Thursday Lizard Blogging

Gotta run and catch the train back to post. Since Internet has been down in my town I don't know when I will get online again, so for the interim, here are some pictures of lizards. No special reason. It's just been too long.

Disorder in the House

Not long ago I wrote about the post-election violence in Kenya, arguing that what the outside world often perceives as "stability" in Africa (the absence of immediate, ongoing violence basically) automatically means that the society is basically healthy and calm and people get along. Everyone was so shocked at the violence because everyone "knew" Kenya was "stable."

I went on to say that many of the same frustrations driving the violence in Kenya were simmering away here in Cameroon, and that at some point it wouldn't surprise me if Cameroon experienced a similar meltdown.

Well, as if on cue, Cameroon just had an ugly round of civil disorder some of you may have heard about. While it was not a prominent story in the US, I heard from people back home that it did make a few papers and websites.

The trouble started around the 23rd or 24th of February. Over that weekend taxi drivers in Douala, Cameroon's largest city and economic capital, went on strike to protest gas price increases. As oil and other commodity prices rise Cameroon is getting hit with the same inflation that seems to be affecting the rest of the world now to varying degrees. And of course, new jobs are not appearing and salaries are stagnant, so people here are suffering.

Aside from economic anxiety, people are becoming increasingly frustrated with a government that does not appear to do much about any of these problems, other than steal everything that isn't nailed down. I mean, you should at least be able to get a job or some cheap gas for your bribes right?

This frustration has grown in recent months after President Biya announced that Cameroon needed to amend the constitution so he could run for another term as President. Under the current rules his presidency will end in 2011. Now it appears he's going to lift the limit (which he can easily do since the national assembly more or less does his bidding) so he can stay in power til he dies. Common pattern in Africa unfortunately. I guess the 25 years he's already been President weren't enough.

So, what started as a strike quickly merged with political frustration and turned on the regime. The strikes spread rapidly from Douala to other towns and cities and almost immediately turned violent. In Yaoundé and Douala and other areas people were burning cars, looting, breaking windows, and torching government buildings. Most of the violence appeared to be committed by unemployed young men. The government responded with a heavy hand, flooding affected areas with police and soldiers to reimpose order. I'm told that the army adopted a shoot on sight policy for rioters: no arrest, just a bullet. An unknown number of people were shot in the bigger towns.

Fortunately, it doesn't sound like the violence was ethnically motivated. Nor was it organized - just mob mentality taking over and angry people going nuts in the streets.

This continued for several days with the worst of the violence occurring on Wednesday the 26th and Thursday the 27th. Things began calming down on Friday, the 29th. The weekend was quiet, but tense, with rumors the strikes would resume the following Monday.

My village remained quiet, but some volunteers had the bad luck to be in areas that saw a good deal of rioting. Volunteer Bill has written a bit about what he saw in Buea during the riots on his blog, here, here, and here.

Naturally, Peace Corps became very concerned about this and almost immediately put us on alert. As the violence escalated, we were put on what they call "Standfast", which means pack a bag and be ready to evacuate if the situation deteriorates further. Volunteers in the Northwest province (where some of the worst violence took place) and several other areas were brought to Yaoundé to stay at the Peace Corps compound as a precaution. So, with all of us a bit nervous, we waited out a long, tense weekend. My Cameroonian friends all assured me that the violence would not resume because "Cameroonians are peaceful." As they promised though, Monday came and nothing happened.

Since then things have been pretty quiet. The soldiers have returned to their barracks and life looks pretty much like it did before the riots. Of course, the riots didn't really change anything, so who knows how "stable" this situation is.

For the moment we appear to have dodged a bullet. Let's hope we don't have to duck again.

Jungle Life

Jungle life
You're far away from nothing
It's all right
You won't miss home
Take a chance
Leave everything behind you
Come and join me
Won't be sorry
It's easy to survive

- Baltimora, "Tarzan Boy"

Sorry I've been out of teach for a while dear readers, but Internet has been effectively out of commission at post for the last few weeks. Oh, and the power has been out most of the time. Usual dry season power cuts and all. Fortunately the dry season is coming to a close -we've already had a couple of rains- so in a few weeks it should get a bit more stable.

So, for the last few weeks I've been cut off from most contact with the outside world, teaching classes at my little university in the beach, navigating by lamplight at night, drinking warm beer on weekends, and not bathing much (since water goes out when the power is out). Ah, jungle life...

