The swimming pool at our hostel!

Our team successfully arrived in Douala, Cameroon! As soon as we arrived, we easily passed through the airport and met with Stephen (the Peace Corps Volunteer who works with Better Family Foundation). We waited near the baggage claim, sweating and a bit tired, slowly collecting our bags as they came out. Unfortunately, while we all arrived without a problem, Luke’s bag was not as lucky – it was actually still at JFK airport in New York! We therefore began our journey by maneuvering the different airline counters, trying to get his bag back. Eventually, we got it all worked out (all in all taking probably around two hours), and it was time to leave again! Stephen had arranged for a taxi man to come and get us, so we walked down and squeezed all of our stuff in to the trunk and clambered into the car.

Here, we got our first taste of Cameroonian driving: without a blink or any hesitation, the taxi man told all four of us to get into the back of his very small car. Stephen told us that this is how driving is done in Cameroon, and we were more than happy to embrace this tradition! Until, that is, we were speeding along towards the Baptist hostel where we would be staying and we got pulled over by the police. They told us that we were overloaded and at first demanded to see our passports. Stephen and the taxi driver talked with them, and they no longer needed our passports: they asked for a small bribe and we were on our way! Getting pulled over was a bit of a shock for all of us, as were the large automatic guns that all of the policemen carried. But everything went well, and we got to the hostel a few minutes later. It was absolutely wonderful! The hostel was a compound with several different buildings and several families staying there. Our building was a little 2-story, cabin-like building with beds on top and a bathroom on bottom. Stephen had already prepared a delicious meal (pizza, pasta, bruschetta, bread, and fruit!), and we were all happy to sit down and eat: while not bad, it’s sure that having home-cooked food was well received after so many meals that were wrapped in plastic. That evening we talked and got to know Stephen a bit better (he is very nice and funny!), hung out around the pool, and finally went to bed, tired after our day of travel but ready for the next adventure.

The next morning, we woke up at 5am in order to make breakfast, pack up, and take a taxi at 6:15 to go to a type of bus stop. We all stuffed ourselves into the car again and we were off on our way. This time, in the daylight, it was much easier to see the passing landscapes. It was also a bit scarier because we were able to clearly see all of the traffic on the roads: something we’ve noticed about driving here is that there is sort of an unofficial fifth lane that cars moving in either direction can move. In addition, cars drive a lot closer to people and to motorcycles. However, once you got used to it, it was actually pretty efficient!

We arrived at the bus station. We were going to take a VIP 30-person bus from Douala to Bemenda, a 6-hour drive. We got there early and so we waited around the bus station for a while. Everyone was so friendly, and vendors were selling clothes and food. Chickens were squawking around and people were greeting and conversing with each other. There were a lot of people there, so we were able to fill the bus on time and we left around 8:40. The bus was different than any I had seen. All of the luggage was loaded on top and then covered with a tarp and tied down. There were two aisles, one with two seats and one with one seat. Then, there was an additional fold-down chair that made it so that there were four people in a row and no aisle. Everyone was so friendly and helpful. They began playing music (it was wonderful! We’re trying to get ahold of some of the songs – we’ll post them when we find out which they are, because you definitely want to listen to them), and as we slowly rolled out of town, we began to see the country side. Cameroon is absolutely stunning. If you ever get the chance to come to this beautiful country, you should definitely take advantage of it. It is not at all what most of us think of when we here “Africa” – it is definitely not a dry Sahara. Instead, everything is a bright green. There are banana trees, fields of corn, looming trees, rolling (and sudden) mountains, gorgeous rivers (at one point, it was so warm outside that I could see water evaporating from the river!)… I don’t think that any of us could truly describe what it looks like. While I originally intended to do some work and reading on the bus, I ended up being enamored and entranced by the passing scenery. We stopped once to stretch our legs for a bit. Often, when we would pass through a town, merchants would come up to the window and try to sell things – fruits, vegetables, nuts, etc. People would complete the transaction through their window and off we were on our way! Six hours later, after crossing some mountains, we reached Bamenda.

