International Youth Day

International Youth Day – Tuesday, February 10, 2013

I think it’s probably a good thing that my travel plans were changed, I have been sick for the past few days.  I had a fever and stomach problems for one day, but the rest of the time it was mostly just a headache, couch, and a stuffed-up nose.  Today I realized that I probably have a sinus infection, so I called the Peace Corps Medical Officer (PCMO) and she told me to go to the local pharmacy and pick up some medicine for it.  It’s kind of crazy, you don’t need a prescription for anything here.  

Either way, the traveling that I have ahead of me is going to be draining enough, much less sick.  I’m glad that I have a bit more time to recover; I’ll just have to get to the places that I missed after inter-service training (IST) instead of before.  Right now the plan is to greet the Country Director (CD) in Guider and have dinner with her and most of my cluster on Wednesday night.  Thursday I will leave for Ngounderé where I will stay the night and see the town a bit.  We catch the train on Friday, which will run overnight and will get to Yaoundé on Saturday.  That way we’ll get to check out Yaoundé for a bit before heading to training in Mbalmayo on Monday.  

I haven’t gotten a chance yet to check out Ngounderé before, we just spent a few hours there on our way up to the North in the first place, so that should be fun.  I do remember that they have good spaghetti-omelet sandwiches right by the case.  I’m really looking forward to getting the food in Yaoundé too.  I mean, there will be shwarma, pizza, smoothies, I can’t wait!  I’m hoping we can find a good Chinese place too, I here there is one somewhere in Yaoundé.  

Yesterday was International Youth Day, which is a nationally celebrated holiday.  The morning started off with a bit of a parade next to the soccer stadium where all of the schools from the town, which took a couple of hours.  There were 8 schools for little kids, 32 for primary/middle school, and 8 high schools.  I had no idea that there were so many schools in Guider.  I mean, there are maybe 20 quarters in the town, and I have been to less than half of them.  After them was a parade of different local groups.  

All of the schools and other groups marched by singing.  The little kids schools were really cute, most of them not really having any idea why they were there, just walking in a line like they do everyday.  There was one disturbing part – a group of clowns walked by, and at least half, if not all of them, were handicapped.  This has been the only evidence that I’ve seen of handicapped people being treated poorly.  I mean, there isn’t really anything helping them that I’ve seen, either in community groups or government programs, but at least I haven’t seen people ridicule them or anything.  

I also didn’t know how many community and government groups were in Guider that are focused on the youth.  I got my hands on a program, so now I’ve got a much larger listof potential partner schools and organizations than I had before.  I should probably mention that people are considered youth in Cameroon until they are 35 or they get married.  The thing is, the majority of people do not get move out of their parents’ house until they get married.  Plus a lot of people are in high school until around 23, which keeps them more in the youth category.  

After the parade, I went home and read for a while before heading back to watch the Lycée Bilingue take on the Lycée Technique in a soccer game.  Unfortunately, Technique lost so I had to buy a beer for my post-mate.  Afterwards, we were walking back and the chief of district health drove up and offered to buy us some beers, so we joined him for a while before heading back to my post-mates house to have dinner and watch Django Unchained.  If you haven’t seen it, you should, both the movie and the soundtrack are awesome.  

Today I went to that same chief’s office to get a the annual district health report from him, which will help me a lot with my community needs assessment.  I was able to get my preliminary post report done and mailed in, but I still have more work to do on the overall assessment.  I got my National Girls’ Forum application done as well, so it has been a productive couple of days.  

Also, I just finished The Girl That Played With Fire.  I really enjoyed it, I’m going to start on the next one pretty soon, but I might wait until after I get back from IST.  I finished the seventh season of Dexter too – definitely not my favorite show, but it was pretty fun.