Right now I'm back in Yaoundé on business so I will try to post a few updates before I go back to post tomorrow night. As some of you may have heard, we had a bit of a crisis here in Cameroon in recent weeks, so later on I'll write about what's been going on.

Peace Corps Partnership for Nanga-Eboko

In a previous post about Kenya, I wrote that I've seen enough here to worry about Cameroon one day experiencing the same kind of violence. As it happens, I have a good friend here named Jerome who often worries about the same thing. Jerome has started his own NGO (which he calls the Brotherhood Coast) which tries to use a variety of community and development projects to unite Cameroonians around common problems they all face.

Jerome is in the process of putting together a public health campaign in my village of Nanga-Eboko. Nanga is a poor village with big health problems: a high HIV infection rate; lack of access to clean water and, as a result, lots of waterborne disease; and lots of problems with malaria due to its location in mosquito central.

Jerome's plan is to conduct a series of events in the town's high schools, hospital, and prison that will try to teach students, patients, and prisoners how to protect themselves from these diseases.

In addition, the town has a recent history of ethnic conflict. In the mid-90s there was a lot of violence against Bamileké (one of the many ethnic groups in Cameroon) who had migrated to the town from the west province. In order to try to avoid a repeat, the training Jerome will be giving will also include conflict resolution and prevention strategies in the hopes that young people will be able to avoid violence in the future.

At the end of a week of these activities, a group of popular Cameroonian musicians that Jerome has worked with in the past will come to the town and hold a concert. They are the "hook" to get young people interested.

The point of all these activities is to try to show Cameroonian youth that despite their tribal differences, they share the same problems of health and poverty, and that they have a shared culture embodied in the music they will hear at the concert.

When he started planning all of this, Jerome asked if I or the Peace Corps could do anything to help. It's often hard to find people in Cameroon who are civic-minded and energetic enough to try something like this, so I felt I had to do something to help. If there was anything I could do to try to keep Cameroon OUT of the news I wanted to try to make a contribution.

Peace Corps has a program called Peace Corps Partnership, where volunteers in the field can post projects on Peace Corps' website. Interested donors can donate money to these projects online. When the funding goal for the project is reached, the money is sent to the volunteer for use on the project. For my project, I'm requesting $2,720 USD to help pay for the costs of this health and conflict resolution campaign. The money will go to pay for water filters and first aid kits in the high schools, mosquito nets for the hospital, various other supplies, and transportation. I will be working directly with Jerome on purchasing these materials, so I will be supervising the money and making sure it all goes where it needs to.

If any one reading this would like to help us out, you can find a short description of the project and make a donation here. I hope some of you will be able to help us. Thank you!

PS: We hope to pull this off in late March if possible, so if anyone plans to donate, sooner is better than later - ideally in the next two or three weeks. Merci Beaucoup!

Quick Hits

A few quick updates:

• Last night Cameroon defeated Ghana 1-0 in the Africa Cup of Nations. I and a few other volunteers watched it in a bar in Yaoundé. The post-victory celebrations were a sight to see. Men ran around tearing off the shirts, people waving Cameroonian flags, drinking and dancing, etc. Good times. They beat Cameroon in their first game, so I'm not sure if that hurts the Lions (intimidation factor) or helps them (desire for revenge). We'll see. Allez Les Lions!
• Last weekend Cameroon's neighbor, Chad, blew up. Thousands of rebels advanced on the capital city of N'djamena in a bid to overthrow the President, Idriss Deby. The capital has been torn apart in heavy fighting. The US embassy was closed down and all personnel evacuated since it was inconveniently located between the Presidential palace and rebel positions. At last report the government had fought off the rebels and was trying to impose a nationwide curfew. Good luck enforcing that one guys. All in all, an ugly situation, with oil and Sudan in the mix of instability.
• N'djamena is just across the border from the extreme north of Cameroon. The border is a river between N'djamena and the northern Cameroonian town of Kousseri. Kousseri is now flooded with refugees fleeing the fighting. I had an email yesterday asking if I was Ok - yes folks, I'm fine. The fighting is hundreds of miles away and has not spilled over into Cameroon. While there are some volunteers near the border with Chad, none are near N'djamena and no others have reported any problems, thankfully.
• The Kenyans are talking again. Let's hope they manage to calm things down.

Cosendai Adventist University

I've been meaning to do a post about the University where I teach for a while. If y'all ain't the readin' kind, y'all can just look at all the purdy pictures.