Bamenda is the capital of the area and a relatively large town. From the bus station, we went to get a taxi. If we thought we were introduced to Cameroonian driving before, we were in for a new treat. In this new taxi, we weren’t the only patrons: in addition to Stephen, the driver, and the four of us there was another woman driving to Fundong. Therefore, we had two people in the front seat and four people in back. I was squished in front between the taxi driver and Atika in the front seat (poor Atika gets car sick, and we were winding our way up some narrow mountain roads at a fast pace!). Unfortunately, because of a few complications and some fears about taxes, half of us had to switch out of our car after a few minutes into another taxi, before eventually switching back to our first one. Finally, we were winding up the mountain roads. It took us about 2 hours to reach a place near Fundong. When we got out, Atika and I literally could not walk because our legs had fallen asleep, but we wobbled for a minute and were quickly back to normal. We finally got into one last taxi that took us all the way to Fundong where we met Simon, who is head of the Better Family Foundation. We had our first taste of Cameroonian food (beans and puff-puff (which is basically a fried piece of dough, like a beignet) – it was delicious! It’s currently around 4:00pm here, and I’m already looking forward to walking over and getting some more today!

Fundong!

Finally, we took the car to Simon’s house in Ngainkuma, where we are staying. This post is getting to be quite long and we haven’t even started talking about our project yet, so I’ll leave a detailed description of the house for later on. Suffice it to say that our house is amazing – so much more than any of us were expecting! We have delicious running water fr

Candle light dinner!

om our faucet, two bedrooms with large beds, a comfortable living room, a dining room, kitchen, two bathrooms, and a shower. We don’t have warm water, but I think we’re all getting used to those adventures. We’re also slowly getting used to the spiders and dead bugs that we find pretty often, but they’re quickly becoming our friends and the basis of a lot of jokes, so no complaints there.

Overall, I am so excited and happy to be here. Cameroon is so beautiful and everyone is so kind. There are a lot of things that are different culturally, but I haven’t been experiencing much culture shock. But we’ll talk more about that later. I apologize that this post was just a blow-by-blow of everything that is going on – there’s just a lot of stuff to get caught up on!

Some fun words/expressions we have learned so far (phonetically spelled)!

Kom

Toe-lie-mah – Good morning

Wah-ee-see-ma – Good afternoon

Too-jeem-ma – Good evening

See-je-ah – This one is harder to translate in English, but it means something along the lines of courage, good luck, stay strong, etc. It has a lot of different meanings!

I-ong – Thank you

(Ah-she-ah – This is similar to See-je-ah, but it is in Pidgin English.)

Talk to you all soon!

Nathalie

This is what we see each morning when we walk out the door. Amazing.

This is a picture of our house in Cameroon! It’s huge! We don’t use all of it, just from the steps and to the left, but it is wonderful!

It feels so nice to actually be on our way together—in a different country. All our hard work is really paying off.  Now all we have to do is make our flight to Douala on time and find Stephen—and our bags—at the airport once we arrive.  Then, we’re off to stay in a Baptist guesthouse for a night with Stephen (whatever that is…all we know is it has a pool, so it has to be pretty cool).  Tomorrow, we will travel within Cameroon via taxi, bus, and motorcycle taxi (!!!) until we finally get to Fundong and our house.

So I figure you all wanna know how our team is doing mentally and physically; Morgan and I slept like babies on the flight (thanks to some Advil PM and some awesome Belgian flight attendants), and Atika and Nathalie did not sleep at all.  We are all pretty quiet at the moment, but—just for you—I’ll break the silence so you can hear how everyone’s doing from the mouths of the babes themselves:

Me: How are you feeling RIGHT NOW!?

Me (In my head): “I’m feeling great! Kinda want to stop traveling and be in Cameroon so we can meet Stephen and start to get comfortable, but the airport in Brussels is pretty sick, and THEY’RE SPEAKING FRENCH OVER THE LOUDSPEAKERS! ~~Chouetttttttteeeeee~~!”

Nathalie: “Oh no are you taking quotes?! Don’t start with me; start with Morgan…NOOOOO!!!! You’re joking!!!”

Morgan: “I am excited to arrive!”

Atika: “Really tired.”

Nathalie (given a chance to redeem herself and make a real comment): “I’ll think about it.”

