Work and going en brousse

Work and going en brousse – Thursday, January 10, 2013

I’ve started to get some actual work done in my town, which feels really good.  Yesterday I went to the Youth Center that my counterpart runs to teach English.  I was under the impressions that I would just be going in to help someone who was normally there, but I was by myself the entire time.  Since I thought I would just be helping the teacher, I didn’t really have anything planned, so I followed my post-mate’s advice and just went over basic greetings.  Every single time you ask a Cameroonian how they are in English, they always answer (if they can), “I am fine.  How are you?”  I tried teaching other things, like ‘I am well,’ or ‘I am sick,’ or ‘I am happy.’  There are 17 students at the Youth Center, all of them between 13 and 23, and 15 of them girls.  It seems like it is pretty much a school where they get more real world training like in computers, English, micro-finance, and health. 

Afterwards I went to the Lycee Classique, one of the main secondary schools that is right by my house, and helped teach English there.  The teacher for the class had asked me to come by so the students can hear an American accent for things they have already covered.  Another PCV from my cluster who caught a ride into town with a couple of nuns came to do it with me.  We went over a list of country names, what the people from that country are called, and the official languages of the country.  Next we went over the names of the fingers.  The teacher asked us to finish up with a song – I had no ideas but my friend suggested “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” so we did that one.  It was actually pretty fun, the kids got really into it. 

 

My post-mate is an economic development volunteer.  Today I went with him to a village en brousse (in the bush), named Sipre Touré, to a meeting of a savings group.  It was only a little more than a 15-minute moto-ride from the main market in Guider down a little dirt and rock path.  It’s amazing how ‘broussey’ it felt out there and how different from Guider despite how close it was.  Some students even walk that path everyday to go to the Lycee Bilingue, another of the main secondary schools in Guider.  Hardly anyone even spoke French, just Fulfulde.  Our phones didn’t have any resseau (reception) either. 

 

The saving group was about 30 women of varying ages (including probably 5 babies), which makes sense, because honestly women seem to do most of the work out here.  Odds are probably even that the men were out in the field or sitting in the shade of a tree.  Of course this is a gross generalization, there are plenty of men who work very hard.  Even while we were going through the meeting, several of the women were shelling peanuts the entire time to make things to sell later. 

 

Right now the group has two funds that everyone contributes the same amount to at each meeting, which occurs once every two weeks during the dry season, and once a month during the wet season.  The first is a solidarity fund, which is used for emergencies.  If someone gets sick, or a family member dies or something, the money is used to help them.  The other is the cotease fund.  Coteasing is when everyone contributes to a fund for the same cause.  For this group, the cotease is used for agriculture.  Everyone in the group works together on some sort of agriculture – this season it was cotton – and uses the money for planting, supplies, and getting the product to market. 

 

The plan is that next meeting my post-mate will help them start savings funds as well.  Eventually, maybe next year, the money saved will be the start of small loans given out to members of the group.  These groups work primarily on trust.  Since all of the women live so close to each other and are around each other all the time, they know that they will repay the money.  In groups without that trust there, people may not repay the loans and everyone else has to eat the cost. 

 

When we got back to Guider we tried to meet with people about our survey that we created for our needs assessment.  Protocol is really important in Cameroon – in order to get anything done you have to make sure you run it by every important person in the town, so they can edit it or at least make them feel respected.  We still have a lot more people to meet with before we can give this survey out.  It really slows things down, but it does help to get the perspective of local leaders.  I’m going to try to make all of these things more a part of my regular schedule.