation was much less than half this). I would guess that if we could break the deadlock on getting birth certificates (there has been progress on this front) we could probably get them for 50 children for this money. There are roughly 5,000 children who currently need birth certificates to complete their education and for other purposes and there are also many other competing demands for funds. One of the two handicapped who were examined but not yet scheduled will need three operations and there are seven other handicapped who have not yet been examined.

Cholera in the Far North of Cameroon

2010-11-05T10:00:00.000-07:00

Apologies to anybody who has already read my blog of 30th October. I have split it in two and added a little to this part.

Maroua is referred to as the epicentre of the cholera outbreak, which extends to Nigeria to the west, Niger to the north, Chad to the east and to North Cameroon, which includes Garoua, to Maroua’s south. Cholera is endemic in the Far North of Cameroon but this year’s outbreak is the worst for over 20 years. The most recent figures which I could find from the health ministry are from 26th September when 7,247 cases had been recorded in Cameroon (6,000 of these in the Far North), including 483 deaths. Local people believe that the real numbers are higher than these.

The Far North has a population of 5,000,000 and its outbreak is probably bigger than the Haitian outbreak which is currently getting much media attention. While the Far North has not had the scale of devastation of the Haitian earthquake, the severe rainy season there has brought its own destruction, as mentioned in a previous post, and has created conditions conducive to the spread of cholera. The mortality rate of cholera sufferers in the Far North is much higher than in most affected areas due to the poor infrastructure and health services in the area. Less than 30% of people have access to safe drinking water and there is one latrine per 4,000 people.

Médecins sans Frontières has set up treatment centres in Maroua and in Mokolo, a village around 60 kilometers to the west. The government has launched a campaign, mainly in schools, to promote awareness of good practices to avoid transmission of the disease and this appears to be working well. It also has a phase two plan aimed at providing infrastructure to reduce the risks in the future by building 50 new deep wells and repairing 200 which are broken. However, to put this in context, Maga is one of around 30 counties in the Far North and it needs 190 new wells and needs more than this number of existing wells repaired. Because of the lack of infrastructure here, I am very keen to work on the preparation of Maga’s development plan, for which state funding came through while I was away.

Lest it should appear that I am suggesting that I am at serious risk from cholera, this is not the case. While admitting that firm information is very hard to come by, I have the impression that the outbreak is under control. There appear to have been very few cases in Maga. The villages of some other volunteers have had serious outbreaks but the volunteers remain in place. I drink only water which I have filtered and keep large stocks of water in my house. I wash my hands all the time, in filtered water if I am touching food. After buying lettuce, tomatoes, apples and other food that is eaten raw I steep it in bleach for half an hour and I always wash it again in filtered water before eating it. I am very selective about eating or drinking anything that either I or Aicha has not prepared. Cholera is easy to treat. Deaths from cholera tend to be due to dehydration and I have stocks of Dioralyte which I can take should the need arise. Aicha and I had a vaccination against cholera before coming here. It is only around 40% effective but should reduce the intensity of the disease should it strike.

13/11/2010: I spoke too soon last week when I said that the outbreak appears to be under control. During the week there were new cases in at least three Maga villages, including seven cases in Maga itself.

01/09/2011: There is a very serious outbreak of cholera in Maga this year which appears to be more severe than last year's. I have not been able to get any statistics.

Return to Cameroon

2010-10-30T03:38:00.000-07:00

We returned to Cameroon early in October so that I may resume work with the Maga council while VSO continues to look for a replacement for me. We flew into Douala and the next day went to Yaounde. We had to spend a few days there waiting for a booking for the train to Ngaoundere. The transport system was choked up because of an African Cup qualifier match in Garoua between Cameroon and the Congo. Other than flying, which is very expensive and somewhat unreliable (since I wrote this I have heard that all flights to Maroua have been suspended indefinitely), the only way to get to the Far North is through Ngaoundere and then by bus through Garoua to Maroua. FIFA had been asked to relocate the match because of a cholera outbreak in Garoua but this request had been refused. Maroua is referred to as the epicentre of the cholera outbreak, which is the worst for over 20 years. This is covered in my next post.

The rains have lingered longer than usual this year, the countryside is greener than usual and many rivers passed on the journey from Yaounde to Maroua were fuller than I have ever seen them. The elephants which leave the Waza wildlife park for a few months towards the end of the rainy season to roam south, passing not far from Maga, have travelled much longer distances than usual and have caused a lot of damage to crops on their way. I have never seen them, even on visits to the park.

I got a very warm welcome from a large number of people on returning to Maga. My bicycle is not yet working but every time I walk somebody gives me a lift on their moto. The violent storms this year damaged much of the millet crop and some of the rice crop in Maga but conditions are favourable for the coming red millet crop. The level of Lake Maga is very high but the dyke has not been breached, as had been feared. It is currently difficult to catch fish because the water is too deep but fish stocks will benefit. By all accounts most of Maga was flooded for a large part of the rainy season and many houses made of mud have crumbled. I am in a privileged position of having a house made of concrete but there were two out-houses in my enclosure which are now rubble.

Before leaving Maga the mayor and I had got agreement from SEMRY, a local development organisation, that they would use their machinery to prepare the (mud) roads for the rainy season if I paid the fuel costs. I handed over the money for the fuel in May but unfortunately some authorisation problems in SEMRY delayed the work until the worst of the rains were over. It still made a small difference because channels were dug at the sides of the roads into which the flood waters flowed. Now the mounds of earth removed from these channels are dumped along the roadsides but I am assured that they will eventually be smoothed out. Hopefully all this will make a significant difference for the next rainy season.

When I first returned to Maga there had been no electricity or running water for over two weeks but happily these have been fixed now. My first journey to Maga was difficult since the bus broke down and a second bus had to be sent from Maroua. This also broke down several times and it got stuck in the mud and people had to get out and push. One of our breakdowns was beside a tiny village and I was pleased to see a poster on a tree giving advice on cholera. My trips to Maga have been much more difficult than the trips back, as though the buses don’t want to go there. A new bus company set up last year initially had good buses but the terrible state of the roads has taken its toll and the buses are now nearly as bad as the awful ones they replaced.

Even the roads in Maroua are very bad after the rains and they make travel hazardous. On “surfaced” roads people weave from side to side avoiding potholes and on unsurfaced roads negotiating the humps and hollows is like skiing through a mogul field. The rules of the road are disregarded and it is necessary always to anticipate what other drivers and moto riders will do. While we were away a woman who sold koki (a dish made from beans) at the roadside next door to our house was killed by a car that went out of control and hit a pole which fell on her. Her baby survived. A few days ago a van went out of control near by and crashed into a wall, ending up in somebody’s enclosure. Our stretch of road in Maroua has had its share of incidents. Last year Aicha saw a man being gored by a bullock just outside our house.

We have had some macabre news from Foumban, Aicha’s home village in West Cameroon. There is a police/army unit trained to track down the coupeurs de route (the bandits who hold up buses and other vehicles and rob the passengers and sometimes kill them). A member of this unit was in league with some bandits and he shot a moto-taximan in a hold-up. The latter survived and identified his attacker. Local people lynched him by putting a tyre doused in petrol around him and setting it alight. When we last visited Foumban this man’s father had shot himself and this was the main talking point on that occasion.

On a lighter note, I went to have my hair cut in Maga. The usual barber was not there and the one I went to immediately set upon me, taking huge chunks of hair off my head. I stopped him and walked out, but it was too late. My head looked like one of the local fields devastated by the storms. When I got to Maroua I got a local barber to reduce my hair to the lowest common denominator and now I look like Yul Brynner (for those of you who are not old enough to remember him, he made complete baldness fashionable). Aicha has still not stopped laughing but happily I had lent my camera to somebody so she hasn’t yet been able to take photos for home.

"Leaving" Maga

2010-08-28T10:09:00.000-07:00

I am currently back in Ireland having completed my contract in Maga at the end of May but I have agreed to return in October since VSO has not yet found a replacement for me. Four years of the plan to build the capacities of the council remain and the need for a volunteer is very real. While I have found my work in Maga rewarding and feel that it has made a difference, I think that at this stage it would be good to bring in somebody with fresh ideas and energy. However the council is currently going through a critical phase due to the roll-out of decentralisation in Cameroon so it is vital to have a volunteer there in the coming months. Also if a replacement is found it would be useful to have a face-to-face hand-over. Further, although there has been good progress on some of the projects which I helped to initiate, my presence would be beneficial on this front. The opportunities for adding value both to the council and to the people in Maga are enormous.

We had a great party in Maga before leaving in May attended by about 250 people. I doubled up with Josiane, a Canadian education volunteer who was leaving Guirvidig at the same time. Aicha prepared the food, including some sheep, a goat, some hens and a duck given to me by friends and colleagues. As usual dancing went on until dawn, ably led by the mayor. We also had a party in Maroua for volunteers and Cameroonian friends. The mayor came to that party too accompanied by a different wife from the one whom he brought to the party in Maga (the latter had a baby with her, which is not unusual). Unlike a lot of polygamous men who attend such functions alone on the grounds that they cannot favour one wife over another, the mayor has brought each of his four wives to one of my functions.

We then travelled to West Cameroon to visit Aicha’s family in Foumban and I returned to Ireland in mid-June. For the early weeks I did little more than watch the football World Cup on television. Cameroon’s early exit was not a surprise since although they had good players they were not well prepared. However my allegiance switched to Ghana, the only African team to make it to the knock-out stage, until their unfair exit (reminiscent of Ireland’s unfair exit at the qualifier stage, which was greeted with huge indignation in Cameroon where “la main de Thiery Henry” has since become part of everyday language). Aicha joined me a few weeks later after the usual delay with her visa. She has settled very well, her English is improving all the time and she is making a promising start to golf. The highlight of our visit to Ireland was a trip to Sligo with Ruth, an English volunteer who worked in schools in Maga when I first went there and who has now bravely gone to Afghanistan. We visited various megalithic sites and went to some traditional music sessions. At one of these we were prevailed on to try some set dancing. Aicha took to this like a duck to water and was a big hit with the locals.

Having gone through a collapse of interest and motivation on returning to Ireland, as also happened last year, I am now beginning to think forward to my return to Maga. After struggling through the rainy season in my first year in Maga I decided to skip it in future years. The tragic events in Pouss (see my previous post) give a vivid illustration of how hard and perilous life is there. Latest information gives more than 5,000 made homeless by the storms in addition to the dead and injured and the crop damage. One of the villages where cholera has broken out is in a remote part of the county and the rains cut access to health centres for its sick people and access to markets for its farmers: one of the projects that I have helped to initiate is the building of a “road” through that village which would give such access throughout most of the rainy season. This year’s rainy season is by all accounts exceptionally bad and has caused widespread access problems and power cuts even in Maga, Pouss and Guirvidig, the three biggest villages. 2010 has been a year of extremes, with an exceptionally bad harmattan (wind with dust from the Sahara), exceptionally hot weather from February to May and now exceptionally severe rains and storms. One piece of good news amid the gloom is that state assistance for work on drawing up the council’s development plan, which will give a sound context for development of roads, schools, health centres, provision of wells and piped water, electrification and other infrastructure has come through after years of delay. This is something that I hope to contribute to when I return.

Sad News from Maga

2010-08-24T13:20:00.000-07:00

In July, while back in Ireland, I got very sad news from Maga. Pouss, the biggest village in the county, was hit by a violent storm. I spoke subsequently to the mayor who said that 15 people were killed, 10 were still critical, 75 were seriously injured, a few thousand were rendered homeless and the millet crop was devastated. The Red Cross has been helping those affected and the Government of Cameroon has provided relief funds. The rainy season has been very bad this year and cholera has broken out in some of the remoter villages of the county. Access to these villages is extremely difficult in the rainy season, which compounds their problems. With widespread flooding there is a serious risk that the cholera will spread.

I have visited Pouss, which is 12 kilometers from Maga, on several (and happier) occasions, the most recent being in May. Doubla, the national volunteer with whom I work, invited a number of us to his family home, which is north of Pouss. Doubla comes from a family of 22 children, many of whom were present. His home is in what looks like an ideal setting on the banks of the Logone river, which separates Cameroon from Chad, but he told us that in the rainy season it regularly gets cut off from Pouss by floods. After eating a traditional meal we took a trip on the Logone in a pirogue. The Muslims among us visited the "mosque" on the river bank to pray.

Afterwards with Misha, a VSO volunteer who works in Maga's schools, and Mamat, a colleague in the Maga council and a good friend, we called to the sultan's palace in Pouss. I wanted to bid him farewell but he was away. Mamat, who is related to him, brought us into the living quarters to meet the sultan's four wives. I was surprised and gratified since normally the wives are only evidenced by the food which they cook for the sultan and his guests.

Marriages, Births and Deaths

2010-05-21T03:50:00.000-07:00

There is considerable activity around marriages, births and deaths here. A man's first marriage is usually arranged by his parents, without consultation, once he is deemed to be in a position to be able to support a family. Some do not seem to mind marrying a girl that they have never met but many men subsequently search out other wives of their own choosing. Marital fidelity is a concept which largely only applies to women since men can flirt with other women (as many of the VSO female volunteers will attest) and then take them as additional wives if they so wish, assuming that they have not opted for monogamy in a civil marriage. Some retain all wives, some divorce the wives that they no longer want and some just abandon them. Under the justice system administered by the traditional chiefs, the father of an abandoned or divorced wife has to return the dowry which he received on her marriage.

