Update on Projects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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