The Main Entrance

Cosendai Adventist University (Université Adventiste Cosendai in French) is a Seventh Day Adventist (link to wikipedia on 7th day adv) school. It started out as a seminary founded here in the 1920s. Many years later, a primary school was established here, then eventually a college (private high school) which shares the campus. Finally, they upgraded again and converted the seminary into a full-fledged University in 1996.

The University is one of only two private universities in Cameroon who's degrees are recognized by the government. (The other is Catholic university in Yaoundé.) Four majors are offered: Theology, Business and Computer Science (almost two separate programs with the same Dean), Education, and Nursing. Nursing degrees take two years to finish and the others take three.

Because the school is too small to support a large permanent faculty, the majority of courses are taught by visiting professors. Since they can usually only stay for a week or two at a time and since we have to take them when we can get them, the school schedule changes every week. On Fridays I find out what classes I'm teaching and when for the following week. Or maybe I find out I'm not teaching at all, which was a big problem last year. As you can imagine, this makes lesson planning and scheduling exams and homework a nightmare.

It also makes life hard on the students, since they frequently have to cram a 60 hour class into one or two weeks. Some weeks they have classes from 7 AM to 10 PM straight, every day, with only an hour break each for lunch and dinner. Giving homework is a problem both because they often have no time to do it with a course load like that and because the power is often out at night.

The school has about 370 students, mostly from Cameroon. The majority are from the country's two biggest cities, Yaoundé and Douala, but there are students from each of Cameroon's ten provinces. There is a large contingent of students from the Extreme North province, which is rare since that region of Cameroon is poorer than the south and tends to send fewer students to college. Most are here on church scholarships. Since it's hard to find pastors to serve in northern Cameroon, they finance the degrees of promising students who will later return north and serve the church there. As a result, after French and English the third most common language spoken on campus is Fulfuldé - the dominant language of the northern provinces.

The school also has an international contingent. We have students from all over west Africa. I have students from Chad, Gabon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, Burkina Faso (my Dean's native country), Togo, the Central African Republic, and Cape Verde. The Dean of our Theology department and his wife are from Kenya (although they've lived in the US for over a decade before coming here and have applied for US citizenship). Most of the faculty and staff have traveled or studied in other countries in the region. We also get a fair number of foreign visitors associated with the church (missionaries, church administration, and professors from UAC's sister universities in Ghana and Nigeria).

As a result of this international character I have been learning a lot about life in other parts of Africa. Most Americans tend to lump all of these nations together as "Africa" - one big undifferentiated mass of people. (Who are either starving or dying of Ebola or getting hacked to death with machetes.) While there are cultural characteristics that are common to these countries, lumping together Cameroon and say, Niger is like assuming that there is no difference between France and Germany because they are both European. So being posted here has been a good opportunity to learn more about the complexities of Africa.

The facilities here are not very good. There aren't enough classrooms and those we do have are run down and often crowded, as in most Cameroonian schools.

Power and water go out often. We have a generator that can power the campus during blackouts, but it broke down back in March and still hasn't been repaired, despite repeated efforts.

The library is small and many of the books are outdated American textbooks donated years ago. The Peace Corps volunteer I replaced did a lot of work in the library. Now there's some organization and he got them on the Dewey decimal system. Before books were just laying around in piles.

We have a lab with 18 computers. That's both for classes and for the extracurricular use of 370 students who are all itching to get in there to write papers and use the internet. Fortunately they are almost done building a second small lab, which will help considerably.

Since land lines are impractical, we have a satellite internet connection.

The University is a religious school, but it is open to students from other denominations. About half the student body are Adventists. The rest are a mix of Catholics and members of other protestant denominations, with a scattering of atheists and now and then a few Muslims as well. Students are not expected to become Adventists, but they do have to live by the rules of the church.

This means that all classes start with prayers and often singing, and that students are obliged to go to chapel twice a week and mass on Fridays and Saturdays. Too many absences can result in disciplinary action.

All students do manual labor on Thursday and Sunday mornings. They are organized into groups and spend two hours cleaning floors, cutting grass with machetes, picking up trash, digging ditches, whatever. Basically they're free labor for the school to use in maintaining the campus.

The school has strict moral codes. Drinking alcohol, smoking, or using drugs are grounds for dismissal, on or off campus. As a result of all these rules, there's not much night life around the campus aside from choir practice. Makes it easier to sleep I suppose. Fortunately I'm not bound by these rules. :)

Of course, lots of students drink and smoke, but they do it in town in the backs of bars or in their homes, hidden from the eyes of the administration. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to report them, but on the odd occasion when I go out for a beer and run into them, I don't say anything. Their lives are hard enough without me acting as the morals police. Besides, since I'm usually having a beer when I see them it's not like I can say "don't drink that" with a straight face.