Many girls are forcibly married once they reach the age of fourteen or fifteen, often to men in their mid-thirties or older. One of my friends was born to a marriage of a 75 year old man to a 14 year old girl (his fourth wife). This man took another wife when he was 90. Such men are unlikely to survive long enough to feed and educate their children. In one case, where an 85 year old man died leaving a ten year old son, it was suggested that the boy be married to a 14 year old girl and that her education be terminated so that she could earn money to feed him and provide for his education.

In the Far North of Cameroon there is an exceptionally high incidence of VSO volunteers marrying Cameroonians (I won't try to explain this phenomenon!). Many couples settle in the home country of the volunteer after going through the usual visa saga but some prefer to stay in Cameroon. Recently we went to the christening of a baby of an English volounteer who converted to Islam and married a muslim. She is clearly very happy.

When a girl gets married she is expected to have a baby immediately and to continue to have babies in quick succession. Fifteen and sixteen year old girls carrying babies are a common sight (if not fully veiled or confined to their compound) and usually their education has been terminated. This poses a significant problem for them if subsequently they are divorced or abandoned. Some live a life of almost total seclusion, their husbands refusing to let them leave their compound. One of the volunteers working in education organised a committee of mothers of school children. She asked the local chief to encourage the husbands to give them permission to attend meetings. His response was that women should leave their house twice in their lives, once to get married and once to be buried. In less extreme cases, I have frequently found that women invited to social events where alcohol will be available have been denied permission to attend by their husbands. It is not unusual for such husbands to drink alcohol and to turn up with a male drinking companion.

People rationalise their large family sizes on the grounds that many children will die and they will need survivors to look after them in their old age. Recently I went to a funeral of a one year old child of a council colleague. He told me that this was the fifth of his twelve children to die. Having daughters is rewarding because they do a lot of work in the household and they are then married off in return for a dowry, rather like livestock.

Funerals are frequent occurrences here. Some deaths are quite needless. For example, a twenty five year old girl who lived with her uncle while attending university in Maroua died of malaria: the uncle, who is relatively well off, had refused to pay for medicines. Recently a council colleague died, the third among 30 employees in my two years with the council. Usually the burial takes place immediately (because of the heat) and there is a "deuil", or sort of wake, which lasts for at least a week. If it is a Muslim who has died, I can sympathise only with the men, who are usually seated outside the house under a tree or hangar. A recent Christian deuil took that form also but the father brought me into the house to sympathise with his wife. I went to an animist deuil and found that the men and women mixed freely (drinking bilbil, a local brew). The husband had lost one of his six wives and he claimed to have 67 children. One of his wives was again pregnant. He asked me to get my camera and when I brought it he led me outside his compound to show me his wife's grave and then asked me to photograph him on the grave with some of his children.

Limbe and Kribi

2010-05-01T01:48:00.001-07:00

Aicha and I travelled south so that she could have treatment for her eye in Douala and because I had a week of meetings in Bamenda in the North West. The trip to the North West was the longest, taking four days from Maga to Bamenda. To get value from travelling we combined the trips with visits to seaside resorts in the South.

Limbe is a resort between Douala and the Bekassi Peninsula. The latter was ceded to Cameroon by Nigeria following a long dispute and is still the subject of armed resistance and also banditry and piratry. Limbe has a scenic coastline with beaches of brown volcanic sand. Our hotel was right on a beach which was almost deserted but the view from the hotel was spoilt by an oil refinery. Limbe has very interesting botanic gardens.

When travelling to Bamenda we stopped off in Yaounde for a couple of days so that I could visit some embassies and orgnisations like UNICEF. While there we visited an art and craft fair where a high proportion of artifacts and of the pople selling them were from Aicha’s native Foumban. One of the more unusual items at the fair was a collection of cakes, one of which depicted Paul Biya, Cameroon’s president for the past 25 years and probably until his death (he is 85), which ba mhaith liom ithe.

After working in Bamenda, which has lovely mountains and a relatively mild climate, we went to Kribi for a few days. Kribi has beautiful beaches which are almost deserted. Fishing is still done from pirogues, boats rather like currachs in the west of Ireland which in this region are constructed from hollowed out tree trunks. We took a trip in a pirogue on a river through the rain forest and visited a pigmy village (at which I felt intrusive and ill at ease) but the vegetation and wildlife along the way were interesting. This river ends in a waterfall which goes directly into the sea. Our hotel in Kribi was again in an idyllic setting on the beach and although we could see an oil or gas rig far out at sea, the view was not spoilt. In both Limbe and Kribi the sea was reasonably clean for swimming.

Moutourwa

2010-04-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-17T08:20:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-12T04:39:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-04T02:25:00.000-07:00

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

The Fête du Mouton in Maroua

2009-12-13T07:46:00.000-08:00

The Fête du Mouton takes place 70 days after the end of Ramadan. It is a very big event here and eclipses Christmas. It commemorates Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, which happily was replaced by the sacrifice of a sheep. There is a Muslim ceremony at which a religious person (the son of the lamido in the case of Maroua, because the lamido had gone to Mecca) slits the throat of a sheep. After the ceremony those Muslims who can afford it slit the throat of their own sheep and cook it. A proportion is given to the poor and after the family has feasted there is much swopping of mutton with friends. In the Far North of Cameroon this lasts for three days.

Aicha's cousin did the needful for her (it has to be done by a male Muslim) and she provided a feast for a large population of volunteers, both VSO and Peace Corps.

Douroum

2009-12-10T06:05:00.000-08:00

On the occasion of a volunteer’s birthday a group of us visited a very remote village in the Mandara mountains. At the end of a very difficult dirt path there is a surprisingly good “encampement” which is powered by solar panels and where they have good rooms and serve good food. The rooms are modelled on “boukarous”, round mud huts. A typical homestead in the Far North of Cameroon consists of a walled enclosure called a “concession” which contains several boukarous, one for the father of the family and one for each of his wives. The wives take turns to cook and also to visit his boukarou to service his other needs. Children live with their mother. The mountains and the villages around Douroum are very beautiful and the whole setting is very peaceful. We saw monkeys but did not have enough time to go in search of gorillas which also inhabit the mountains.

Return to Maga

2009-10-24T05:46:00.000-07:00

People have been hugely welcoming on my return to Maga. Doubla, the national volunteer with whom I work, did a great job on cleaning my house before my return and in particular clearing the droppings of a large population of bats. He also cleared the garden of weeds, which grow strongly in the rains and give good cover to snakes and scorpions. He told me that he had found a scorpion in my bedroom just after I left in June. He tried to block the holes where the bats come in and succeeded in reducing the population from its alarming level, but some still get through and even an owl has made it through to my living room through a circuitous route in the roof. An ex-guardian also turned up to clear the weeds and finding that Doubla had already done so, he cut down an ornamental shrub that the owner had planted. I headed off a bigger group of council workers who planned to turn up at 6.00 a.m. one morning to do similar work. Some others have talked of building a sort of shelter in my garden so that I may work there in the shade when it is very hot and may also sleep outside on very hot nights.

While I was in Ireland Atapassing, a friend with whom I work on projects, got married. Although he is in his mid-thirties his father chose his wife. Although Atapassing had not previously met her he was quite happy with this arrangement. By all accounts it was a huge wedding, with around 3,000 guests over four days. They live in a remote village and whole neighbouring villages arrived together. They killed two cows and 67 goats for the occasion (his father practises traditional medicine, and evidently he derives a good remuneration from this). Since I was not there they kept a goat for my return.

While in surrounding areas the rains have been heavier and have continued later than usual this year, strangely Maga has had much less rain than usual. This has begun to cause problems with crops, particularly millet which is used to make a gooey dough (called “couscous” in Cameroon) which forms the basis of most people’s diet. Prices have begun to rise and this will have a direct effect on families which can barely afford food, or indeed on many families which already do not have enough food. Millet is also used to make a local brew called “bilbil” and since a very large quantity of millet is used to make a small quantity of bilbil there are calls for it to be banned this year. There is another beverage, called l'arki, which is much stronger and rather like Irish poteen. People reputedly use it to power their motos. One of my initiatives has been to get the council to collect taxes on the sale of these beverages.

The range of foods available in Maga since my return is more restricted than I can remember, but happily I go to Maroua at week-ends and Aicha provides for me there. The lake was closed to fishing (officially at any rate) from June to September but although it is now open few fish have been caught and I rarely find fish in the market. Fishing in the Logone has also been poor.

There is cholera in the North and Far North of Cameroon, including some villages not far away, with 51 deaths so far. Dirty water and flies, which are in abundance at this time of the year, are blamed for the spread and because some of the foodstuffs in the market come from the areas affected I have to soak things like tomatoes in bleach for over 30 minutes, even if I intend to cook them. They said on the radio that Cameroon has had only four cases of swine flu but did not say in what region. As usual at this time of year, a lot of people have malaria and there have been many deaths. A dog in Maga was found to have rabies last week after he had bitten other dogs and was put down. There are fears that this may spread.

In a news bulletin on Radio France International I heard that "coupeurs de route", as they call the bandits who hold up buses and other vehicles, had killed five people at Waza. The same day Cameroon's radio station, CRTV, reported that police had killed several bandits at Waza. The RFI report appears to be the correct one, which is bad news since I have visited the wildlife park in Waza a couple of times and would like to go there again.

There has been good progress with my action plan in my absence but some big problems have arisen also. The steering committee met each month from June to September, which is no mean feat given the logistical problems in the rainy season. The biggest success was with increasing the tax take. I did workshops for the tax collectors and made an action plan for increasing the tax take before leaving, including ways in which all council employees could lend a hand. There was a big jump in the tax take in June, boosted by the rice harvest, and the mayor used part of the increase to pay one month’s arrears of salary. July and August are always very lean months for tax because of the rains, the closure of the lake to fishing, etc. Towards the end of August a quarterly subvention from the state was received and this is usually used to pay arrears of salary. However on this occasion the mayor paid a lot of bills and paid only one month’s salary. Thus the employees effectively had the month already paid clawed back and their arrears grew by a further month. This led to a strike (although most of them never do any work anyway) and a blockade of the council buildings. The mayor was away at the time and the Sous Préfet intervened and got the Secrétaire Général to pay an additional month. However the conflict continues, morale is very low and an opportunity to harness the commitment of employees in continuously assisting and controlling the tax collectors appears to have been blown. There was also a conflict which I had to mediate between two senior officials which threatened to bring serious sanctions on the commune. Before the mediation they were not talking and refused to go into each other’s office. After the mediation they went together hand in hand, smiling broadly, into one of the offices.

While I was away the government of Cameroon published a bill on transfer of resources from central departments to councils. Cameroon’s legislation on decentralisation was published in 2004 but without this component, which is a prerequisite. Hopefully we will not have to wait another five years for this bill and the 2004 legislation to be implemented.

There has been good progress with the projects which I have been assisting with the help of the funds donated by my friends in Ireland. The signs are good for the projects to build roads to isolated villages (if we succeed, the state will invest over €2 million, which is huge by local standards) but I am told that I will have to send somebody to Yaounde to lobby when the annual scheduling of programmes takes place. We have promises of equipment such as tricycles for some of the handicapped in the county and are approaching various organisations for help for the others. This week I paid for a representative of the Ministre des Energies et de l’Eau to come and survey 10 sites for deep wells (a survey has shown that over 200 deep wells are needed in the county, and this will be a very serious problem if cholera spreads). He also inspected some villages that want to be connected into the electricity grid. He was very supportive and we are sending proposals to the minister with his endorsement.

Return to Cameroon

2009-10-16T08:46:00.001-07:00

As many of you will know, after an unpleasant struggle to get a short-term visa, Aicha joined me in Ireland for two of the three months that I spent there. Wedding celebrations continued there with a meal in my house for my extended family and a session with friends in the Cellar Bar. There were also sessions with a number of other groups, such as Bank of Ireland colleagues, Irish Life colleagues and neighbours. People were extraordinarily welcoming and hospitable and many also donated funds for further projects in Cameroon. Aicha was very happy in Ireland despite feeling a little cold at times, particularly when we visited the west where she found the Atlantic breeze intimidating. She found the people lovely and the countryside very beautiful. We went to see U2, Riverdance, a jazz band in the Spiegeltent and (regretfully) Fatboy Slim in Marley Park. We also went to Dun Laoghaire to the Festival of World Cultures where we saw dancers from Cameroon perform. There was much that was new to her and the standard of living was far beyond anything she had experienced. It was hard for us both to face back into Cameroon but we are well settled in at this stage.

We arrived in Douala in a pause in the worst rains that people could remember. Douala has a nine month rainy season and is not far from an area which is claimed to have the heaviest rains in the world. I was apprehensive about the train journey from Yaounde to Ngaoundere because I had seen coverage on television of a derailment which killed five people and injured more than 200. Derailments happen every month or two and we have been lucky never to experience one. My apprehension increased when I learnt that there had been a second derailment of a goods train which caused 12 wagons carrying fuel to explode and kill two people. I was told that this was covered up on national television, where some shots of the aftermath were shown with no commentary. Apart from having to wait three days to get a booking on the train (because of the disruption caused by the derailments), happily our journey was largely trouble free.

Back in Maroua we found that many of the volunteers with whom we were friendly had left. However Aicha prepared an end-of-Ramadan feast for volunteers and that enabled us to meet many of the new volunteers. I finally got to see the house that we bought. It has more potential than I expected but also needs more done to it. Work is in progress on building a modern en suite bathroom off the main bedroom and we will move in when that is finished and live in the house while the other renovations continue. When we asked the electricity company to reconnect us they told us that the previous owner had not paid his bills, had been cut off, had illegally connected himself and then had been served with large fines as well as a bill for arrears. They are now telling us that they will not connect us unless we pay all this, and we are currently trying to find a way out of this. At least we can be happy that the house does not appear to have been sold to a number of other buyers, as sometimes happens here.

