Disaster

It’s the anniversary of two years in Cameroon today! I should be thrilled, but I’m actually extremely upset. In fact, after my visit to the sawmill today, I went to Magloire’s house after and cried and threw a small fit. I’ve said it before (perhaps not to but I really many people in particular, but to myself, at least) and I’ll say it again: I feel like Cameroon has broken me – my hope, my spirit, my optimism for humanity. That may sound drastic, but perhaps it feels so much worse, because I don’t feel like even my best friend here can understand why I’m upset and comfort me properly. Magloire’s response to my being upset was “Becca, you know how things work here, so why are you letting it upset you?” This is so Cameroonian - ie when everything goes wrong, it’s your fault for being upset about it. Geez, I’m just looking for a little sympathy. I even tried to explain that to him before I became a blubbering mess, but once again, I don’t think he understood that all I really wanted to hear was comforting sounds - “I know, they suck, those bastards.”

I guess I should backup and explain what brought this on. While preparing breakfast this morning, Magloire surprised me by showing up at my house. He was supposed to be two days travel away at a training that was supposed to begin yesterday for a government-sponsored project he’s doing. Apparently, this training has been rescheduled for next week, for the same dates as those for our HIV Counselor Training. Now we’ve got to figure out a way to manage this problem, and he’s talking about skipping out on part of our project. I feel confident that I could lead the training alone, but 1) I think it will be more beneficial for participants if he’s there to act as a cultural liaison; 2) I think he will benefit from teaching, it will be a good experience for him; 3) He made this commitment months ago, and I feel like it’s unfair to drop that commitment a week beforehand because some jerk government organization finally got their shit together and planned their project for the same time as we did.

So that was problem number 1. Actually, that’s problem number 3. Problem 1 is the seeming impossibility of getting HIV tests for our HIV week project. I have about next to no faith that I’ll be able to get tests from the government agencies responsible for distributing them. I already know that the Cameroonian government is entirely inept, corrupt, inefficient, and basically incapable of doing anything but put on airs and bouffe money. Perhaps because I wasn’t expecting much from them, this is less disappointing, despite the fact that free testing was kind of the culmination of AIDS Week. I’ve approached other NGOs to try and get HIV tests, to no avail. I actually wonder whether there are any tests physically in the country right now.

Problem 2 is ACMS (Association Camerounaise pour le Marketing Social), a Cameroonian NGO that distributes a lot of HIV and malaria related materials as one approach to combating these two large health challenges. ACMS has long been a reliable partner for PCVs, providing sponsoring for PCV projects. I visited ACMS about a month ago with Magloire, and they gave us the runaround – making us re-write and re-deliver our demande d’aide, fill out additional forms, and then come back on a Friday, (but not the following Friday, when I would conveniently still be in Yaounde). When I thus went back last Friday, I was irritated when the receptionist said that they didn’t currently have anything to give out. Could I come back on Monday or Tuesday? “No!” I wanted to scream, “This is my third trip here! You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep. If you can’t give me anything, can you just say no, so I stop wasting my time?!” But I didn’t say that, I politely informed her that I could not come back the next week because I was traveling back to Ngambé Tikar the next day (Saturday). She said I could send someone in my place, so I enlisted a PCV friend, Ben.

When I called Ben yesterday to see if he had success, he said that the ACMS office was closed on Monday. I couldn’t believe the receptionist would tell me to come back when the office was closed! Was that her way of telling me to stuff it? Or was she actually that stupid and inconsiderate? Clearly, this has angered me. I thought ACMS was reliable – last year, during international AIDS day, it was almost absurd how easy it was to get HIV materials, such as condoms and posters. Many volunteers have successfully gotten sponsoring from ACMS. I now wonder if I did something wrong?

And now for problem 4, which basically triggered my emotional breakdown today. Before I went to Yaoundé last week, I asked Mirko at the sawmill if he had the money that he had promised us for this project – 150.000 CFA, or about 12% of the overall budget, no small contribution. He said he didn’t, but I should come back on Monday and he would have it then. I said I wouldn’t be in village, and he agreed that Magloire could pick up the money. When I called Magloire from Yaoundé so find out if he had gotten money from Mirko, he said no. I encouraged him to be persistent, thinking it was just a problem of reminding Mirko enough times (not unusual here).

When I went to talk to Mirko today, I was not expecting what he told me, which was that he had no money (how that’s even possible – the sawmill just built a brand new office… I don’t want to get into). So basically, he just made a promise, which he may or may not have intended to keep. I can’t believe it. I don’t think a company could get away with that in America – the media backlash would be awful for business. But not in Cameroon! I’m so disgusted with the way this country functions. Which is actually an oxymoron – this country doesn’t function.