The school also regularly hassles female students about dressing modestly so as to avoid tempting the men.

With a church that serves both the University and the local community, on campus baptisms, weddings and other events are a regular part of life here.

One nice thing about living here is the music. There are a number of choral groups on campus that regularly sing in church, have concerts, and rehearse in the evenings. I can often sit in my house and hear singing all over campus. Since these groups are all pretty good, it's nice.

Food options are, sadly, a bit limited. There is a cafeteria which make serviceable meals but gets a bit boring after a while since they rotate through a pretty small repertoire. It is however reasonably priced and conveniently located, even if lunch is never ready on time.

At the edge of campus is a long hut where a group of women (who I refer to as "the fish mommies") come to sell food to the students. My typical breakfast is a bean sandwich purchased from one of the ladies who works there. When I don't feel like cooking at night I can get beans and rice or grilled fish from them as well.

Students live both on campus and off campus. Some students live in small, two person "cells" that are scattered around campus. Tiny concrete huts divided into two rooms, each with just enough space for a bunk bed and a tiny desk and chair. Others live in larger dorms. From what some students have told me, it sounds like life in the larger dorms is close to prison life. They live four, five, or six to a room and have a strict curfew after which the doors are locked.

There are also a limited number of apartments and houses for students with families and for professors. Some of these are decent (depending on how big the family is) but there aren't enough to go around.

Because there is not enough housing on campus (and because they want some freedom) many students live off campus. There is a small quartier (neighborhood) that surrounds the campus. Some students are able to rent rooms there, which is at least convenient for classes.

The rest have to find housing wherever they can in town. Often this means being several kilometers from campus. So, either they have a long walk to school, or, they have to pay for a motorcycle taxi ride - which starts to bite given that most of the students aren't exactly rolling in cash.

In general I like most of my students and the rest of the faculty and staff and have made a lot of good friends here. In spite of the school's organizational headaches and the area's problems with power and water, this is a great assignment for a Peace Corps volunteer. I've had many frustrating moments here, but the longer I've been here the more I've come to appreciate all I've learned here.

Out of Africa

We just got word yesterday that Peace Corps is pulling out of Kenya. Some volunteers had already been sent home due to the ongoing violence, but now they're suspending the program entirely and are in the process of evacuating all the volunteers this week. Oy.

Over at Peace Corps Journals, I checked out some of the Kenya blogs and read some posts from volunteers. Here are some thoughts on coming home this way from Diana, Nicholas, and Rachel.

Victory!

So, Cameroon beat Sudan last week and last night went on to beat Tunisia 3-2 in overtime in the Africa Cup of Nations. Watched the game in a bar here in Yaoundé. It wan pendemonium after every goal. When Cameroon won at the end the locals all started shaking their beer bottles and spraying the ceiling, walls, and each other with beer. Wish I'd had a video camera. Truly a sight to behold. Then I fled before they started lighting things on fire.

Throughout the game there was one drunk patron who kept shouting that the Tunisians were terrorists. Apparently the Cameroon-Tunisia match was a major battle in the War on Terrorism® and he kept screaming things like "We must beat the terrorists!" and "Terrorism must be punished!"

The Lions are playing Ghana on Thursday. Woot woot woot!

The Road to Hell is Unpaved

Another volunteer pointed me to this article from the Economist about the hellish state of Cameroonian roads and their impact on the country's economy. One of the roads he writes about happens to be the road to my village, and I can personally vouch for everything he writes: the mud, the rain barriers, the gendarmes, etc.

An excerpt:

The plan was to carry 1,600 crates of Guinness and other drinks from the factory in Douala where they were brewed to Bertoua, a small town in Cameroon's south-eastern rainforest. As the crow flies, this is less than 500km (313 miles)—about as far as from New York to Pittsburgh, or London to Edinburgh. According to a rather optimistic schedule, it should have taken 20 hours, including an overnight rest. It took four days. When the truck arrived, it was carrying only two-thirds of its original load.

The scenery was staggering: thickly forested hills, stretching into the distance like an undulating green ocean, with red and yellow blossoms floating on the waves. Beside the road were piles of cocoa beans, laid out to dry in the sun, and hawkers selling engine oil, tangerines, and succulent four-metre pythons for the pot. We were able to soak up these sights at our leisure: we were stopped at road-blocks 47 times.