Before we left Maroua there had been a high profile case where a number of wealthy businessmen had been arrested on suspicion of being involved in a ritual killing of a child. They were said to be members of a sect which practises sorcery. On our return we have heard that all have been released and the charges dropped following payment of large bribes by members of the sect.

Wedding celebration in Dublin with my friends

2009-09-26T08:35:00.001-07:00

Wedding celebration in Dublin with my family

2009-09-26T07:56:00.000-07:00

The marriage feast in Maga

2009-06-13T02:44:00.000-07:00

The wedding reception

2009-06-13T02:32:00.000-07:00

The wedding ceremony

2009-06-13T02:18:00.000-07:00

Aicha

2009-06-13T02:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Local Projects

2009-06-12T09:38:00.000-07:00

Some ex-colleagues in the Bank of Ireland raised money to support my work in Cameroon. This was hugely generous of them given what was happening in the Bank and in the Irish economy at the time (December/January). It was also very encouraging for me. I had not asked them to raise funds but their contributions were very timely since my budget was inadequate and I had begun to use my own money to press ahead with my programme in the council and also to support some valuable local projects. There is great scope for supporting projects since the real worth of money transferred to the Far North of Cameroon tends to be between 5 and 50 times its value in Ireland, and sometimes much more, depending on the use to which it is put. Having these funds available also freed up my own money for meeting the immediate needs of the people around me.

In my work in the Maga council I have been caught between two financial crises, one in the council and the other in VSO. The council is currently unable to collect enough taxes to pay its way and salaries are four months in arrears, there is no money for maintenance and no money for development, nor even to prepare proposals for projects which would attract funding to the area. VSO has lost some of its sources of funds and has fallen short of its financial commitments under my programme. In response to my pleas for help VSO recently found a small budget which has enabled me, among other things, to hold a workshop with the council's 38 tax collectors and to follow this up with a meeting on taxes with the council's executive. We have now completed an action plan for increasing the council's tax receipts. Hopefully these initiatives will bring about an improvement in the council's finances, but there is a mountain to be climbed.

Some of the money contributed in Ireland went directly to VSO Ireland to help them with their work in putting volunteers in the field. This is important because in the long term sustainable development will only come through programmes such as strengthening the capacities of councils and of civil society organisations. The next layer of funds contributed has gone towards furthering my work with the council, e.g. paying the costs of workshops and meetings of task groups. The rest of the money has gone towards supporting local projects.

In supporting projects I have tried to find ones where a little money will have a big effect. For example, I was asked to help prepare a proposal to attract state funds to provide "roads" to remote villages which are cut off from the main villages and from the main access routes of the county for several months each year because of the rains. The consequences of being cut off include not being able to transport produce such as rice to the markets when prices are high and not being able to get sick people to medical centres. The latter is a serious problem because villages in flooded areas are hotbeds of disease. State funds (sourced from the World Bank and other international donors) are available to support councils with improvement of local roads but in order to attract such funds one has to mount a campaign of letters and visits to a whole range of bureaucrats, including the Governor of the region, the Prefet of the district, the Sous-Prefet of the county, reprentatives of various ministries and local members of parliament. Once these people's commitment has been engaged, it is necessary to bring a team of technicians to survey the routes in question and assess the work required and its cost. This work has now been completed for three of the county's most inaccessible routes and a proposal has been prepared seeking the state funding. The amount of money required to get thus far is tiny in relation to the state funding but the council is unable to find this money at present. The prospects of getting the state funding look good.

A second project for which I have provided assistance has to do with handicapped people in the area. State funds are available to help handicapped people, e.g. by providing tricycles or crutches for them or by providing special training for them to enable them to become part of the workforce. To apply for such funds each handicapped person has to have a file containing a photo and four certificates, e.g. a certificate containing a description of the disability signed by the local doctor. At this stage we have just a photo of each handicapped person but this is no mean achievement. I paid for the rental of a moto and lent my camera to a to a man who spent a considerable amount of time and energy visiting all the villages and tracking down the handicapped people. It was arduous and dangerous given the state of the roads and the unhygienic condition of some of the villages in which he had to eat and sleep. Even getting the photos printed was a saga in itself. The main printing facility in Maroua was not working and I came to an arrangement with an individual who had the equipment. We agreed on a price but he ran out of ink with around a quarter of the photos not yet printed and I also found that his printer chopped off the heads and feet in about a third of those which had been printed. Given that the heads are needed for identification and that the feet are needed in many cases to illustrate the disability, these photos needed to be reprinted. He has not been able to get a replacement ink carton but luckily I had to visit Douala, the industrial capital of Cameroon, for other purposes and I had the remaining photos printed there. Getting the certificates will be difficult. For example, the Maga health centre's doctor has gone to Belgium for a year for training and we must await his return.

A third project which I am assisting has to do with providing birth certificates for children in the local primary school. When a child is born the parents have 30 days in which to register the birth. After that, children who need birth certificates, e.g. to continue their education or get jobs with the state, have to go before a tribunal with three witnesses and present a file with a photo and various certificates in order to become registered. It is a cumbersome and expensive process and the tribunal sits in a town which is 80 kilometers away when the direct road is useable (typically for three months each year) and 200 kilometers away when not. I was approached by a person who had assembled the files on 114 children and was asked to support an initiative to have the tribunal come to Maga to hear these cases since bringing all the children and their witnesses to the other town would be too difficult. I agreed to do this but after six months and after sending various emissaries to the chairman of the tribunal, going to see him myself and even sending him some fish from Lake Maga, we still do not have a firm date. The rains have started and the road will be impassable for the next nine months. As they say here, "il faut patienter".

These are just beginnings. If the funding is granted for the roads there are several other roads which need to be tackled. Assembling the files on the handicapped people will require a lot of work, and then they will have to be categorised and requests prepared for various kinds of assistance. Procedures are now in place to make sure that most current births are registered but there are thousands of children in the county who have not been registered in the past. And of course there many other useful projects which could be supported.

On a more personal level, I am frequently approached for money by people who cannot feed their families, cannot pay for treatment and medicines when ill, whose children have been sent home from school because small fees and levies have not been paid, etc. I am also asked to provide capital for individuals' money making enterprises, e.g. to rent land to grow rice, to buy fertilisers, to buy nets for fishing. Many ask for loans but my experience of repayment is bad, I have to be prepared for non-repayment and I have become hard-nosed about only providing funds in cases of need. While my main focus is on long-term sustainable development, I cannot ignore the immediate needs of those around me. For example, the son of a colleague in the council was knocked down by a moto and had a broken leg. He could not pay to have the leg set until the next pay day, which could be up to three months away. A small donation in such circumstances is clearly immensely valuable. Judgement of whether people are really in need can be difficult. However the consequences of refusing to help those genuinely in need vastly outweigh any embarrassment of being misled by those who are not in need. In any case, I do not use funds contributed from Ireland to meet such immediate needs but use them only to support development projects such as those discussed above.

September 2009:

When I was in Ireland on holidays many friends donated generously. I will give updates here from time to time on how these funds are being used.

One initiative which has already taken place has to do with children who are HIV positive. Aicha works with many such children on Cameroon's HIV/AIDS programme. These children are entitled to free drugs but must first undergo an examination. 30 of these children have up to now been unable to pay for this examination but this week she brought them to Maroua and we paid for the examinations out of the fund. Or so we thought at the time! Aicha asked for a receipted invoice for the examinations and was told that this would take some time. She kept asking and eventually the director of the hospital rang her to say that the examinations are free for children and he returned the money that she had paid. None of Aicha's colleagues knew that the examinations are free for children and one can surmise what would have happened the money she had paid had she not insisted on a receipt.

October 2009:

A survey has shown that more than 200 new deep wells are needed in the county. We paid for a delegate from the appropriate ministry to come and inspect 10 proposed sites and we have prepared demands with his help. He also helped us to prepare demands for extending the electricity grid to a number of villages. Both these projects will be funded by the state, if successful, but without our financial support and guidance the local people would not be able to raise the demands. We clearly need to do much more, particularly in relation to wells since dirty drinking water is undoubtedly a cause of illness and deaths, and we are talking to organisations which could help us with this.

A day in my life in Maga

2009-04-14T04:20:00.000-07:00

My alarm goes off at 4.40 a.m. I scan the floor with my torch before stepping outside my mosquito net. I found a scorpion in my bedroom a few nights ago. Unlike some other volunteers, I have not as yet found any snakes in my house, although I had to deter one from entering my gate. The usual occupants of my house – bats, lizards, frogs and spiders – are welcome since they help to keep it clear of mosquitos. There are also owls nesting in the roof. I woke one night to the sound of heavy breathing. I searched the house (all two rooms) but found nobody. Then I heard the screech of a barn owl and there was hissing and frenzied excitement in the roof as the nestlings anticipated being fed. The nestlings are now almost fully grown and very active. At times it sounds as if there is a football match in the awning of the roof but I have learnt to sleep through this, as also through the Muslim calls to prayer which can start as early as 3.30 a.m. At times in semi-consciousness I can hear calls from several mosques, some rather like the lowing of cattle in the west of Ireland. The cocks have not yet begun to crow.

I do yoga exercises for an hour. It is normally so hot here that you have to walk or cycle very slowly and avoid doing anything energetic, otherwise you will dissolve into sweat. A session of yoga in the “cool” of the morning is therefore one of the few ways to keep fit. It also helps keep all the joints and muscles in trim and ready to withstand the squashing and buffeting which they get in the buses. The very few vehicles that are here are all loaded to an unbelieveable extent before every journey and the “roads” are mud paths with big potholes.

Before breakfast I take my anti-malarial prophilaxis and drink lots of water so as not to be sick. Breakfast consists of fruit in season, quaker oates, bread and tea. Only food grown locally is available here and the choice is always very limited. At present I can get oranges and bananas once a week on market day, and also dried dates which I eat with my quaker oates. Later on in the year there will be mangoes and mangoes and mangoes. Honey is also available, which I take on my bread.

After shaving and showering, at around 7.30 I head for work on my bicycle. It is currently mid-winter here (this was written in January). The temperature sometimes falls to a low of 20 degrees at around 7.30 a.m., climbing above 35 degrees in the mid-afternoon and not falling below 30 degrees before I go to bed. I still only need to wear a shirt in the morning but my colleagues wear several layers, including heavy over-coats and woolly hats, rather like people in ski resorts. In a few months’ time the temperature will never fall below 35 degrees and will be mostly in the 40s.

On my way to work I pass the local primary school and often groups of children jog along with me or hang out of the back of my bicycle on their way to school. Curiously they say “Bon soir, nasara” but later in the day this changes to “Bon jour, nasara”. Apart from its use in the early morning greeting, here the word “soir” usually refers to the afternoon, rather like the word “evening” in my native Limerick. “Nasara” is the Fulfulde word for a white person and is usually intended in a friendly sense. During school holidays it is very quiet on my way to work and sometimes I see fascinating bird life, especially birds of prey such as eagles and vultures.

I am nearly always the first to arrive at the Maga council building. Work is supposed to start at 7.30. Less than half the employees ever turn up for work. Very few come every day, on time or for a reasonable length of time. Those who do come to work shake hands with all those already there and have ritual conversations about the cold and whether they slept well and some sit outside chatting all day and do no work at all. Tuesday is market day in a neighbouring village and it seems to be accepted that almost nobody need work on that day. I have regular meetings with my working party on Wednesdays at 9.00. I am usually the only one on time. If the Secretary General is in his office I tell him that I will call him when I have a quorum. On a good day that will happen by 9.30, on a bad day by 11.00, if at all. Quite often the Secretary General, who is the most important member of the working party, will have disappeared by the time that the meeting starts. Members are capable of turning up at any time during the meeting, later in the day or not at all, without alerting me or apologising. At the meeting they sometimes take calls on their mobile phones, which is especially disruptive since all Cameroonians shout into their phones and they have voices like megaphones. Other people at times enter the room, shake hands with everybody, converse with some and ask somebody to go outside for some purpose.

Virtually everything in the building is not working. Most bulbs are missing, most sockets are broken, fans have disappeared and there is air conditioning which does not work. There is a helicopter landing pad which was used in 1982 but there is no toilet. There used to be a photocopier, computer and printer but all broke and were brought to Maroua to be repaired over a year ago. In any case there is no electricity since the council has not paid its bills. The council is in severe financial crisis, salaries are four months in arrears and there is no money for materials of any kind. My job - strengthening the capacities of the council - is to change all that! It would be easy to throw up my hands in despair but when I see the widespread hunger, disease and death around me I am much more strongly motivated in my work than I have ever been previously. Despite the lax behaviours (which I am trying to change), I get very strong commitment from the mayor, his deputies, the councillors and the staff of the council. I am encouraged by progress to date and I think that good improvements can be made.

At around 12.30 I usually venture out into the midday sun, to the mocking accompaniment of laughing doves, and go to my house. I do not find any mad dogs or Englishmen, but the local primary school runs two shifts and I see large numbers of children going and coming in all directions across the wasteland with their school-bags. Some of these “children” are in their late teens but have not yet made the grade for secondary school.

Although work is supposed to continue until 3.30, unless there is a meeting in progress there is usually nobody left at work when I leave. The afternoon is not a good time for meetings since most people are Muslims and break for prayers. Although the prayers usually take only around 10 minutes, washing and conversation take up a lot of time and they do not all say their prayers together, with the result that it can take the best part of an hour to get everybody back in the meeting, if at all. It makes more sense to have lunch and then work in my house in the afternoon since it is the hottest time of the day and I can use my fan and drink chilled water from my fridge. I can also run my laptop from the mains and recharge it. I have persuaded the mayor to buy a new computer (not yet paid for) and have set it up in my house where I am training my assistant in its use.

