Rainy Season, Travel Down South, and Steering

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Well the rainy season has finally hit the North after hearing so much about it from my southern neighbors.  It is still only raining once a week or so, as opposed to almost everyday in the Grand South, but that is enough.  The color green has begun to permeate the landscape.  It started out as little more than that; a color, an illusion.  A dirt field might look green with grass from a distance, but as soon as you got close you could see that the grass was short, few, and far between.  I started to write a blog post a few weeks ago (best laid plans of mice and men) where I described it as faux-vegetation, a mirage, but things kept growing.  I would head south for a few days for a meeting, come back, and the grass would be longer.  There would be plants that had sprouted up where before there had been none.  The hills that I am used to seeing as brown and rocky now look like something out of Highlander. 

The Adamaoua, the region to the south of us, was always green.  To get there, you have to go over a series of mountains, and when heading North this usually meant that when you got to the other side, there would be a vast, brown expanse in front of you.  That expanse has since turned green, and is beautiful to look at.  The 5-6 hour drive from Ngaounderé to Garoua was always beautiful; something to see in its own way.  Now I can’t look away during the drive.  I just put on my instrumental playlist that includes everything from Mozart and Bach to Rodrigo y Gabriella to Explosions in the Sky and watch the landscape go passed.  It’s like Captain Planet came and just went crazy

The other day I was even rewarded by my involuntary vigilance.  A buddy and I were heading south to go to National Girls’ Forum and a pretty big gang of baboons walked across the road in front of our bus.  That’s right, a group of baboons is called a gang, we looked it up.  They were the first wild animals that I’ve seen in country other than the boring ones (bats, lizards, birds, general vermin), so that was pretty exciting. 

I plan on writing an entire blog post about the National Girls’ Forum (NGF), it was a lot of work and probably one of the most important things I have done with my service.  Since NGF I’ve had to stay in Yaoundé to attend the Youth Development Steering Committee.  Things have been very busy for the past few weeks between preparations for NGF and now Steering Committee.  The next training group for Youth Development (YD) will be here mid-September and the Steering Committee has to get ready their Pre-Service Training (PST).  I am the Chair of Training Development, which means I am basically helping to coordinate the development of this year’s training. 

While the trainees won’t get here for another 2.5 months, we will need to have the majority of the trainings created or edited by the end of August when we will be meeting for Training of Trainers and the Training Design Workshop (TOT/TDW).  I’m not getting as much done at my post as I would like, but I think that the work I am doing will have a more far-reaching, national effect.  Really this is better for me; I would rather work on the more national stuff, but it does make me feel guilty about post.  Luckily I have been bringing people from Guider, especially my counterpart, to things like my PST and IST (Inter-Service Training), NGF, a Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) conference, and hopefully more things in the future.  My counterpart, Godwé, is great.  He seems to be a hard working, energetic, and intelligent guy who will bring all of the information and strategies that he is learning back to Guider.  I hope to be there and help him with that more when school starts again in September, but I’m glad I have also had something to do during this summer while they have been out of school. 

Update:  I just found out that next year’s training will be in June and we will possibly have the next year’s National Girls’ Forum in April.  I’m freaking out a bit, but it will be OK I keep telling myself. 

To help me not feel guilty, though, we did another map project before I went down south.  This time we just did a big map of Africa on the wall of the Lycée Bilingue, labeled and everything.  It still took a long time to get done, especially because of logistics (getting approval for a wall and having it prepared), but I think it looks great.  Next blog will be about NGF! 

Painting the Peace Corps symbol on the map

Kids watching me

Finished product