These usually consisted of a pile of tyres or a couple of oil drums in the middle of the road, plus a plank with upturned nails sticking out, which could be pulled aside when the policemen on duty were satisfied that the truck had broken no laws and should be allowed to pass.

Sometimes, they merely gawped into the cab or glanced at the driver's papers for a few seconds before waving him on. But the more aggressive ones detained us somewhat longer. Some asked for beer. Some complained that they were hungry, often patting their huge stomachs to emphasise the point. One asked for pills, lamenting that he had indigestion. But most wanted hard cash, and figured that the best way to get it was to harass motorists until bribed to lay off.

.......

Even without the unwelcome attentions of the robber-cops, the journey would have been a slog. Most Cameroonian roads are unpaved: long stretches of rutty red laterite soil with sheer ditches on either side. Dirt roads are fine so long as it does not rain, but Cameroon is largely rainforest, where it rains often and hard.

Our road was rendered impassable by rain three times, causing delays of up to four hours. The Cameroonian government has tried to grapple with the problem of rain eroding roads by erecting a series of barriers, with small gaps in the middle, that allow light vehicles to pass but stop heavy trucks from passing while it is pouring. This is fair. Big trucks tend to mangle wet roads.

The barriers, which are locked to prevent truckers from lifting them when no one is looking, are supposed to be unlocked when the road has had a chance to dry. Unfortunately, the officials whose job it is to unlock them are not wholly reliable. Early on the second evening, not long after our stand-off with the police in Mbandjok, we met a rain barrier in the middle of the forest. It was dark, and the man with the key was not there. Asking around nearby villages yielded no clue as to his whereabouts. We curled up in the hot, mosquito-filled cab and waited for him to return, which he did shortly before midnight.

The hold-up was irritating, but in the end made no difference. Early the next morning, a driver coming in the opposite direction told us that the bridge ahead had collapsed, so we had to turn back.

Bigger Than The Superbowl

Cameroon is a football (soccer) country. Forget the Superbowl, the World Series, or March Madness. You haven't seen sports fanaticism until you've been to Cameroon. Not only do people follow the sport religiously on TV, there are informal teams and matches in every quarter and village in the country. The poverty of the country makes it difficult to build stadiums, but if you were to drive around the country, you'd see makeshift football fields everywhere (easy to spot because of the improvised goals - often just sticks or tree branches jammed into the ground). I hear the rest of Africa is not too different.

Right now we are in the middle of the Africa Cup of Nations, which surpasses even the World Cup in importance here. The 2006 World Cup was being held during my training in 2006, so I got a taste of soccer culture then.

On days when the Indomitable Lions (the Cameroonian national team) play, everything shuts down during the game. At the University, evening classes were cancelled during the last match. Taxi drivers stop driving, stores and restaurants close, and everyone heads for the nearest TV. Bars with TVs are usually packed. When a goal is scored you can hear half the town screaming. When the Lions are playing, the day of the game is always an unofficial national holiday.

As I mentioned in my last post, Cameroon is a country with plenty of divisions, but the Lions are one thing that unites them all. When the national team is playing, everyone is Cameroonian, no matter what their tribe, religion, language, or politics. It's actually a little touching.

Last Tuesday night Cameroon lost its first match to Egypt, 4-2. I watched the game at a friend's house, so I probably missed the full effect. Needless to say, the mood the next day was almost funereal. On the bright side, one of my English students was watching it with us, so it gave me the chance to explain what an "kicking ass" was.

On Saturday night, Cameroon played Zambia. They somehow got their groove back and won 5-1.

This time I watched it with a friend in a local bar, and the patrons and employees all went wild with joy with every goal. I was able to explain the expression "kicking ass" again, but in a more positive light this time.

Cameroon is playing Sudan tomorrow night. It's probably a good sign for Cameroon that Sudan was beaten by Zambia. If Cameroon wins, they will move on to the second round. I can't imagine the celebration that would follow if they were to somehow win the cup (probably unlikely after the drubbing they got from Egypt). Ah well, onward! To victory!

As a side benefit, the government and SONEL (the power company) are working overtime to make sure the televisions stay on during the cup. So, power has been remarkably stable the last couple of weeks. Makes you wonder why they can't manage to keep the power on the rest of the time, but, c'est l'afrique.