Lunch usually consists of beans, which I have previously steeped in water for 24 hours and then boiled for 2 hours. I make up a sauce for the beans with onions and tomatoes and also eat some bread and bananas. I put more effort into preparing my dinners but the choice is very limited. I could eat in a “restaurant” for €0.50 but the food is awful and probably unsafe. The highlight of my week is fresh fish, “capitain”, a lake equivalent of sea bass which is excellent if you can get it. There is great demand for fish from Maroua and Kousseri, nearby cities, and it is necessary to go to the lake at 10.00 in the morning to buy directly from the fishermen as they come in from their night’s fishing. I can usually only do that at week-ends. The choice of other food is extremely limited. Since I have only a gas ring, I buy beef or goat’s meat which has been cooked at the side of the road and I re-cook it to get rid of germs. It can be very difficult to find these or any alternatives since the local people have run out of money and there are few customers to attract vendors. I am often reduced to vegetarian curries and pastas (with very limited vegetables, such as potatoes, carrots and yet more beans) or to opening canned food which I bring from Maroua.

Visitors call to my house most days. These are a mixture of neighbours, work colleagues and a collection of teenagers who seem permanently bored. Some of them arrive when I am preparing meals and in Cameroon the custom is to share whatever you have, however small. At week-ends I can have as many as three visitors before 7.00 a.m., to whom I may have to give breakfast. I have had to draw a line and refuse some of the teenagers who turned up regularly at mealtimes since this was causing havoc with my provisioning. However, most week-ends I escape to Maroua to meet other volunteers and some Cameroonian friends and this is a very pleasant change from my bucolic existence in Maga.

In the evening I have a small amount of time to do some extra work, read a novel or listen to music on my ipod. We rarely have power cuts at this time of the year, except when a neighbour on the same line has not paid his bill, but between March and September there are storms and rains which can result in power cuts for as much as three weeks per month. There are only 12 hours of daylight, from 6.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m., and when there is no power in the evening, usually the only thing I can do is play my tin whistle and my harmonica. My children used to tell me that of all the instruments that I have tried to play, the tin whistle annoyed them most. I therefore usually reserve the tin whistle for storms, which are deafening. Occasionally also I venture out to a local bar if it is showing a football match. I have to put on a large amount of mosquito repellent since mosquitos like the bars too, especially in the rainy season when the air at night is full of insects and one can have the sensation of being attacked by dive-bombers. I always bring a torch so that I will not step on a snake. The moonlight can be absolutely beautiful, and when there is no moon I can see the Milky Way more clearly than I have ever seen it before.

I normally go to bed between 9.00 and 10.00. At this time of the year at night I hear just the screeches of owls, the hissing of lizards and barking of dogs. There has been no rain since September but once the thunder showers begin in March huge numbers of frogs and toads will appear from nowhere and there will be a loud chorus of croaking. The snakes will have a feast.

St. Patrick's Day in Cameroon

2009-03-17T07:56:00.001-07:00

Health Services in Cameroon

2009-03-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

I hear of a constant stream of deaths of relatives of friends and colleagues and in many cases lack of money for diagnosis and remedies seems to be the deciding factor. Also many people live far out in the bush and there is no possibility of getting to a health centre for a large part of the year because of the rains. However, getting to a health centre or hospital here does not always have a positive outcome.

As mentioned in an earlier blog, I went with a friend to visit his mother who was in a health centre in Pouss. She was clearly in a bad way and they were unable to diagnose her illness. The health centre has one nurse and no doctor. We brought her to the health centre in Maga where there is a doctor (or rather there was at that time but he has now gone to Belgium for a year’s training). There they diagnosed malaria. It is hard to understand why this was not possible in Pouss, given that it is by far the most common ailment here and most people suffer from it at least once a year. Everything has to be paid for, so we paid for the consultation and the medicines, and we also brought her meals which are not supplied here. She recovered but I think that if we had left her in Pouss she would have died.

Some months later the same friend became ill and went to the health centre in Maga, where they diagnosed malaria. He took the remedies which they prescribed but became extremely sick and I thought he was going to die. I brought him to a hospital in Maroua where they prescribed different remedies and said that what was prescribed in Maga was the main cause of his problems. Once he changed to the new remedies he recovered quickly.

Another friend had a sore eye. She went to the hospital in Maroua where they prescribed remedies which did not produce an improvement. Indeed her condition worsened. I gave her money to go to Douala, the industrial capital, a four-day round trip costing around twice her month’s salary as a nurse. Even if the trip was affordable she could not have paid for it since her salary was eight months in arrears. In Douala they said that the remedies prescribed in Maroua were adding to her problem. When she changed to the new remedies her eye improved quickly.

A volunteer in Maroua became ill. She went to the hospital many times and they diagnosed many ailments, including malaria and typhoid. The remedies that they prescribed did not produce an improvement (it is not unusual for them to give treatment for several illnesses without knowing which one, if any, the patient suffers from). She went to a hospital inYaounde, the capital city, but despite efforts there her condition worsened. VSO flew her to Canada, where she got effective treatment and she has since returned to Cameroon.

These are just a sample of instances where the health services were found wanting.

The previous minister for health is in prison having been convicted of pocketing huge amounts of money intended for health services.

Implications of Global Crises for Africa and Cameroon

2008-11-28T05:39:00.000-08:00

Please excuse the grandiose title of this blog. I recently hosted a workshop for VSO volunteers on current global crises and their implications for Africa and Cameroon. Given Cameroon’s dearth of statistics and volunteers’ limited access to the internet it is difficult to find relevant information on Cameroon and on Africa but, in addition to discussing past crises and what we might learn from them, we pooled what thoughts and information we had so as to understand what is happening around us as well as possible.

Food Crisis

The global food crisis is much in evidence in Africa. In Cameroon the price of cooking oil has nearly doubled in the past year, the price of rice has trebled in the past year and the price of sugar has multiplied more than ten-fold in the past few years. Fish from the lake have become expensive in Maga as stocks dwindle due to over-fishing and because buyers from Chad, Maroua and Kousseri are outbidding local purchasers. Separately, a few scares about avian flu (with some substance) have caused a lot of poultry to be killed and eaten and a rise in poultry prices has followed.

The food crisis has resulted in increasing poverty. In the Far North of Cameroon a significant proportion of people do not have enough money to feed themselves and their families and the food price rises have increased this proportion. People were particularly badly affected at the start of the school year, many failing to pay the fees for their children. A high proportion of people had a bout of malaria in September/October, the period of highest risk at the end of the rainy season, and many could not afford medecines. Lack of medicines has clearly contributed to the high mortality rate.

There have been demonstrations in several countries. In Cameroon there were riots in February. The stated cause was the change in constitution to enable Paul Biya to remain as president but the underlying causes included increases in food and energy prices, as well as unemployment among the young. The government imprisoned the organisers. They bought the numerous public servants off with salary increases but now many salaries are in arrears.

A minority benefits from high prices, e.g. rice growers, the majority being affected adversely. There is a need for redistribution of the benefits of price rises.

Africa is on the receiving end of food tariffs and subsidies by the US, EU and Japan and this has distorted the economics of its food production and caused some viable crops not to be grown locally.

Population growth is a long-term cause of hunger, particularly strong in the Far North of Cameroon where families with more than 10 children are common. Birth control would help but is almost never mentioned here.

Energy Crisis

The price of petrol has roughly doubled in the past year and in addition to the direct effects on the cost of travel, there are knock-on effects on the price of products, such as food, which need to be transported. Cameroon has some oil (in the Bakassi peninsula) but is trying to become independent of this source of finance.

Given Cameroon’s climate, solutions to the difficult problems of production and storage of solar energy would be particularly beneficial.

Climate Crisis

Deserts in Africa are increasing (including in Cameroon), there are drought, famine and violent storms (recently in Chad, Togo and Morocco). Nomads who roam between Cameroon, Nigeria, Niger, Chad and the Central African Republic rearing livestock are finding less grazing and fewer watering holes (the Maga council’s tax revenue from the nomads is declining). Lake Chad is contracting. These problems are contributing to migration. Zones where malaria is prevalent are expanding.

Africa is adversely affected by practices in developed and emerging countries. Ideally countries which are net polluters should pay countries such as Cameroon for retaining forests, e.g. using the proceeds of a global carbon tax.

Financial Crisis

Africa has not been affected directly by the financial crisis although some African banks are part of multinational groups. However Africa/Cameroon are affected by reduction of economic growth in developed countries (e.g. Cameroon’s exports of wood to the US have collapsed, putting over 40,000 jobs at risk). Tourism will be affected but is not well developed in Cameroon. Iimmigrants will not be able to afford to continue payments home at their current level.

Credit will be much more difficult to come by and loans will be more expensive. Aid from developed countries is likely to be reduced. Developing countries, including most African countries and Cameroon, are being bypassed in remedial discussions involving the developed and emerging countries and at best the developing countries can hope not to lose out. The massive rescue packages in the developed world dwarf aid to developing countries.

Lower demand in developed and emerging countries will have a beneficial effect on petrol and food prices. There could also be some negative effects, for example I have some fears that local rice growers who are paying heavily for fertilisers for the coming season will find that the price of rice has fallen by the time that they harvest their crop. Recent heavy falls in the price of crude oil have yet to be reflected in the price of petrol at the “pump” in Cameroon (outside of cities such as Maroua, petrol is only sold at stalls at the road-side in cans, in litre bottles, or in smaller quantities). Immigration to developed countries will be less attractive and this should have a beneficial effect on the brain drain from developing countries.

Some commentators believe that Africa will gain relative to other continents as a result of the financial crisis but its lack of influence in world economic affairs has to be a concern, as mentioned earlier.

Some Aspects of Religion and Tradition in the West and Far North

2008-09-27T02:58:00.000-07:00

Although Foumban seemed predominantly Muslim, Christianity (mainly Protestantism) is also strong in West Cameroon. In fact Islam, Christianity and traditional religions have roughly equal shares there (an invention of one of the Bamoun kings was a religion that was a fusion of all three, but this did not last). We passed a large number of Christian, mainly Protestant, churches along the road, some very impressive constructions. There are also pockets of Christianity in the Far North, some quite fundamentalist. One volunteer in a village in the Far North told me about a church service that she was obliged to attend since the school she works in is strongly religious. She said that the preacher worked people into a frenzy and demanded that “fornicators and masturbators” come forward and repent, whereupon several complied.

The brand of Islam in Foumban is very modern whereas in the Far North it seems a little more fundamentalist and less flexible, e.g. with respect to dress, the role of women and frequency of prayers. In the Far North work is punctuated by prayers and buses stop for prayers. One of the practices which I least like here (because it seems to imply that women are subservient to men), and which happily is not very common, is that when some women need to address a man for a purpose such as to buy a bus ticket they crouch before him and present their money on outstretched palms of their hands, from which the man removes the money and in which he places the ticket and any change. A few women in the Far North are completely hidden behind black veils but some of them greet me quite cheerily when we pass on the road. Most Muslims of every age seem to practise, though a surprising number drink alcohol on the quiet (some of them hide their drinks underneath the table between hasty gulps). Nowhere in Cameroon have I seen any signs of militancy or sympathies with terrorist causes.

Last month in Maga I had to endure lound music and shouting from a neighbour’s wedding celebration which lasted four days and continued through each night. I was told that the bride-to-be’s mother invites her friends to a party at which they make contributions to wedding expenses, then the father, then the bride-to-be and then the groom-to-be each has a party, and after all that they have the marriage. A dowry is paid to the bride’s father (or to an uncle, if the father is dead). In both regions marriages are still arranged by parents, uncles and aunts. In an earlier blog I mentioned that a friend had been persuaded by his parents to marry a girl whom he had not previously met. Since then she ran off with another male friend and happily my friend does not have to go through with this arranged marriage. I heard of a particularly disturbing case of a young man who wanted to marry a young girl but his family could not afford the dowry. There was another suitor who was able to pay the dowry but the first young man deliberately made the girl pregnant to prevent the marriage. He later lost interest in the girl and did not marry her, which led to him having custody of the child, once weaned. It was brought up by one of his female relations. There can be somewhat devious aspects to the marriage transaction, as I learnt when a local man died at the age of 97 leaving 40 children, the youngest being aged 10. I commented on the fact that if one has a child at the age of 87 one clearly will not be able to provide for all its schooling. I was told that this is only considered important if the child is male and that in this case he can be married to a 14 year old girl who will have her education terminated and will be sent to work in the fields to provide for her husband’s education. Hopefully this practice is not very common.

It is currently Ramadan which is observed strictly here in the Far North (I have not been to the West during Ramadan). In Maga the range of foodstuffs available in the market is very restricted (but prices are higher than usual), the local bank closes early and work in general is at a slower pace since people pray more and are listless from hunger and from getting up very early. The first call from the mosque is at 3:00 a.m. rather than the usual 4:30 a.m. (in fact on some nights non-stop preaching is broadcast from the mosque). I think the 3:00 a.m. call is to wake the women so that they may cook a meal which can be eaten before dawn. During the day not even a drink of water can be taken, which must be very unhealthy since it becomes extremely hot most days. A practice which I find disturbing is that some Muslims (thankfully few) spit every minute or two all day (I think spittal is considered impure) and must therefore deplete what fluids they have. After sunset (6:30 p.m.) there is a big meal which starts with a sort of soup called “buie” which is easy to digest. The few who can afford it have another meal later. There will be a big feast at the end of Ramadan and everybody seems to need a new “boubou” (this is a traditional outfit, and the way people feel about it reminds me of the attitude to holy communion outfits among poor families in Ireland). Times are hard this year since the global energy and food crises have really hit prices here and severely affected people, many of whom were already struggling to make ends meet. Also Ramadan this year coincides with return to school, which has to be paid for and for which a new school uniform is also needed.