So there you have it, folks! Doing well in the Brussels airport (and a little confused on the part of Nathalie…).

Until next time,

The Klaremont Krew

(Luke)

Us just casually chillin’ in Brussels. We’re not tired! WE’RE NOT TIRED!!! WE WANTED TO TAKE THIS PICTURE! ALL OF US! (especially Morgan)

We are a week away from departure and are super excited to head out to Fundong, Cameroon.

To bring you all up to date with what our team has been up to, I’ll give you a brief overview of our preparation and training methods.

1. Team Meetings

We had six training meetings when we were back at school to get acquainted with Cameroon and figure out logistical questions as a group.  Each team member presented on a different aspect of life in Cameroon—history, geography, politics, water, culture, customs, etc.—in order for us to learn as much as possible about our surroundings before we arrived. We also worked on documents together, such as the Theory of Change, the Memorandum of Agreement, the Communications Plan, the Parent Packet, and others in order to finalize plans with the Better Family Foundation, the Nourish National Office, our government, and our families. These meetings were also a great time for us to get to know each other and socialize before we spend six weeks living together!

2. Nourish Phone Calls

Our International Projects Director—Jacob Fiksel—and me, the Team Leader—Luke Miller—held conference calls with Sarah Miller in the National Office every other week to go over planning and preparation for the project. These were a great way to get an outside, professional perspective on our actions and get as prepared as possible.

3. Immunizations

All of us on the team had to get some shots and take some pills while back in Claremont. The most important one—the Yellow Fever Vaccination—even came with a cool—yet strangely informal-looking—yellow card (pictured below) that is necessary to enter the country! We also took some typhoid pills, went to a strange travel clinic, and had meetings with the Student Health Services on campus. However, there are STILL more travel meds to take! We will all be taking anti-malarial pills (pictured below) throughout the duration of our stay and for a few weeks after we get back! (We also got some traveler’s diarrhea medications, but sshhhhh! That’s embarrassing to talk about!)

4. Visas (A.K.A. Stress Stamps)

We needed visas in order to travel to Cameroon, and this process was probably the most stressful part of preparation. We all had to have valid passports (pictured below), two completed applications (filled out in all caps—a problem for some of our team…*cough* Morgan *cough*), money orders (yeah…apparently those are a thing), and all sorts of other weird documents from BFF. To make this even MORE stressful, we had to mail them into the Cameroonian Embassy in Washington, D.C.—passports and all! We FINALLY got them back a few weeks before school got out, however, which made us all a little more relieved. The visa is this cool little stamped form on a passport page that has curvy writing and other little stamps on it…well worth the stress, I’d say…

5. E-mails and e-mails and e-mails, oh my!

In addition to all the aforementioned preparation goodness, there was a TON of e-mailing to do.  I had to constantly send documents back and forth to Stephen—our peace corps volunteer contact with BFF—, get logistics planned with him (housing, packing, schedules, etc.), and relay all the information back to the team. However, the e-mails paid off, and we feel much more confident and connected as a group as a result of all the communication.

~PRESENT DAY~

So now, we’re pretty much ready to go! Only some last-mintue things remain. First, we are all looking over the course materials for the safe-sex/HIV education camp we will be teaching; Simon and Stephen did a great job on creating all this stuff, and we want to be able to contribute our knowledge to the process as well. We are cross-referencing their materials with some other safe-sex/HIV documents and will be sending our revisions to BFF within the week. Second, we are working on packing and buying some final supplies! We are finishing up our packing lists and are planning out room in our bags for the long trip! Finally, we are continuing our long-standing tradition of e-mailing and forwarding e-mails to each other to get on the same page at every level before we all meet up in New York next Wednesday! We are all super excited for this experience, and we can’t wait to get over there. With all this preparation, it will be very rewarding and fun to see it pay off in a well-executed and carefully planned project. This will surely be a learning experience for all of us, and we will be sure to keep you all—our beloved and faithful supporters—in the loop about future events! Stay in touch: This is gonna get cool.