In short, everything that could go wrong with the AIDS Week is… and all of it is out of my control, but yet reflects on me. I think this is why I’ve had such trouble with Cameroon, in general: maybe you’ll achieve something great which has little to nothing to do with your particular effort. And maybe you’ll try and try and try to do something meaningful and the end result will be pitiful. It makes you wonder why you should even try since results seem to be so unrelated to effort.

Actually this whole mess has brought me some peace on an issue that has been challenging for me to grope with. Namely, how much does the West owe to Cameroon and to Africa in monetary terms? Should the wealthy West be throwing more money at Africa’s enormous and seemingly insurmountable problems? Should we pity their poverty – their kids’ bellies swollen from malnutrition, their mud brick houses with leaky thatched roofing and dirt floors, their lack of clean drinking water, their endemic malaria? I think I have finally found an answer: no.

If there’s anything to pity here, it’s the overwhelming and stifling lack of hope and sense that people have no power to influence fate, embodied perfectly in that all too common phrase, “on va faire comment?” (“What are you gonna do?”) Because no matter how poor, sick, hungry, or suffering these people are in material concerns, they are far richer in closeness of family and generosity to fellow man (something America could certainly take notes on…). Moreover, if America teaches us anything, it’s that perseverance and hard work can achieve anything, but you must first believe in your ability to succeed. This is something kids are trained to believe since pre-school – who didn’t grow up hearing, “What do you want to be when you want to grow up? You can be anything you want, you just have to try!” All of Africa’s (okay, perhaps I shouldn’t generalize to a whole continent, but definitely Cameroon’s) problems, I firmly believe, could be resolved if people – forgive the cheesiness – had the audacity to hope. Hope, the belief in the very possibility of better, is truly powerful. It can lead people to do extraordinary things – just as it is bringing much-needed health reform to America’s ailing health care system right now. But Cameroonians don’t have this vision. Today, I felt the way they see the world, I understood that lack of hope, fundamentally and viscerally. Why do I care, why do I even try when everything is just as likely to fall apart as it is to work?

No. Don’t pity Africans their poverty. Pity them the colonialism, the traditions, and resulting clusterfuck of disorganization that many countries on the continent have suffered and which crushes hope of making a difference insidiously, beginning with early childhood, until the people become docile and incapable of getting angry in the face of injustice, chalking everything up to fate.

On va faire comment?

Agroforestry training with photos!

I recently helped organize a training in agroforestry techniques. Specifically, we learned about various types of plants that flower for 10 months out of the year (good for beekeeping!) and also feritilize the earth, how to make germoires, how to increase tenfold the production of banana and plantain trees over traditional methods, and how to obtain carbon copies of existing fruit trees. I decided to put a selection of photos from this project on my blog with explanations. I hope you find the following interesting and enjoy it!

BEFORE:

This is Magloire and Dang Assebe, a member of CAPJ, helping build the hangar where the training took place.

The completed hangar. It just needed to be covered with palm leaves. Notice the huge sacks of sawdust and the wood planks – both materials readily available in Ngambe Tikar for free because of the sawmill. Also some of the main materials that are needed to build the nurseries and employ many of the techniques we learned.

DURING:

Training begun, Blaise Komkom Magloire, the trainer, laying some groundwork, explaining what exactly agroforestry is and why people should practice it.

Here, we are building the “chassis géant” or Giant Chassis. Please forgive my translations. Since I’m not an agroforestry volunteer and the average French-english dictionary doesn’t have translations for random French agro vocabulary, I’ve done the best I could. The first step was to build the groundwork and lay it in place. We then had to assure that the ground was well-leveled before pouring insecticide on the ground.

Next, we needed to construct the framework which would support the clear plastic tarpaulin that would cover the chassis.

Here, it’s clear that the framework is almost complete. The only thing left is to do is saw off the excess length of the wood.

The clear tarp is already attached and we are filling the nursery bed with sawdust. Sawdust is used because it’s light and airy and doesn’t compact as much as soil, and thus provides a good environment for the banana and plantain rejets to sprout (again, rejet is the French word; I don’t even know how to explain it well without showing you a picture of how banana and plantain trees regenerate). Before placing the banana and plantain rejets into the sawdust, we sifted the sawdust and ensured there were no big clumps.

We had bought 200 rejets of banana and plantain trees and there was a huge pile of them (bottom left). Blaise showed us how to clean these rejets so they’d be ready to plant in the nursery. Here, the women (and men) are cleaning the rejets to prepare them for the nursery.

Cleaned and prepared rejets, pre-planting.

Another photo of the prepared rejets. Behind them, you can see how the pile of rejets has been reduced to nothing but scraps.