Ramadan is clearly a significant spiritual experience for most Muslims. A friend’s bar in Maroua which is usually buzzing every night of the week does virtually no business, even at week-ends. However it is said that some Muslims eat more during Ramadan than in other months because of the tendency to gorge themselves before and after the long day’s fast. I have heard different versions of the prohibition of sexual relations during Ramadan, one being that only those who are not married must desist from sex during Ramadan. I know of just one teenager who does not always observe the fast and does not always go to prayers. Other teenagers pray in my house and at times ask me to pray with them.

p.s. The prayers at the end of Ramadan were very impressive in Maga. A huge number turned out in colourful outfits and prayed in a large field beside the Mosque. I am told that business was booming in the bars in Maroua.

Perhaps it is not appropriate to consider sorcery under the heading of religion but it is interesting to note that most people in the Far North believe in it. In fact I have not spoken to a person who does not believe in it. Recently in Maga, Guirvidig and Pouss there were similar incidents where suspected sorcerers were beaten up by the crowd and then handed over to the police. They were reputed to have the power to remove a testicle from anybody who shook hands with them. It is hard to work out what was really going on since even university educated people believe in sorcery. I think the explanation may be that sorcerers in Nigeria are prepared to pay large prices for boys' testicles for use in their rituals and perhaps those who forcibly remove them (hopefully not their parents) use sorcery as a smoke screen.

Photos of Foumban

2008-09-20T01:15:00.000-07:00

Foumban and the Bamoun

2008-09-20T01:09:00.000-07:00

We spent a week in Foumban. It is a very interesting town since it is the seat of the Bamoun dynasty. The current king of the Bamoun, who is the local Islamic sultan, is the 21st in a line that stretches back many hundred years. Some of his predecessors were quite inventive, e.g. one invented a new language and script and wrote a history of the Bamoun in this script. We visited the king’s palace which has a museum containing lots of interesting artifacts, including some of the past kings’ inventions. Foumban is also Cameroon’s centre for arts and crafts and acts as a channel for exports (including some from other African countries) to Europe and the United States. It has an interesting museum of arts and crafts and an extensive “artisanat”.

Most people in Foumban are either Bamoun or Foumban. I don’t know much about the latter except that they are the traditional ennemies of the Bamoun. I met a large number of Bamoun since I visited the family of a Bamoun friend. I attended a ceremony for the death of her mother at which around 100 uncles and cousins gathered in a large room for prayers followed by a feast at which everybody was given gifts of coins, sweets, dates and kola nuts (which have some hallucinogenic properties) as well as local dishes. There were as many women as men but they were housed in the periphery and did not take an active part other than helping to prepare and serve the food.

There was also a similar but more extensive ceremony for the anniversary of the family’s “grand-father”. I should explain that the Bamoun are made up of “families” which trace their origins to some past king. Nearly everybody I met was part of one large family, which is not surprising when you consider the effects of polygamy (one king had 681 wives). Each family has a grand-father who acts as its chief and representative. When a grand-father dies his eldest son becomes grand-father. When the previous grand-father died last year his eldest son was already dead so the latter’s eldest son, a student at Yaounde university, became grand-father. He was very personable and looked a bit like Tiger Woods. There was a very large crowd at the previous grand-father’s anniversary ceremony, including a representative of the king (the king had gone to Beijing for the Olympics). It was held in the open, with marquees beside the mosque, and there were many prayers from the immam and speeches from notables.

While I was there an uncle died and I was able to observe a Muslim burial. He died at night and was buried the following morning. The body (with no coffin) was placed in a narrow trench at the bottom of the grave and planks were placed over it before the earth was put in. Only men took part actively in the prayer ceremony which preceded the burial, the women having done a sort of wailing, rather like Irish keening, in the house before the removal (I was kept awake one night in Maga by horrendous wailing when a neighbour died suddenly). After the burial the deceased’s close male relations sit around for a couple of weeks and receive the salutations of visitors. There is a ceremony, which is similar to the anniversary ceremony, after a few days and again after 40 days as well as on each anniversary thereafter.

Although women had a secondary role in the formal ceremonies in the Muslim household that I visited in Foumban, women and men otherwise mixed on a fairly equal footing there, except that virtually all the preparation of food was done by women (in Muslim households in Maga women are more in the background except when they bring food). The clear leader of the Foumban household was a grand-mother who was a sprightly 85 (in Cameroon, life expectancy is in the low 50s, but probably higher than this in the West and lower than this in the Far North, where people die at an alarming rate). She had brought up many of her grand-children, as well as her own children, and probably also children and grand-children of her late husband’s other wives. The household currently has a number of women and children. The women could be her daughters, wives of her sons or the equivalent of her fellow wives. These women currently live in this household rather than with their husbands, who work in places such as Douala and Yaounde. The children, though not full brothers and sisters in every case, relate to the “family” in the household and refer to the other children as brothers and sisters. Not all the children of the women in the household live there, some being brought up by other relatives. If this sounds complex, it is!

The main form of amusement in Foumban each evening before dusk was a football match on a pitch carved out in a most unlikely space at the intersection of a few dirt tracks. It was of quite an irregular shape because of the adjoining buildings and there were undulations and some steep inclines over which occasionally an over-enthusiastic player would plunge, to loud cheers. Motos regularly passed through while the football was in progress. The standard of football was actually quite high but methods of scoring goals included bouncing the ball off adjoining walls to score on the rebound, and hitting the ball into a tree above the goal in the hope that it would drop into the goal.

Journey to Foumban

2008-08-30T02:40:00.000-07:00

I took holidays in the first half of August, spending most of the time in Foumban in West Cameroon. August is not a good time for holidays in Cameroon since it is at the height of the rainy season but part of my logic was that anywhere is better than Maga in the rainy season. I have been lucky in that the rainy season was late this year and there were no really bad rains before I left. Such rains can make it impossible to go outside one’s house for several days because everywhere there is mud up to the knees. We have experienced some very violent storms in Maga with extremely heavy rains, making the local roads impassable and flooding the village, but fortunately they were usually followed by a sunny spell which dried the roads sufficiently for travel (one theory is that there is a progressive reduction in rainfall due to global warming, but on the other hand, Chad which is on the other side of the Logone, has had severe flooding this year). The more lasting effect of such storms has been disruption of the electricity supply, since poles are blown down or simply snap in the wind or are hit by lightning, also with disruption of the water supply (since the pumps are electric). On average we have had power and water around one-quarter of the time over the past few months. However I was very lucky with my holidays in that I left and returned to Maga in fine weather (there was a lot of rain while I was away) and the electricity was turned on a few hours before I returned.

Having escaped from Maga to Maroua I headed south to Yaounde and then to Douala. The journey to Yaounde was the reverse of my original journey to the Far North and the contrast was remarkable in that what had been virtual desert had turned green and rivers that had been dry were now flowing strongly. As we headed further south towards Yaounde the vegetation became lush and exotic. This intensified to something like tropical rain forest on the onward journey to Douala, which is close to an area reputed to have the greatest amount of rainfall of anywhere in the world.

Douala is the economic capital of Cameroon and is bigger than Yaounde. It is at the mouth of the Wouri river and has a large port. It is very industrial and is not a pleasant place in which to stay. Many of its districts have high levels of crime and are very dangerous. After spending two nights there we went to the bus station which serves West and North West Cameroon. When we arrived at the bus station a swarm of aggressive representatives of bus companies descended on us and practically fought each other over us. Eventually the winner took our luggage and put it on top of a bus and told us to get in. Such buses only leave when they are full and it became apparent that the bus was not filling quickly. Whenever prospective customers were spotted our driver started the engine and drove back and forth as if the bus was about to leave, so as to panic them into jumping in, but it took six hours to fill the bus. The journey took another six hours but we found out later that there are other, more expensive, bus companies whose buses leave at fixed times from central Douala, which do not pack so many people into the buses and which have fewer stops along the way.

North of Douala we drove through fertile countryside with lots of fruit and vegetables, including mangoes, pineapples, grapefruit, avocados, extensive plantations of palms, bananas and papayas, corn, millet, ground nuts and cotton. As we drove into the hills of West Cameroon we got an impression that life there is much easier than in the Far North. The fertile land supports many villages, the houses are reasonably solid rather than mud huts and cars and buses are much more plentiful and in much better condition.

If one looks at the map, it appears that one can get to Foumban much more directly by road from Ngaoundere. However the road is so bad that it is only passable in the dry season from November to February, and then with difficulty and some danger from bandits (even the bus on the busy road from Maroua to Ngaoundere had armed guards). One has to go south to Yaounde or Douala and then go back north to Foumban. The road from Ngaoundere to Yaounde is also bad (though passable most of the time) and most people and goods go by train. The effect of the bad roads is that the North and Far North are almost cut off from the South, West and North West. One consequence is that there is a far narrower range of fruit and vegetables in the North and Far North, the quality is lower and prices are much higher. Much of the fruit in the Far North comes from Nigeria. A good road from Foumban to Ngaoundere would open up the North and Far North to the foodstuffs of the West and North West, and also allow some trade in reverse, e.g. of rice.

There was an amazing number of police roadblocks between Douala and Foumban at which we had to stop, even more than in the Far North. In the latter case there is some financial exchange between the bus driver and the policeman (at least four times on the 80 kilometer journey between Maga and Maroua). In the West the bus probably would have passed a test of road worthiness and the documentation, including a list of passengers with their identity card numbers, was in order. Perhaps there were other vehicles for which it was worthwhile for the police to check, or perhaps in both cases the police act as a deterrent to bandits. It is possible also that the trouble in the neighbouring Bakassi Peninsula was the reason for the vigilance (the Bakassi Peninsula was disputed between Cameroon and Nigeria and although the International Court of Justice ruled that Nigeria should cede it to Cameroon in 2002 (the hand-over formally happened on 14th August 2008) there are armed groups which still resist Cameroonian rule, causing ongoing conflict in which over 100 people have died in the past month).

On the last leg of the bus journey, from Bafoussan to Foumban, a man got on the bus and gave a sales pitch on a number of Chinese medicines. In each case he looked for 15,000 fcfa but due to lack of response quickly dropped his price to 500 fcfa, sometimes adding bonus products at this price. The most popular product was a liquid which you held in your mouth for 10 minutes and which did all sorts of wonderful things such as healing gum disease and bad teeth. Somebody asked if it was any good for ear aches and the salesman immediately launched forth on the great benefits that it brought to the ears. I think it is indicative of the African belief in quick remedies that most people on the bus bought this product. His last product was a cream that is rubbed on the genitals to cure or prevent sexually transmitted diseases. There were a few takers for this product but it was not clear whether they needed a cure or just prevention.

When in Foumban I wanted to visit some VSO volunteers in two villages around 80 kilometers further north. I was told that the road is very dangerous in the rainy season, but what really killed the idea was news that some people had just been killed by bandits on that road.

My Work

2008-08-11T08:54:00.000-07:00

Decentralisation in Cameroon

The context of my work with the Maga Council is that Cameroon is in the process of devolving responsibilities from central to local government. The aspiration to do this has been around since the 1970s, there was a flurry of activity in the 1990s and in 2004 laws were published detailing such things as the responsibilities of the councils. The expanded services for which the councils are responsible include water and sanitation, local roads and infrastructure, primary education, local health services, town planning, development of local economic activity and local environmental issues. A law setting out how resources, both human and financial, are to be transferred from the state to the councils to enable them to fulfil their additional responsibilities has not yet been published and the 2004 laws have not yet been enacted. However the state has withdrawn somewhat from meeting local needs and the people look to the councils to meet their needs, which are acute.

Much good work has been done on the planning of decentralisation, mainly with technical assistance from the German equivalent of Irish Aid, supplemented by its Dutch and French counterparts and by financial assistance from these and the UK and Canadian governments. In the limbo created by the devolution of responsibilities without the corresponding transfer of resources, one constructive contribution would be to strengthen the capacities of the councils so that they may use their current resources as effectively as possible and be positioned to take on their extra responsibilities when resouces are made available. VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas) for whom I work is one of a number of organisations which have adopted this response. VSO has already experience of strengthening the capacities of NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and CSOs (civil society organisations) and with the help of local councils in Canada and Wales has adapted this process to the needs of the councils in Cameroon. The Maga Council is one of ten forming a pilot group, four of which have volunteers at this stage.

Strengthening Capacities

The capacities in question are such things as the ability to manage human resources, the leadership of the mayor and his executive, financial management, two-way communication between the council and its citizens, provision of or outsourcing of services, project formulation and management, and cooperation with state bodies and with international development organisations. The capacities are enablers of good governance, in which there is participation of all relevant individuals in decision making, clear allocation of responsibilities with accountability for carrying them out and transparent communication with availability of relevant information. I am currently in a diagnostic phase in Maga in which, with a working party of councillors and council employees, we are studying all available documentation on policies, procedures and standards relating to capacities and carrying out a large number of interviews with councillors, staff, representatives of state organisations, NGOs and CSOs. When these activities have been completed we will agree on how strong the council is on each capacity, present our findings to all councillors and staff and agree priorities for addressing the weak capacities. We will then propose a five-year plan for strengthening the capacities. VSO will work with the council over the five years and will bring in people with expertise appropriate to the proposed actions. The objective is to enable the council to do things such as planning and managing projects, rather than supply volunteers to do such things for it.