–Luke

**Picture: Our very beloved supplies, the physical fruits of our pre-departure labor: incredibly valid passport with spiffy visa, Yellow Fever Card from strange travel clinic that looks surprisingly un-legit for how important it is, and 60 days’ worth of Doxycycline—just say “NO!” to malaria!

It’s been a long journey, but the project teams have arrived and are finally getting comfortable. We landed in Douala, a major port city on the west coast of Africa, on the evening of May 16 (last Thursday)… and from that moment on, it has been an adventure. We were unfortunately delayed in our departure from Douala, due to Swissport employees going on strike… our baggage and the donations did not arrive with us.

Although we were quite uncomfortable, stuck with the same clothes for… well, a week… we learned some valuable lessons about packing essentials on your carry on as opposed to hoards of American candy and junk food :] Luckily, the team persevered and gained a great bond from the communal atmosphere. “Be real about your needs.” From hand sanitizer to malaria pills.

The trip to our project site, the subdivision Oku, took at least a day’s journey. The crowded car-bus ride gave a good perspective on how difficult it can be to get around in Cameroon due to poor road conditions. It took us about 6-8 hours to get to Bamenda, the big city of the Northwest province + headquarters to our partner CamAAY, and then about 3-5 to get to Elak-Oku, the main village of the subdivision we are staying in.

Douala had us sweating in our sheets, but Elak-Oku is much higher elevation, located in the mountains around Mt. Oku (a “touristic” volcano), so the weather here is cooler. In the afternoons and evenings, it pours rain, and at night, when there aren’t any clouds, the stars could take your breath away. The intense green with the snaking brown roads draped with clouds gives the distinct feeling of being in the middle of paradise.

The flip side is the sheer remoteness and underdeveloped infrastructure of the area, but the hotel-esque flat we’re staying in fits most of our needs. Running water and electricity are patchy, but we do have toilets. Toilets are definitely a luxury here, so we’re grateful. When the water is on, the tap is fairly clear, and probably potable, but most of us still stick to the bottled water, iodine tablets, or filtration + purification systems. Electricity and working lights have been available about ¾ of the time, and the two cell phone network providers here in Cameroon usually work. It’s due to an “internet stick” that I am able to update this remotely.

Based on our experience and several interviews and meetings with community groups and schools around Oku, we’ve been doing needs assessments. With the information we’ve collected, our plan is to digitize the reports, summarize, organize and eventually make the immediate needs public. We hope that this will help other Nourish chapters and interested parties to come up with project ideas and connect resources with the appropriate people. It has been great meeting all of the community members. Oku has been very welcoming.

From day one, we began an educational campaign about menstruation, pre-marital sex and pregnancy. The Ohio State Nourish chapter partnered with Days for Girls to bring hundreds of reusable (washable) sanitary napkins to women groups here. Traditionally, these topics are taboo, but we have been able to bridge the topic and answer a lot of questions and misconceptions related to these topics. One of CamAAY’s goals is to set up regularly meeting Girls Corners to talk about these subjects and other hardships that women in particular face, along with providing a means for continuing this educational campaign when we’re gone. These groups will be in charge of distributing the sanitary napkins and, hopefully, working towards making their own here in Cameroon.

So, most of this first week was dedicated to getting to know the community, greeting officials, visiting schools and community groups for needs assessments and giving presentations on both women’s health and school partnerships. May 20 was also Cameroon’s National Day – celebrating the unification of the former British Cameroons and French region of Cameroon as the (United) Republic of Cameroon in 1972. We marched in the parade as CamAAY, promoting our educational campaign.

Finally, yesterday marked the beginning of the community empowerment center construction. It was great to see so many people come out to greet us and work on the center. We purchased materials and helped to deliver stones and sand in the heat, but the center belongs to the people of Mbam-Oku. Their dedication was impressive. Plus they plaster so much better than we do! Thank goodness no one left the construction and piping to us!

Hopefully by the end of this month, significant progress will have been made, and the center we’re helping with will be fully operational. It already serves as a temporary school and gathering area, so with toilets, and completed side rooms, it can gain significant capacity to hold other resources like books and computers.

We also visited another school to distribute the first of our pen-pal letters to begin the connection between a New Mexico elementary school, and a primary school in Mbam-Oku. We listened to the kids read their penpal’s letters and their responses.

