Six Months. Woo-saw.

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Welp, my Close of Service (COS, basically leave) conference has been set at March 31^st, which is incredibly soon.  It turns out that I’ll have to COS by the end of August.  I was trying to keep it a secret from my parents, but since they are trying to plan a trip to East Africa with me, I wasn’t able to. 

A lot of you may be wondering, “Graham, shouldn’t you be leaving in December?  Isn’t Peace Corps 27 months?”  The answer to that is, usually.  First we lost a month during our original training.  We are always the guinea pig stage, or at least that’s what we like to complain about.  The best example of this is that our original training was two months instead of three.  So where did the other three months go?  The short story is my replacement will be coming in August, and they won’t let us overlap.  If you don’t want the long answer, skip the next paragraph. 

Here goes: there are five sectors in Peace Corps Cameroon – Youth Development (YD, mine), Education (ED), Community Economic Development (CED), Environment, and Health.  There are two different training groups each year.  CED and ED come in June, and the other three come in September.  This year, they are combining CED and Environment under the umbrella Sustainable Livelihoods.  They are also putting YD and ED under the name of Youth Empowerment, but nothing is really changing there, they will just be Formal/ED and Informal/YD Youth Empowerment.  To that end, they are going to switch ED and CED, so YD will be coming with ED in June and CED will be coming with Environment and Health in September.  That means my replacement will be going to post in August, and I have to leave 3 months earlier. 

Whew.  That was convoluted. 

We were originally told that we would be able to stay until our regular COS date as long as housing could be found for my replacement, so I was planning on staying until November anyways.  We were told a little over a month ago that now we had to leave in August unless we extend our service.   

There are only 13 of us affected, so they are just going to have us do our COS conference with the CED/ED stage before us.  There are definitely a few people from that stage that I like, including my post mate, but I don’t think they’re too happy that we’ll be there.  I would say out of the 13, about half are happy that we are leaving early, and most of the rest are fine with it.  I’m not that happy about it – I signed up for 27 months.  I was already leaving one month early, now I won’t even have two full years in Cameroon.  It’s frustrating. 

I don’t really know if I’m done here yet, so I’ve been thinking about extending.  I would like to get some more experience in international development and see another part of the country.  I’ve been asking about an extension with UNHCR – the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.  Because of the attacks by Boko Haram in Northeastern Nigeria, and the rebel attacks in Central African Republic, Cameroon currently has over 100,000 refugees and asylum seekers.  It would be really interesting to work with them with logistics – improving access to health facilities, water and sanitation, and education.  UNHCR also works with birth certificate campaigns, and income generating and livelihood activities, both of which could also be interesting.  I asked if I could work either in Yaoundé, the capital, or Bertoua, the regional capital of the East. So far they haven’t answered my emails, but I gave their contact information to my boss, so he said he would look into it.  I’ve asked about UNICEF and Plan International as well. 

However, if an opportunity to work in a larger city with a major organization doesn’t present itself, then I really need to start a career.  That means finishing my Significant Research Paper for my grad school program and finding a job.  Somehow I need to do both of those, my local and national work, and see the parts of the country and posts of friends that I haven’t gotten to yet.  All in six months.  I feel a little overwhelmed.  Luckily, I’ve gotten a lot of research done already; I just need to actually start writing my paper. 

It’s crazy how short six months really is.