My work to date has included delivering workshops to describe the process we have embarked on, to explain the capacities and how they contribute to good governance and to highlight the need for good governance and that without good governance any projects initiated have a high likelihood of failure and of losing the confidence of international development organisations. The most important element of the workshops is a play which illustrates the need for each village to have a management committee to look after things like pump maintenance and charges for pump usage. When I visited villages, as described in an earlier blog, I was struck by the lack of good governance at village level and the futility of providing new facilities such as pumps in such circumstances. I decided that this was where we should start, rather than just concentrating on improving the capacities of the council, and rewrote the play proposed by VSO in this context. This message has been taken up by many of the councillors. They perceive the need to improve the governance of their villages and we now have requests to present the workshop to all the chiefs of the villages (at village level, the main power tends to reside in the chief who is appointed through traditional processes and is not necessarily, and not commonly, the elected councillor).

The Current State of Maga’s Council

The Maga council has 41 councillors elected by the people who in turn elected the mayor and his four deputies. The council meets once per quarter and delegates certain powers to the mayor, who in turn may delegate to his deputies. The council can form committees - in the case of Maga there are committees for finance, development and social affairs. The council also has employees, 18 in the case of Maga. The most important of these is the Secrétaire Général, who is essentially the chief executive (the mayor being the chairman). There is also a Receveur Municipal (a sort of financial controller) and a Comptable Matières (a sort of bean counter who keeps track of everything the council owns).

The reality in Maga is that most of the work is done by the mayor and the Secrétaire Général, who are extremely busy. The Receveur Municipal, some of the local tax collectors who report to him, and one or two others, also appear to do a moderate amount of work. Some others turn up at the office from time to time but just seem to chat, and some are rarely if ever seen. The concept of work here is very different from the Western concept. For example, on Tuesdays there is a market in neighbouring Pouss and while the tax collectors have a valid reason for going there, it seems to be accepted that everybody goes there and that there is really no need to turn up to work in Maga on that day.

One of the reasons for the inactivity of many employees is that the council is in severe financial crisis and there is no money for the materials needed for their work. The present council was elected in July 2007 and around that time also a new Secrétaire Général and Receveur Municipal were appointed. The new administration found that accounts had not been prepared for five years. This exacerbates a situation where taxes collected by the state but normally passed to councils (under pre-decentralisation legislation) are running several months late. Salaries of employees are around four months in arrears and because of the problem with the accounts the council is prevented from having recourse to short-term borrowing to pay them. This has resulted in severe hardship since the salaries are barely adequate for the very large families which are common here and the world food and fuel crises have increased prices dramatically. Employees of the council say that they have to find other ways of making money and don’t have time to come to work. The new administration has reconstructed the accounts for the past few years and is in the process of getting them approved.

The council building is somewhat run down. Most lights have no bulb, many of the electric sockets don’t work and there are air conditioning units, none of which works. The council has a PC, a printer and a photocopier but all are broken down, were sent to Maroua to be fixed around a year ago and there has been no follow-up. Even if these worked there is a need for a generator since the electricity supply is so unreliable. The council has a helicopter landing pad but no toilet (this is a big problem when I arrange a day-long workshop for a large number of people). I asked if helicopters often use the landing pad and was told that one landed in 1982 (I think it contained the previous president of Cameroon who performed the official opening of SEMRY and the lake). There is also an airstrip dating from those times but it is in disuse.

It is evident at this stage that in the case of Maga’s capacities, we are starting from a very low base indeed. No external organisation has ever worked with it on any of the relevant capacities. It is also clear that bringing about change in the Maga council will be very difficult indeed. The level of education of staff is very low, most having left school well short of completing the ‘bac’ (the equivalent in francophone Cameroon of A-levels in anglophone Cameroon, both of which mirror the French and English systems). While the staff all speak French, only around one-third of councillors speak French, the others speaking various local languages such as Mousgoum, Fulfulde and Arab Choa. Almost nobody speaks English. The multiplicity of languages makes workshops extremely challenging!

Barriers to Change

As indicated earlier, the state’s commitment to devolving power to councils under decentralisation is ambivalent. The state has a strangle-hold on the councils using a large cumbersome control organisation (the ‘tutelle’), starting with provinces and their Governors and ramifying down to structures at council level where the Sous-Préfet is the local strong man (as described in the blog on democracy in Cameroon). All significant decisions of the council have to be referred to the Sous-Préfet, and upwards by him, as appropriate (including the approval of the accounts). The Secrétaire Général, Receveur Municipal and Comptable Matières are state appointees and if the council needs to recruit staff with competencies such as third level qualifications it effectively has to look to the state to provide these also. This parallel structure is quite inappropriate under decentralisation but it is not clear what is to happen to it.

Cameroon has been rated by Transparency International as the most corrup country in the world in each of the last 10 years and one can only speculate on what vested interests might block the dismantling of the tutelle. Corruption is reputedly endemic also within councils (I don't have evidence of it in Maga). It is possible that dealing with resistance motivated by corruption will turn out to be the biggest challenge in strengthening the capacities of councils.

Pictures of Maga's Reunification Day Parade

2008-06-30T05:57:00.000-07:00

Cameroon's Reunification Holiday

2008-06-30T05:53:00.000-07:00

On the 20th May each year Cameroon celebrates the reunification of the country, which undid the divisions of the French/British colonisations. This is Cameroon’s biggest holiday and in the morning there were parades of all the local schools, some of which put on performances of traditional dances and displays of arts such as karate. The mayor did a walk-past in dashing blue, accompanied by his three male deputies (his fourth deputy was with a group of females from the local opposition party). The Sultan of Pouss was given some sort of decoration. He came with his usual retinue, who were weilding swords on this occasion (literally), and he brought along a group of musicians playing traditional instruments. It was a really colourful and enjoyable occasion and provided illustrations of protocols and hierarchies and also of other less seemly aspects of Cameroonian life, such as its rather aggressive crowd control.

Everybody seemed hyper for the day, even though the majority are Muslims and don’t drink alcohol, and the way motos were speeding around was quite alarming. Also, much activity continued into the evening, which is quite exceptional in Maga. My celebrations started the evening before with a reception in a local bar, “Evasion”, laid on by the lycée. I went along with Halidou, Ruth and Lady Diana. The latter two turned out to be almost the only ladies present but despite this they went ahead with the “tour d’honneur”, a sort of ice-breaking exercise which is used to start off dances. This consists of nominating attractive ladies to take the floor with the most notable men present. Once the music starts the men grab the ladies in embraces which are otherwise entirely out of place here. The music was supposed to last for 30 seconds but happily for Ruth and Lady Di, they cut it much earlier than this. Dancing continued throughout the night, almost entirely with men. To my surprise, Westlife seem to be the most popular band here and Celine Dion and Phil Collins also seem very popular.

On the evening of the holiday I was invited to a soirée in the Sous-Préfet’s residence. There were over 100 hundred guests, including lots of ladies on this occasion. People were decked out either in traditional dress or in suits, and I felt conspicuous for not wearing a suit. After arriving we were shown to our seats and then waited for a couple of hours while nothing happened. People conversed, if at all, in hushed tones and I remember thinking that there was no sound of laughter. The food when it finally arrived was really good, with fish, chicken, beef, lamb and probably goat, together with salads, rice, pasta and other local vegetables such as plantains and nyams. After the food was cleared, there was a bout of the tour d’honneur to start the dancing. It was rather like the session of the previous evening except that there was a much better supply of ladies and the notables were more notable. It did indeed break the ice, and very quickly there was quite a good party atmosphere and lots of dancing.

Visit to Waza Wildlife Reserve

2008-06-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

The Waza wildlife reserve, which is billed as the best in West Africa, is around 100 kilometres north of Maroua. Four of us hired a car and headed north early one morning. It was a beautiful clear day and the journey to Waza turned out to be very pleasant. We drove mainly through an almost perfectly flat plain but with mountains rising like islands, mainly in the distance. Those nearby were heaps of rocks which must have been thrown up in some volcanic eruptions. We drove through the small town of Mora which had a surprisingly lavish “Palais de Justice”. The road was quite good but we had the customary incident, which in this case was a blow-out after hitting a pot-hole at speed.

At the entrance to Waza we picked up a guide and then spent the day driving on rough tracks through the reserve. There were some watering holes with lots of birds: marabouts, “grues coronets” (crested cranes)?, herons, occasional ostriches and some birds of prey (which looked like eagles) soaring overhead. There were lots of gazelles and various other bigger animals in much the same mould. The most evocative animals we saw were giraffes, which usually kept at a distance and watched us warily. There were lions and elephants there somewhere, and other animals such as jackals, but we did not see them. We did not see any snakes but I see them occasionally in Maga.

While for me this was a significant experience, being my first visit to a wildlife reserve, I think that Waza must now be a shadow if its former self. Poachers are not controlled effectively and have greatly reduced the wildlife. We came across a group of poachers wading through a watering hole and guiding the fish to an area where they could catch them. When they saw our guide, who is a bailiff, they quickly ran off into the bush. There was one particularly extensive watering hole which was almost completely devoid of wildlife and the guide said that it used to teem with life but the poachers had taken everything. Despite these comments, I thoroughly enjoyed the day and will go there again, perhaps to get a glimpse of lions and elephants.

Development of Maga

2008-06-01T01:50:00.000-07:00

Maga’s artificial lake was constructed in 1979. This was part of an extensive development plan by SEMRY, an organisation which was formed to develop the Logone plain with international financial backing. Canals were built from the lake to provide irrigation for the cultivation of rice and other crops. The new town of Maga grew up close by and a lot of people moved from Gurvidig and Pouss into it. SEMRY built a village with good facilities and a hotel, Safari Danay which still operates to a surprisingly high standard (e.g. an Irish country house from the Blue Guide or a good Logis de France). As part of the plan some factories were built, for example a rice packaging factory. A fish processing factory was also built separately by the Japanese. These are either closed or greatly run down at this stage. Unfortunately SEMRY was state-owned and its senior management were political appointees, which resulted in bad management. Global economic problems and SAPs hit very hard in the 1990s. Regulations have not been enforced, e.g. there has been serious over-fishing. SEMRY is now bankrupt and most of the extensive infrastructure that it put in place is in disrepair. This is a scenario which I need to investigate further to see what lessons can be learnt from it and what things can be salvaged.

Last year SEMRY failed to pay its employees for many months. However its Chief Executive continued to build a luxurious house for himself at its expense. When a staff delegation took this up with him he hurled abuse at them. What followed is referred to locally as a “peasant revolt”. The Chief Executive escaped and has not been seen since but his house was razed and in the resulting unrest two people died, one of them a policeman. A staff committee currently runs what is left of SEMRY.

Mayday

2008-05-24T07:46:00.000-07:00

Despite its financial crisis, the whole of the council went to Yagoua, capital of the district which includes Maga, to march in the Mayday parade. I went with them, decked out in Cameroonian dress. Transport was in the back of a truck but after I had climbed into it, hitting my head off an iron bar in the process, the mayor fished me out and told me I was to go in his 4X4. He did not come with us since his mother had died and he was in mourning. Even in the 4X4 it was an arduous journey. I am repeatedly surprised by roads even worse than those I have been on. To make matters worse, there had been rain earlier which turned the road into mud, and at times the 4X4 skated all over the road which had a significant drop on each side.

The 80 kilometer journey was interesting since it followed the Logone south for most of the way (in the northerly direction the road goes around 200 kilometers to Kousseri, which is across the river from Njamena, the capital of Chad). There was good vegetation, due to the river, and the recent rains had begun to produce some patches of green. There were places where we could see people wading back and forth between Chad and Cameroon. A friend told me that she was washing clothes in the Logone one day and a man whom she knew waded across from Chad. He was well dressed but just waded to whatever depth was necessary. When he saw her he borrowed her soap and soaped both himself and his clothes, remaining fully clothed. He then rinsed off and continued on his way, letting the sun dry him.

Yagoua turned out to be quite a nice town with lovely trees and some small hills (a rarity in the flat Logone plain). Before the parade started there was some entertainment. At one stage a senior council official with whom I have a lot of dealings took me by the hand to see some traditional dancers. He pulled me through the crowd towards the front and continued to hold my hand as we watched. Homosexual acts are illegal in Cameroon but it is quite common for men to hold hands. Despite this, I felt ill at ease and in order to disengage I decided to take a photo. After taking the photo I was slow to put my hand back down since I was afraid that he would grab it again. When I finally put my hand down I found that my wallet was gone. In addition to my money and my bank cards (with which I had completely failed to access money in Cameroon) it contained an identity card which I had been issued after arrival. Being without this card is a serious matter since it creates circumstances in which policemen look for significant bribes. Another member of the Maga party who was watching the dancers had his mobile phone stolen.

We went to the local police station and reported the theft. They told me that my wallet would probably turn up but without my money. Cameroon has a benevolent type of pick-pocket who, provided that the wallet contains enough money, actually throws the wallet through the window of the police station at night. I got a phone call from the Yagoua police to-day to say that this has duly happened and that the wallet contains my indentity card.

The parade, when it finally took place, was a farce. We marched no more than 300 metres in the space of a few minutes. However a few of us piled into the 4X4 and joined a cavalcade of similar vehicles which formed a sort of secondary parade around the streets of Yagoua, much to the glee of the local children.

As usual, I was one of a privileged few who were invited to lunch by a local person who turned out to be a most agreeable and thoughtful host. He was very interested in where I was from and produced an atlas so that I could show him where Ireland is and what countries I had flown over when going to Cameroon.

Democracy, Cameroonian Style

2008-05-24T07:16:00.000-07:00

The president of Cameroon is Paul Biya. He has been in power for 25 years, is 75 years old and has recently changed the constitution to enable him to stay in office for a further term. Announcement of this change was the spark that ignited the riots which caused our departure to Cameroon to be delayed, although there were already many underlying sources of grievance, including huge increases in food and fuel prices. The Government puts the number of deaths in the riots at 40 but NGOs say that the real number is greater than 100. I have heard it remarked that Biya wants to stay in office since he would be jailed for embezzlement if he resigned. There was a census in Cameroon in 2004 and the results have not yet been published – some allege that this is because its publication would make the rigging of elections more difficult.