I am very excited to work some more on the center tomorrow and begin the next portion of our project – seed demonstration gardens. We’ve packed 15 different varieties of seeds from Seed Programs International to test in small quantities in at least four different community gardens. The goal is that with this and our presentations, the various groups can increase their crop diversity and seed security by learning to tend to the soil needs and save the seeds. Our organic famer is super excited to start, and I am looking forward to getting in the dirt.

We also visited the tree nursery to talk with the community members setting up the different varieties (pre-germination and planning) for a water catchment project. With educational campaigns and renewal of the trees in the naturally forested areas here in the mountain, the communities will regain an important area for water catchment.

So, that’s the plan for this week. Next week or so, we should begin working on training “sports animators” for the women groups and preparing for the International Youth Camp.

Until then, feel free to leave us a message. Once we’re back in the US, we will add photos.

We have a little less than 3 weeks before we all are off to Cameroon. May 15! UNM will be working with 5 students from Ohio State University, an organic farmer, the Cameroon Association of Active Youths (CamAAY) and the surrounding communities this summer.
We’ll head to Douala first and then the Northwest region, around OKU and BATIBO.

We’re still working on our visas and finalizing the details of the projects coinciding with our stay, but it looks like we’ll be involved in various things in some capacity or another alongside CamAAY:

- Women’s health campaigns promoting awareness about menstruation and safe sex
- International Youth Leadership Camp
- Sports Tournament
- Women’s seed collective groups (agricultural techniques and seed sharing)
- Construction of the community center in OKU:

If you have any resources you’d like to share about preventing substance abuse in youth, women’s health education and youth leadership, comment below! We’ll be involved in workshops and awareness campaigns related to this.
Thanks!

Last Day at the Farm

Hello there again!

Wow, it feels strange to be blogging away from Cameroon. Already three weeks have past since I’ve returned, and I’m still making small day-to-day adjustments. I think I can speak for the other volunteers when I say that there is definitely some counter-culture shock going on. It’s not so abrupt and huge as the term may suggest, but there is definitely some realizations you make once you return and are able to distance yourself from that foreign place in which you spent half of your summer. One of the most obvious outcomes is becoming more appreciative for every little thing we may take for granted sometimes when living in a place like the US. Everyday life in Cameroon was at or below the poverty level, but the people there were nonetheless happy to have what little they owned. Families were just grateful if they could bring food to the table, and sending children to school was sometimes nothing but a dream.

I learned from the community much more than I can put to words. They were a friendly group of people who more than welcomed us into their country, but also greeted us, invited us to their homes and churches, fed us, gave us gifts, and never failed to kindly say ‘hello’ and wave at us. Yes, we didn’t exactly blend into their society, but I had never felt so welcomed as I did in Cameroon. Perhaps sometimes people were a little too welcoming, if you know what I mean, but I never felt completely offended or uncomfortable. That’s just how their culture is.

Before I go on about my last thoughts on cultural differences, I would like to talk about the project. The last two weeks of the project found the other volunteers and me working on the Njinikom farm, which was, to and from, an hour and a half long hike each day. It was quite the challenge trekking up those steep, rocky mud roads each day but I always felt really accomplished at the end of a day’s work. There are about ten different groups of widows that will be benefiting from the money we brought for each of their plots of land, but we only worked alongside one group. This group was the arts and crafts group of Njinikom. Like all of the widows we have met across different groups, these women were really kind and giving. Throughout the last two weeks, our main focus was preparing the land for cultivation. Our main work consisted of clearing and hoeing the land, as well as building a propagator.

Along with the hard labor, the other volunteers and I interviewed key community members, like the president of the Njinikom arts and crafts widow group, in addition to the coordinator of the widows groups. This documentation and video recording will prove very useful and will be added to the wide variety of photos we have taken for the purpose of this project. We hope that these records will contribute to a successful project report and follow-up during the course of the months and even years to come.

