A month without a post

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Guider has now been closed for a solid month.  The first few days I was in Limbé for the National Girls’ Forum, so I was pretty busy and distracted from it.  After that, I took the train up and stayed in Ngaoundéré for a couple of days.  The local Peace Corps staff in the Grand North has been amazing.  I got a ride up with them to Garoua, where I had to stay a week or so.  I planned on going earlier but they wanted to confirm the plan, which they kept changing.  Luckily, I was able to go back to Guider for a week. 

It was funny the different tracks that the three of us in Guider have taken.  One of my post mates came back just a couple of days before we were closed, so he didn’t have much time to say goodbye to people.  My other post mate was there about the same amount as me, and made a strong effort to go around and say goodbye.  I said goodbye to some people, but it’s like I couldn’t get myself to actually do it or even pack.   I don’t know if I was in denial or what, but I packed a bit and mostly just lived like I would have anyways.  Out of the three of us, one is going home a couple of months early, one is staying the normal time in a new post, and I am planning on extending. 

Everyone in Guider was really understanding about the situation though.  They knew that it was not our fault; our bosses made the decision.  They also know how dangerous Boko Haram is in general, and they were glad that we are going to be safe.  A friend of one of my post mates even told him that he had a new neighbor, and that Guider might not be safe for us anymore. 

After a week in Guider, Peace Corps helped us to move our stuff to Ngaoundéré.  We are incredibly grateful for that – most of the other closures did not have near the time to move or the help from Peace Corps.  I stayed with a friend in Dir in the Adamaoua for a few days, and then headed south to Yaoundé.  Long story short, I’m just hanging out here until I can go to Morocco to get my tooth fixed.  Apparently my extension can’t move on until I get medically cleared – not even finding out where I will live. 

While there have been a lot of changes in the last month, I think the biggest one is that people have actually heard of Boko Haram now.  Since I’ve been living mostly in cases (transit houses) for a month, I’ve had pretty good access to the Internet.  By now, it seems like everyone has heard about the close to 300 girls that were kidnapped by Boko to be sold throughout the region.  All I see on Facebook is pictures of protestors and signs with the hashtag #bringbackourgirls. 

I think that it’s great that the rest of the world is finally recognizing the atrocities committed by this terrorist group, but the fact is that Boko Haram has been operating for years.  More than a year ago, the post closures started happening in the Grand North of the country because of kidnappings.  Since then, I have had a Google alert on them, and have watched as story after story has unfolded of Boko Haram burning down schools and entire villages, often with people inside, slaughtering hundreds of men, women, and children.  It’s terrible that it has taken the international community this long to catch on.  Also, while the girls being kidnapped is an absolutely awful situation, the boys were just slaughtered. 

Boko Haram has destabilized the entire Northeast of Nigeria.  Schools have been shut down because any kept open are attacked, burned to the ground, and the students killed.  The government has no control, and the military has been accused of the same brutalities.  The conflict has started to spill into Cameroon, and most of us who have been closed heard of Boko Haram being in our posts.  Meanwhile, on Cameroon’s opposite border, the Central African Republic is slipping further into chaos and closer towards genocide.  Muslims fleeing towards Cameroon have been massacred.  I’m very glad that the issue is starting to come to the forefront, I just hope that people realize that kidnapped girls are only a part of the problem, and more than five times that number have been killed by Boko Haram this year alone. West/Central Africa needs help, and I don't think hashtags are going to do it.  

3rd Annual National Girls’ Forum

Sunday, April 27, 2014

In all the excitement of losing my home and trying to figure out my future, I forgot all about writing a post about the 3^rd Annual National Girls’ Forum (NGF).  This was my second year on the committee planning and executing it, and other than some minor hiccups, I thought it went very well.  Each year we’ve made changes to the Forum; it’s awesome to be able to see something that you work on evolve. 

The way the Forum works is that we invite 30 Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs), 30 Host Country National (HCN) counterparts, and 30 girls for a three-day conference.  The biggest change this year was the schedule for the girls.  The first year, only a couple of girls were invited; the second year, 30 girls were invited but had the same sessions as the counterparts.  This year, we had the girls and counterparts separate almost the entire time, and tailored the girls’ sessions to them. 

The theme this year was “A Future for Girls.”  All of the girls were mostly in Life Skills sessions, talking and learning about issues like self esteem, love, and role models.  The counterparts and most of the PCVs, meanwhile, were in sessions on how to bring positive projects to their towns and villages, including finding and using resources, community needs assessments, and money management.  There was a great discussion on the theme as well. 

I was really happy with the sessions for the counterparts this year, which is where I spent my time.  Last year, we chose presenters from among the participants, usually PCVs and HCNs together.  That meant that we had some great presentations and some that fell completely flat.  This year, we asked people that we knew were excellent presenters with a lot of experience to come specifically, and only HCNs this time.  We think that Cameroonians get a lot more out of presentations done by other Cameroonians than ones done by PCVs.  We also made a lot more of an effort to make sure that we had either both a Francophone and an Anglophone presenting together, or someone to translate. 

Though I wasn’t in the girls’ sessions, they sounded like they were having a great time.  We could hear their cheering from across the hall, and whenever I went over there it just looked like they were having great conversations.  We had to keep asking PCVs to go back to the HCN sessions – everyone wanted to hang out in the fun sessions. 

My main role again this year was working on the monitoring and evaluation for the Forum.  We had the HCNs and girls’ take (different) pre-tests and post-tests to see how much they actually learned.  We also had the take daily surveys, rating each session, and an overall survey for the Forum.  Unfortunately, I had… stomach issues… for the whole Forum, culminating on the last day, so I didn’t get to see the very end.  I haven’t been able to finish entering all the data yet either, it is waiting for me in Yaoundé.  What I have looked at has all been really positive; everyone really liked the first half of the Forum at least, and from what I heard they did the rest too.

Everyone had positive things to say; the comment that I heard the most is that the Forum seemed a lot more focused this year.  At the end, I was told that some of the girls even cried because they didn’t want it to be over.  I think that the NGF is a great barometer for the Youth Development (YD) program in general.  Both have just finished their third years, and both are making amazing progress.  Though work can be incredibly frustrating here (get ready for a story in my next post), it feels great to be involved in the building of the program.  I think that for both NGF and YD, there has been a pronounced positive trajectory, and I’m glad to be a part of it.