Blaise explaining how to kill the merystem of the banana rejet. The rejet is what’s used to propagate banana and plantain trees, rather than seeds. Banana and plantain trees naturally sprout 4-5 rejets, which will then become trees themselves when the mother tree dies. Killing the merystem of the rejet makes it impossible for the tree itself to grow. This is desired because then, instead of growing into a tree, the rejet will sprout 4-5 new rejets. When those rejets sprout, we will repeat the process – preparing these new rejets to be planted in the nursery and killing the merystem again so they can again sprout more banana or plantain rejets instead of growing into a fruit-producing tree. When the rejets sprout again from the second generation rejets, however, we will allow harvest the sprouts and let them grow into trees, ie not kill the merystem. Net gain: each rejet that we collected and prepared will eventually give up to 10 trees instead of only one, which is the standard practice.

Planting the prepared rejets into the sawdust nursery bed. After planting, we let them sit overnight so that they would dry out before watering them the next day. This was done to prevent rotting. The following day, we also covered the rejets with a light layer of sawdust.

The planted rejets. When we finished, the entire bed was full.

Building the framwork for the “chassis de reeducation.”

Filling the “chassis de reeducation” with sand.

The “chassis de reeducation,” now with the framework firmly attached and covered in clear tarp. The gap left was to build a door. Whereas the other nursery was not intended to be stepped on, this one is, and you enter the nursery/greenhouse-like space through the door.

Blaise explaining how to place a marcotte on an existing fruit tree. Marcotting is a technique that allows someone to clone an existing fruit tree. The advantages of marcotting over simply planting trees from seeds are: if you marcotte, you know if they tree will give good fruit, give fruit early, big fruits, juicy fruits, etc, because the resulting tree will have the exact same characteristics as the tree it came from. Another advantage is that the tree will begin producing more quickly than a tree grown from seed – in about 2 years, rather than 4 or 5. Finally, a marcotted tree will be of small stature, and won’t grow to huge sizes that take up space when land is limited.

A note about translation: marcotter translates to "layering." I don't love this translation, so I'll stick with the anglicization of the French.


Mama Veronique showing how to place the marcotte. Mama Veronique and her GIC were key hosts in inviting Blaise for his “prise de contacte” or first visit last October. At that time, Blaise showed those present how to place marcottes, so Mama Veronique had already seen the technique and Blaise wanted her to explain it to the others.

Mah Antoine finishing the marcotte that Veronique started, filling the marcotte sachet with sawdust. You can see how sawdust is needed for a lot of this work! Fortunately, Ngambé Tikar has a sawmill, and thus, an almost unending supply of free sawdust.

The first marcotte harvested in Ngambé Tikar, it came from a marcotte we placed last October, shortly before the dry season began. Marcotting can be used on almost any kind of fruit tree, including but not limited to: guava, avocado, all citrus (mandarin oranges, oranges, grapefruits, lemons, limes), corossol (a fruit native to tropical zones), mango, and prune (again, a different kind of prune than we know in the US - this prune is small and cylindrical, about fist-sized, with a purple/blue exterior and a bright green interior and a large pit).

Albert preparing the marcotte, now with roots, in a sachet so the branch becomes a tree.

After harvesting the marcottes we had placed last October, we planted them in sachets and placed them in our “chassis de reeducation,” as shown here. In the chassis, the controlled environment will allow the branch to "re-learn" how to be a tree, instead of just a branch - and voila! Once it begins to sprout buds, it is officially a carbon copy of the tree you started with.

Blaise brought a small quantity of calliandra seeds with him, which are good for fertilizing that earth and are in bloom 10 months out of the year. Here, we’ve built a germoire or germinating nursery and are preparing to plant the calliandra seeds.

Everyone pitched in to help plants the seeds. In the foreground of the germoire (or germinator), you can see we’ve planted avocado pits. When the pits begin to grow into trees, they will be used as “porte-greffes” or graft carriers. The next technique that Blaise will teach us will be grafting. In preparation for this next training, he has asked everyone to grow as many port-greffes as possible during the next five months.

Family photo on the last day. Some people were missing from this photo – we had 27 people come to at least one day of the three-day training and 21 people participate in most or all of the training.

AFTER

I took these photos of “La Station,” as we’ve named the training site on April 19, about 2 weeks post-training. In the foreground are germoires for the calliandra and for the porte-greffes. The two closest germoires were created after the training to sprout more porte-greffes.

The calliandra has sprouted and is growing fast!

Isn’t it beautiful?

I was pleased to find that the banana and plantain rejets are already sprouting after only two weeks! In the foreground, the blurry white blob is a sprout, as is the green and pink thing jutting out of the sawdust. Another blurry white blob set against the sawdust in the background is yet another sprout.