The post-project part is in some ways just as or even more important than the project itself. Every volunteer doesn’t expect any sort of project completion during their stay, just project progress. Something as complex as a sustainable development project implies difficulty and lots of dedication. Sometimes that’s not enough because other factors play in, and as the other volunteers and I learned, culture is a BIG one. There’s not much you can do to influence change easily in a system that works differently from yours. It’s hard work and nothing seems to happen as planned. It’s not easy to get the results you want in the time frame you want them, but as a volunteer working for a good cause I was never expecting it to run smoothly. I was just happy to learn from my mistakes, learn from the community, and use those to help me move on and progress for the sake of the project. It took a lot of late night conversations and additional meetings to finalize some project details, and by the time we were leaving the other volunteers and I wished we could have completed more tangible work.

In the end, despite all the twists and turns, we were very content in our choice to come to Cameroon. We understood that although we didn’t accomplish much tangible work on the fields, we made a pretty good intangible impact on the people we worked closely with. I know that many of them could tell how much we cared to sort the issues out so that we can help them as much as we can. We were able to sit with Anna, the coordinator of the widows groups, and the project financial advisor, on two separate occasions before we left Cameroon to conclude the direction of the project once we were out of the picture. We feel much more secure now that we are close to establishing business workshops to be held for the leaders of widows groups. After all, teaching them a method of sustainable development is what Nourish International is all about. We hope that they will use those business skills to not only run their fruit and vegetation businesses, but to also grow and flourish these businesses. I would love to return back 20 years from now to see a Cameroon that is no longer suffering and limited as it is now.

There are few things I know I will not miss about Cameroon. Cold showers everyday, for one. Going many nights and even days at a time without electricity was sometimes unbearable, but the other volunteers and I found fun ways to occupy ourselves. The electricity was out most of the times because it rained literally everyday there, and although I do miss it sometimes especially since Texas hasn’t seen any rain since I’ve arrived, the rain made the mud roads the worst to trudge through. There is no possible way to walk through that untouched by blotches and squirts of red, thick mud over your shoes and pant legs. And it also made slipping on your bottom very likely! Add that to steep roads and long hikes, you got one big workout! Although they were good workouts, I will never grow accustomed to steep anything! I don’t mind the walking so much, but steep hills will never be my friend. It also would’ve been nice to have more connection to the world. The internet connection was extremely slow and we only averaged once a week at the lab. It was quite difficult to handle at first, but in the end, it was a challenge I’m glad I endured. It’s good to distance yourself from a little technology sometimes. Making sure to bleach or use a UV light to clean your water isn’t exactly something I’ll miss doing either. Oh, the stomachaches! I will never miss those.

But enough of the negative, there was way more positive! They are much more general but also much more meaningful. I will miss most of all the friends I made there. This includes the women we worked with, the kids I met on the street, our lovely cook, and so many, many more! They made our stay worthwhile and I thank them for welcoming us with such open arms. Trying new food was fantastic, and no matter what it looked like or what the content, I always jumped eagerly into the dishes. I loved trying the exotic food and all of it was delicious. Thanks to our cook, Zita, Emily and I have some of her homemade recipes that we can cook on our own. We want to cook our favorite dish puff puffs first! I’ll dearly miss the beautiful landscape of Cameroon. From the beaches in the South, to the bustling cities in the center, and to the mountains in the Northwest region where we stayed, every view was beautiful. And I felt like I could see almost every star at night – it was breathtaking. I’ll also miss the excitement around soccer matches there. I felt privileged to be a part of something that was so special to the people of Cameroon. That was one thing that brought all of them together, and it was a sight to see. And although French was not so prevalent in my village as it was in other parts of Cameroon, I will miss the presence of French the times I was able to practice it in the southern cities and in Limbe in our final days.

I would definitely say that Cameroon was an amazing experience. An unforgettable one that I will only grow to appreciate more in the year to come. I know that our work there and after the project will make an impact in some way for the lives of those good women. So many people we met there hope we return soon, but all I could tell them was that hopefully one day I would. I really hope to visit them again but for now I must settle for emails and occasional phone calls and care packages as our only ways to stay in touch. And finally, I want to thank all of you who stuck by me on my journey and followed my blogs. I really appreciated the support away from home. And of course, thanks for supporting a cause that’s extremely important to me.