Cameroon has an elected parliament and has provision for a senate but this has not been implemented. Parliament can make laws but many of them are ignored. The prime minister and all ministers are appointed by the president and don’t need to be members of parliament. The president also appoints the people who head up Cameroon’s 10 provinces, and these people have much more power than government ministers, the latter mainly filling an advisory and standard setting role. There is a cascade of appointments from provincial to divisional, sub-divisional, district and council level. The Sous-Préfet is at council level and is the most powerful person at that level. The councillors are elected and they in turn elect the mayor. The mayor appoints deputies from among the councillors to form his Executive. Apart from this he inherits his management team. There is a Secretary General at council level who is appointed by the Sous-Préfet but is a member of the mayor’s team. In practice he is the most powerful person on the mayor’s team, and there are a number of other state appointments on the mayor’s team. Thus the mayor needs to achieve things by influencing rather than by authority. Laws providing for decentralisation of responsibilities were published in 2004 but they have not been enacted, and a further law which is to provide for transfer of resources to councils to enable them to fulfil the new responsibilities has not yet been published. Thus councils are in the invidious position of being expected by their electorate to provide water, schools, health centres, roads and many other services but they don’t have the means to provide them. Meanwhile the state is not filling this gap. Maga’s 41 councillors are all from the opposition party. This is a result of a weird system where each party puts forward a list of candidates and the electorate vote for the lists. Maga’s councillors feel that they are marginalised by the state (ironically, in one of the villages that I visited the chief and his notables were government supporters and felt marginalised by the council).

The chiefs are traditional leaders from families on which their succession is based. There are lots of princes and princesses. Their local power on issues such as ownership of land cuts across state authority at times. They perform a bottom-up function for the state on matters where consultation is sought and they organise local committees to look after matters such as maintenance of wells and pumps. They also act as tax collectors for the councils and the state. The meeting in the Sultan’s palace referred to earlier was attended by all the chiefs in the area and at the meeting each chief was given pre-signed and pre-stamped receipts for taxes which are levied annually on all adults (around €2 per annum). Police frequently stop people to check on their identity cards and if they don’t have a receipt for tax payment presumably they will have to pay a higher bribe than would otherwise be the case.

Visits to Villages

2008-05-18T01:54:00.000-07:00

A man (Moussa) from a local development organisation was doing a survey of deep water pumps in the Maga area and I accompanied him in order to get to know the villages, their chiefs and their needs (Halidou acted as interpreter since practically nobody in the villages speaks French). The night before we started I asked Moussa how he planned to spend the days and he said that he might just work for the morning since it gets extremely hot. He turned up as agreed at 7:00 the next morning and casually remarked that if we went far out into the bush we might not make it back that night. I hastily threw a few things, including a torch and a mosquito net, into a bag and joined him in his 4X4. We visited a lot of villages that day, crossing extremely difficult terrain by following what looked like animal tracks, and ended up in a very remote village where we slept in the open. We hung our mosquito nets from poles that we stuck in the ground and the villagers gave us mats to sleep on. They were not expecting us but killed a chicken and cooked it with rice for us. They also gave us boiled milk straight from the cow. At that stage we had eaten nothing for 14 hours. The next day we visited several other villages but I ran out of filtered water and insisted that we go to Guirvidig to buy some (and some bread for breakfast/lunch). Moussa worked through the week-end and into the next week but at least he agreed to go back to Maga at night.

The deprivation of the villagers is enormous. Most of the deep pumps are broken or working badly. Many villagers are faced with drinking water from shallow, unsafe and unreliable wells or bringing water large distances from other villages. In some cases the villagers, and particularly their children, drink water from ponds and swamps used by livestock. As you go further into the bush the tracks that serve as roads virtually disappear. For several months in the rainy season many villages are completely cut off (even in Maga there are weeks when you can’t go out of your house and when it is impossible to go to a neighbouring village even in a 4X4). The rainy season brings high risk of disease since there are no refuse collection services anywhere and no latrines in many villages, with the result that all sorts of stuff is floating around. There are risks of flooding (I have come to realise that there is also an appreciable risk of flooding in Maga because the ditch of the artificial lake sometimes breaks). Many villages have no school and many of their children never go to school (particularly girls, who have to fetch water and perform other chores), even in the dry season. Where villages have schools, more often than not they have fallen into disuse because the villagers are unable to pay teachers or because the villages are too remote to attract them.

When we were sitting in one village talking to the chief I noticed a large flock of birds flying by. They looked rather like a flock of starlings but the flock was enormous and flew past continuously. It still had not passed when we left, half an hour later. I was told that they were “bêtes” which eat grain. The likelihood is that most of the harvest will be wiped out. The defence against these birds is to spray them at night from a plane in order to exterminate them. The last time that this was done was 2001 and they have since recovered and are now everywhere. The local remedy is to cast nets over trees at night and then bring the birds to Maroua to be eaten, but this makes a trivial impact. The government has put in place a service, including planes, to spray the “oiseaux granivores” but I am told that the resources have been diverted to other, probably private, uses.

Although our arrival was unexpected, large reception parties materialised in most villages. Some came with spears, bows and arrows, swords, machetes, and other weapons. In one village there was a fierce-looking man on horseback with a bow and arrows who offered to bring me riding (which I declined). I asked him what he used the bow and arrows for and he said that they were for defence against bandits and lions. I don’t think that there are lions in the vicinity but in another village later that day we were told how they had killed a bandit with an arrow.

Marriage, Life and Death, Cameroonian Style

2008-05-18T01:39:00.000-07:00

Parents here expect their children and grand-children to look after them in old age. They try to have their daughters married from as young as thirteen (for which they receive a dowry) and press them to have as many children as possible, with the result that many girls drop out of school. As far as I can judge, the wives get spent at an early age and the husbands take other wives, also young, retaining or divorcing the former wives. It is not unusual for men in their fifties, and even sixties, to take young wives and to continue to have children. There is a local chief who has 47 children and his sixth wife is currently pregnant. They don’t seem to consider whether they will be able to support the children, but look to the state or council to provide facilities for them. Men also have a lot of extra-marital affairs with “free women” and illegitimate children abound. It does not look as though there is any real bond between husband and wife in most cases, other than contractual.

Part of the logic here is that mortality will be high and that lots of children are needed to provide enough survivors to look after the old. A link does not seem to be drawn between the high birth rate, the lack of capacity of water supply, schools and health facilities, and the general worsening of very impoverished conditions. Illness and death are everywhere here. Within my small circle of friends in the space of a few weeks, there have already been numerous deaths, including children and people of all ages. Most have been caused by malaria, and this is not the bad time of the year (which is from October to December, after the rainy season).

Halidou’s mother fell ill and I went with him to visit her in the Pouss hospital. The hospital can accommodate around 15 patients, has almost no equipment and has only one qualified nurse and no doctor. It serves around 50,000 people, and some Chadians also cross the Logone to go to it. Halidou’s mother seemed extremely unwell and they were unable to diagnose her illness (which turned out to be malaria). I gave him money to have her brought to the Maga hospital, which has some equipment and a doctor, where she was diagnosed and given treatment. She has now recovered but I think she would have died if left in Pouss. All medical treatment has to be paid for and most people cannot afford to pay and just do without it. I have heard many stories of people who have died for lack of money to pay for treatment and medicines (which cost trivial amounts in our terms).

The mother of another friend has been having some sort of fits and she and everybody else thinks that she has been put under a spell by somebody. She probably has something like cerebral malaria but even the best educated people believe in sorcerers. There are of course local “healers” with dubious methods.

The bonds between parents and children are also weak in many cases. Children are left to roam unsupervised, and with no rubbish collection service they are constantly sifting through bags of decaying material, some of which they eat. On one occasion I tried to burn some rubbish but did not do a good job and decided to let the fire smoulder and then dispose of it. Later I heard a sound outside my window and saw three young children (less than four years old) at the spot where there had been the decaying remains of fish and other food, but there was none left. Not surprisingly, child mortality is very high. Apart from illnesses, accidents are frequent. In the past few weeks two children have drowned in the lake, another has had his foot crushed while trying to catch onto the side of a truck and another broke both his wrists in a fall from a tree after he was attacked by bees.

There is currently a financial crisis in the Council and employees have not been paid for five months. Nearly 100 employees are affected (including teachers and others employed by the council) and several have told me that they go for days without eating. Most have families, the average size being around 10. When some food is available, the father gets first call, then the mother and then the children, if any is left.

Pictures of Some Friends

2008-05-10T11:44:00.000-07:00

Neighbours and Friends

2008-05-10T11:42:00.000-07:00

The people here are very friendly, rather like Irish people in rural areas, and I am gradually getting to know some neighbours. Apart from an existing volunteer, Ruth, who has been extremely helpful, my first contact was with a sixteen year-old boy, Kalifa, who introduced himself on my first morning. He told me that he used to act as “petit frère” to the volunteer who was in my house before me. He is very resourceful and street wise, he has fixed all sorts of things for me, sorted out all sorts of problems and has even shown me how to cook a number of local dishes. He is one of a number of youths who tend to turn up at my house around meal times. In Cameroon, no matter how little you have for a meal, if anybody turns up you share it with them. I am quite happy to share but I keep finding that my provisioning and shopping schedule are derailed and I seem to have to go shopping at least once a day. Some of my neighbours and colleagues have invited me to dine with them. In one case a man whom I had met in the town invited himself to dinner one evening, offering to bring cooked fish if I would prepare a salad to go with it. It turned out a very pleasant evening.

Ruth teaches English in a local school and I asked her if she could suggest somebody who could give me some French conversation practice. She introduced me to Halidou, a 30-year old man who teaches French in the local school. This has turned out to be a significant breakthrough. He is very intelligent and speaks not only French and English but several local languages, including Fulfulde, Mousgoum and Arabic Choa. In my first two weeks at work I visited the chiefs of around 50 villages in the area and most of them do not speak French (none speak English). Halidou, who is employed by the council but is seconded to the school, came with me (it was during the school holidays). He was able to fill me in on the background to everything, as well as translating. He is some sort of national volunteer and is paid very little and treated badly. Cameroon’s graduates, of whom he is one, find it extremely difficult to get work and one option for them is to work as a volunteer and at least get experience. Last week-end he got engaged. For years his parents have been pressing him to marry but he resisted up to this. He finally gave in and consented to meet a 17 year old girl at their request. He met her for the first time on Saturday, got on well with her and agreed to marry her.

I have scripted a play for a workshop which I need to run with all the councillors and with the local dignatories. A local group of actors have agreed to do it for me and they come to my house to rehearse. They are young, energetic and talented. Their main strength is improvisation, which is not good news for me since I am trying to communicate particular messages and I never know when they are going to take off at a tangent and abandon the script. One of them is referred to as “Princess Diana”, being a princess herself (this distinction is not what it seems since the chiefs tend to have so many children). There are some original names here: one very assidous student at the local school is referred to as “A-B-C-D”.

The mayor has introduced me to all the important people in the area. These are a mixture of elected representatives, such as the mayor and his executive, state-appointed representatives, of whom the Sous-Prefet is the most important, and traditional chiefs, of whom the Sultan of Pouss is the most senior. The latter has an impressive palace in Pouss as well as a house in Maga. The mayor brought me to the palace in Pouss on the first day and after we had taken our shoes off we were brought into a very large room with sofas around it and carpets on the floor. When the Sultan entered with his retinue we bowed respectfully and all conversation was restrained and at his bidding. He is extremely tall, as are most of the Mousgoum tribe of which he is part. The mayor sat under him and talked up to him, and on subsequent visits to the palace the only person who sat at his level was the Sous-Prefet. On one occasion there were around 50 men in the room and a select few, including myself, were invited to lunch with him (lovely beef, lamb, chicken and fish, plus vegetables and sauces). He turned out to be quite genial. He took pity on my efforts to eat with my hands sitting on the floor (the Cameroonian way of eating), without staining the carpet and my clothes, and he produced two chairs – one for me to sit on and the other to use as a table. I was quite embarrassed but it seemed to amuse him, and of course all the others. Ruth lives in his Maga house and shares a lovely big living room. He has frequently asked her to become his sixth wife, which she has declined. His fifth wife, who was 14 and was an “esclave” since his religion only permits four wives, ran away, causing a scandal. He has also offered to marry Ruth to one of his sons.

No smoking, spitting, fighting, stealing or vomiting on the bus

2008-05-09T05:44:00.000-07:00

This was the notice above the windows of a minibus which I took from Maga to Guirvidig on the latter’s market day. The bus only leaves when it is full, which means that an incredible number of people are packed in, and there are others on the top and also hanging out of the back (on the way back from the market there is all this plus all sorts of bulky objects bought at the market piled high on top). People sit facing each other in rows along the length of the bus and their knees are carefully interleaved with no room left to move in. A boy near me had a cock in his lap which tried frantically to escape every now and then. As we sat sweltering in the heat waiting for the bus to leave (this can take hours) somebody’s mobile played “Jingle Bells”.

I was at the front of the bus and could see into the cab (which contained three people in addition to the driver). The seat of the cab opened up to reveal the engine. Before starting, the driver connected some wires, put water in the radiator and sucked some liquid through a tube into his mouth, spat it out and syphoned the liquid into something else. After all that the battery barely turned the engine, which would not start, and then the guys hanging out of the back of the bus pushed it (fully loaded) until it started. The gear changes were incredibly jarring. I soon came to realise that the bus had absolutely no brakes and on one occasion a car blocked the way and for what seemed like an eternity the bus free-wheeled up to it and bumped into it. The driver didn’t even get out to see if there was any damage. We passed some police sitting under a tree and free-wheeled to a stop down the road from them. The driver gave some money to one of the guys hanging out of the back who ran back and gave it to them, presumably to avoid having his vehicle checked for road-worthiness. Most buses that I have been in since then have been equally bad and have had theirs radiators topped up every 15 kilometers or so. Broken down buses are regular sights, their passengers sitting patiently under a tree. I was on a bus recently which broke down over ten times between Maroua and Maga. Each time repairs were done with the help of bits of tubing, plastic bags, etc. To my relief the bus eventually made it to its destination, albeit many hours late.

The state of everything here is precarious. To-day I was in the local chief’s house and a young boy took out a bicycle. The chief asked him if it was road-worthy. The boy said “yes” but immediately the front wheel fell off and then the handlebars also fell off.

Pictures from Maga

2008-05-08T09:35:00.000-07:00

Since I wrote my blog on Maga I have been out on the lake and have seen the hippos. It was a lovely still day and it has left a lasting impression on me. I felt privileged.

Maga

2008-04-26T11:45:00.001-07:00

After dinner I was brought to my house. It turned out that the electricity was not switched on so a person whom I later learned was the mayor’s third deputy helped me put up my mosquito net by torch-light and I went to bed, leaving it to the morning to get my bearings. To my surprise I was told that there was a guard on duty every night and that he sleeps in an adjoining shed.

By Maga standards my house is good. It has a living room, a bedroom, a shower and a flush toilet. The electricity was switched on the next day but then the water failed for a few days. When the water came back I found that there was a blockage in the drain from the shower (this has still not been fixed but I take my showers standing in a big basin). There are bats in the roof and they fly around the living room and bedroom at dusk before going out and at dawn after they return. Sometimes they get trapped between the curtain and the window and make an awful racket until I release them in the morning. They sometimes fly around during the day also. I don’t mind them but their droppings accumulate and I have heard of a person who died from rabies after being bitten by a bat so I should get something done about them. Lots of lizards, some multicoloured, come in and run around the place. Mosquitos are not much of a problem at this time of the year but I am told that they are a serious problem in the rainy season, which could start any time from late April and continue until late September.

Maga is a very quiet town with mainly Muslim people. They are very courteous and have strict protocols which they go through when they meet. They congregate in groups sitting on the ground under trees. The children are extraordinarily well behaved and are expected to do things for adults without payment, such as running to the market to buy things. The one thing that I would hold against the people is that when a white person goes shopping they multiply their prices and if you are not prepared to expend a considerable amount of time haggling you are constantly ripped off (or “bouffé”, as they somewhat impolitely call it). Happily there is a bar, “Chez Rose”, hidden away in a back street. Even some Muslims slip in there for a drink.

The range of things which one can buy here is very restricted. There is very good fish, coming from the lake which supplies the region. Given that we are approaching the end of the dry season I was surprised to find so much water in the lake. The Logone river fills the lake in the rainy season and the lake supplies water to the river in the dry season. I have watched fishermen cast small nets in canals off the lake and pull them in, usually with two or three fish per throw. Over-fishing and poaching are problems. Also the lake is man-made and has led to the drying up of many small lakes where fish used to be caught and to the elimination of some of the swamps, with a consequent loss of wildlife. I have yet to go out in the lake to see the hippos but heard that one attacked a man near Maga a few days ago and was killed by the local people. The Maga football team are referred to as the “hippos”.

A lot of beef is also available locally. The plain in which the Commune de Maga is situated and which extends north to Lake Chad is used to graze cattle. Nomadic cattle herders come here from Niger, Nigeria and Chad, covering enormous distances in search of grazing for their herds. The creation of the artificial lake has adversely affected the grazing and the availbility of watering holes for the livestock. Also some local people have established farms and have fenced off areas through which the nomads used to pass. This has given rise to conflicts with significant loss of life. In theory the state owns all the lands and levies taxes for grazing. In practice the traditional chiefs continue to allocate ownership rights in their areas.

M. le Maire de la Commune de Maga

2008-04-26T11:36:00.000-07:00

I was collected in Maroua by the mayor of the Maga local council and my future boss. He is a very imposing person and the girls fall for him in a big way. He is turning out to be very personable, popular, enlightened and progressive and I expect that he will make me work very hard since he has great ambitions for his locality. It consists of three small towns and their environs with a total population of 100,000. They are on the shores of Lake Maga which stretches for 25 kilometers from Guirvidig in the west through Maga to Pouss in the east. Pouss is on the Cameroon side of the Logone river and Chad is on the other side. Happily the nearest bridge is 200 kilometers away but bandits still cross by boat and have caused some deaths in towns north and south of Pouss, but not in Pouss as yet.

The journey to Maga was difficult. I met the mayor in the morning and he said that he would return shortly to collect me when he had met his wife. He has three wives and three houses, one of which is in Maga. Unfortunately he could not track down his Maroua wife until late and it was getting dark as we left. He has the rare luxury in these parts of a 4X4 jeep and a driver who always goes around in it with him and hangs around wherever he is. On a subsequent trip the mayor carried a rifle which he explained was because he was visiting some areas in the bush where bandits kidnap, rob and murder rich merchants. He comes from a warrior tribe, the Mousgoum, he has a short fuse and I certainly would not take issue with him when he has his rifle at hand! On my first trip from Maroua to Maga, after I was installed together with my luggage, and feeling squashed since there was already a lot of clutter in the jeep, three women, two children and all their clutter were somehow piled into the area behind the back seat. I think they were neighbours for whom he was doing a favour but I am not sure since although men are introduced meticulously, women are generally ignored.

The first 30 kilometers of the road were incredibly bad and the trip from Ngaoundere to Maroua paled into insignificance when compared to this (I was to find on a return trip to Maroua that they had “resurfaced” the road with earth, which is fine now since we are still in the dry season…). Happily there was extremely little traffic on the road since the area is extremely poor. After 30 kilometers the road suddenly assumed a very good surface (like an Irish road, but I am told that the rainy season will wash parts of it away). This lasted for another 30 kilometers. When I asked why this part of the road, and not the 30 kilometers nearer Maroua, was properly surfaced I was told that prior to resurfacing it was by far the worst part of the road. At this stage we stopped for Muslim prayers. We then continued on a bad road for about 15 kilometers to Guirvidig. Here we called into the mayor’s second house. After removing my shoes I sat in a very big room with sofas on every side and a big carpet on the floor. The mayor had told me that he had 13 children and I counted seating space for himself, the three wives and all the children (but this may be spurious since they usually sit on the floor). He opened a bottle of whiskey (which I expect was a huge honour, and probably rather risqué on his part) and poured me a large tumbler full. I had eaten nothing in 10 hours and politely took a few sips and explained as best I could that it couldn’t be taken in such quantities. We then continued the further 12 kilometers to Maga where he invited me to dine with him at his Maga house. This was on a carpet in the open-air and consisted of fish deliciously cooked. He also had the thoughtfulness to send his jeep around for me the next morning and bring me for breakfast (again fish) since there were no provisions in my house.

Pictures from Maroua

2008-04-19T02:02:00.000-07:00

Maroua

2008-04-19T01:22:00.000-07:00

Maroua is a less chaotic city than Yaounde, has almost no white people and is not cosmopolitan. It does not give an impression of much wealth but there is also less evidence of poverty (in the city itself) and there are fewer beggars. Its market is very lively and apart from this, shops are very small and restricted. There are not so many cars and motorbikes. The latter are the main form of taxi and often carry two passengers in addition to the taxi man. It is not very unusual to see a bicycle or motorbike carrying a huge load, even a bed, through busy traffic. Maroua is on the edge of a very large flat plain and has long straight streets lined by trees. It has a river which is dry at this time of the year but people dig holes in the river bed to get to water for washing themselves and their clothes.

I have spent a week training here at this stage and have liked Maroua’s atmosphere better than Yaounde’s although there is very little to do here besides going to restaurants and bars. In Yaounde there is night-life if you want it and we did spend an evening in a bar with very good music, much of it Cameroonian or of other African origin. Such entertainment is less in evidence here but the restaurants and bars are very lively. There are a few hotels, some of which have swimming pools.

Walking around Maroua at night is hazardous since there are virtually no street lamps. On one occasion I stepped into a hole just after crossing a bridge and tumbled down to the river bed. I was more or less OK but my trousers, shirt and mobile phone were not.

Journey North

2008-04-17T10:04:00.000-07:00

After a week’s training in Yaounde, the group of volunteers split into those going to the English speaking North West and those going to the French speaking Far North (in Cameroon as a whole it is about 80/20 French/English and there are around 250 other languages, of which Pidgin is the most common in the North West and Fulfulde in the Far North). There had been ten of us, coming from Ireland (just myself), Wales, France, Canada, India, the Philipines and Zambia, and five of us headed north. The station was as chaotic as it could be but we managed to avoid the pick-pockets and swindlers of all sorts. We had a fifteen hour train journey over night with couchettes. Before it got dark we passed through very green countryside with lots of trees and rivers but by morning the countryside was more arid, there was much less vegetation and most of the river beds were dry. The countryside was sparsely populated and the dwllings were very basic, usually consisting of mud huts with straw roof within compounds surrounded with straw walls. The train stopped at a lot of stations where people with baskets of food on their heads frantically tried to make sales through the windows. Most purchases cost of the order of 20 cents and I doubt if the vendors averaged even one sale per train.

We arrived at another chaotic station in Ngaoundere and somehow found our bus. The first four hours to Garoua were not bad but then other passengers were packed in and it was impossible to move for the next five hours in suffocating temperatures. Also on this part of the journey there were huge potholes in the road and the bus driver tried to weave his way among them, with mixed success, somehow avoiding oncoming traffic which was similarly weaving all over the road. Our luggage was piled way up on top of the bus and it was hard to know how the bus did not topple over. We passed some broken-down buses but happily our’s did not have a problem. We had one stop so that the Muslims could say their prayers after meeting their calls of nature and washing themselves scrupulously (with no loos in the stations everybody, both male and female and of whatever creed, just did what they had to do with no cover).

Christians are in a majority in the south of Cameroon (although even in Yaounde the Muslims managed to wake me every morning at 4:30 with their call to prayer) but in the Far North they are in a majority. On the bus the radio played mostly Christian religious programmes (it was Sunday) interspersed with lots of updates on soccer matches.

As we approached Maroua the countryside became flatter but with sudden hills consisting of huge rocks which must have resulted from some eruptions (Cameroon still has active volcanoes and we saw some relatively fresh lava on our journey).

Somehow we arrived in Maroua intact and on time, much to the surprise of the VSO people who were used to over-night vigils on such occasions.

Pictures of Yaounde

2008-04-12T09:49:00.001-07:00

Yaounde

2008-04-12T09:38:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Yaounde Airport, Cameroon, on the evening of Saturday 8th March 2008, having flown from Dublin with an over-night in Paris. It turned out to be a great introduction to Cameroon since it was International Women’s Day which is celebrated in style in Cameroon. There were people everywhere, most of the women in colourful Cameroonian dress, and they were clearly in very high spirits. There had been parades and many festivities during the day and the open-air bars and restaurants were jammed. The journey from the airport to our hotel in Cameroon was my first introduction to the erratic style of driving which is endemic in Cameroon and as the bus weaved its way at break-neck speed through the traffic, with the horn blowing almost continuously, the many revellers who were wandering around the road had to fend for themselves.

The next morning my first impressions of Yaounde were of a lively city set in hilly countryside much greener than I expected. Most shops are little more than shacks and there are stalls everywhere selling various local foodstuffs, some cooked and ready to eat, and various other odds and ends. A lot of the stalls and shacks sell credits for mobile phones, provide facilities for making phone calls and occasionally provide services such as photocopying and internet access. The traffic is truly chaotic and dangerous and even when you are on the footpath you are in danger of being run down - it seems to be your own responsibility to watch out and dodge any cars or motorbikes that are using it. The one saving factor is that there are deep open drains at both sides of most streets which restrict where the cars can go, but these and other holes, all with no warning signs or barriers, present their own hazards.

Nearly all the shopping is done in the daily market, where they sell everything. I had lost the earphones for my ipod so I bought a new set there. After bargaining the price down from €4 to €1.50 I brought them back to my hotel only to find that they did not work. We went to the zoo which was really interesting since it covered wildlife that we could see in Cameroon. Even in Yaounde itself there were big birds of prey soaring overhead but I don’t know enough to decide whether they were kites, buzzards or eagles, or all of these. Also down the road from our hotel there were some trees full of bats the size of jackdaws which took off with great clamour at dusk.

Although there are signs of poverty everywhere, the people dress very well and are very friendly. Many of the dwelling areas look to us like shanty towns but I am not sure that they are that bad in reality. There was less begging than I expected but we were continuously warned about pick-pockets. The food is very good although it is usual to find that quite a number of things on the menu are not in stock. They have lots of fish, and chicken and beef are the main meats. They cook vegetables, such as plantains and yams, in several different and appetising ways. The beer is fine but I quickly gave up on the “wine” (in fact I have drunk less alcohol in the past ten days than at any time in the past forty years, but my consumption of water is massive).

The heat in Yaounde was not as bad as I expected. There was fairly high humidity, there were a few violent storms and mosquitos were a problem at night.

Introduction

2008-03-28T08:01:00.000-07:00

These are my observations on Africa. They are written mainly as personal therapy and as an aide memoire but are made available to others in case some aspects of them should prove useful.