BACK IN KMER
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Year #2. I’m back at it. Everyone is asking me « Didn’ t u say you were going to do one year in Cameroon?» , Yes, I did. But my mission is not accomplished yet. I need to leave some kind of sustainable legacy before I can afford to go back to the US to further my studies.
I have to admit this second year around I feel my drive has mellowed down a notch. I’m not super excited about all the meetings I go to anymore, I don’t attend all the conferences I hear about, I take more time to collaborate or partner with any organization or event that would increase Harambe’s visibility; In short, my experience of last year has thought me better. Sure, we have results, and we have shown what Cameroon’s youth can do if given a platform on which they can compete and propose solutions to our local problems; Yet still, I will not spread myself too thin as I did last year to make things happen! I should know better now, after all those experiences.
Maybe my drive is still the same, but the un-tempered fervor, uncontrolled passion, and exuberant drive of the first year have been transformed – through trials-and-error, unfulfilled promises, setbacks and obstacles – into careful reflection, cautious strategies and purposeful actions. I will certainly fuel my determination to make things happen, I will preserve my obsession with solutions and results. And above all, this year I will strive to establish an organization/an institution/a system that would survive and thrive beyond Olivia Mukam.
November 12th will mark our first year anniversary! We have drafted a report called “Harambe-Cameroon: One Year Later” which documents all the activities we organized this year, as well as our plan of action for the upcoming year. If you are interested in getting a copy feel free to email: Cameroon.2008@healliance.org. You can also look back at the blog posts I published last year, on our inauguration:
HAVING AN OFFICE
Having an Office is an experience in and of itself. It’s important to have a physical location here in Cameroon, 'cause with all the unreliable people and crooks around, people are always very wary of virtual organizations. I managed to do Harambe last year without an office, but that was with the constant inquiry from all the students we would talk to, or the press, or partners "where is your office?" to which we would answer "we are looking for one in town, but for now, you can contact us by email, or phone" So, it is not only great to have an office, but also important for further expansions, to have a physical location where people can find you. I thank God I was able to find an office in one of the most prominent building downtown. The building is known by everyone because it's 56 years old, and we are 1 mile away from everything: Hotels (Hilton, Djeuga), Banks (Avenue des Bank), the Best Bakery in town, Restaurants, Ministries, the Central Market, I mean, name it and we can find it around here!
For the past month, I have come to doubt the statement that women talk a lot more than men! That for every word a man says, a woman says 10. I'm really reconsidering that statement. 90% of my interlocutors are males, between 25 and 39 years old. Let's say half of them speak in a cogent, straight to the point manner (as they say most men do). The rest of them? Pure Talkers! I could be sitting quietly in my office, steadily doing my work, and some male aquaintance/friend/collaborator comes in, sits down infront of me, and starts rambling his life... Let me give you the example of Mr Z. Mr Z is an aquaintance of mine. He is someone who easily expresses his annoyance, and impulsively vocalize his complaints. Even if he is in an argument with his grandmother's friend, he feels compelled to tell you the story from A-Z, passing through the 1,2,3 of his life of discipline, and righteousness, and coming back to the O P Q of his story, then drift again into the 8,9,10 of doing the right thing always, and being commendable, and back to the subject... I tell you, it's exhausting to listen to him! I always think he'd be a great live example for pre-SAT students to understand and remember what the word "garrulous" means. They must just think of Mr Z, and they'll understand it simply means "continual and tedious talking." I realized it after my first 2 conversations with him last year. Only 25% of what he said was relevant, the rest was repetitions, digressions or just random stuff. And so I have learned to just tuneout after 5mins of nodding and unsuccessfully trying to get him over his annoyance; and I continue my work. He certainly doesn't mind either. Whether I am listening or not, Mr Z will keep talking! 10, 20 , 30 mins man... with little or no response from me. I mean, usually after talking for let’s say 2-3 mins to someone, you check if the person is "with you"; you say things like “u know?” “can you imagine?”, “think about this”, or you try to keep constant eye-contact, or even tap the person to make sure the person is listening to you, u know? Well with Mr. Z, approval or none, he will continue his monologue! In Cameroonian jargon they say such a person has “Diarrhée –verbal” (verbal diarrhea)! I think that explains it all.
As always , I try to learn a thing or two from each experience. One thing I understand more now is why appointments are important, and open-door policies must be planned too. I mean, when I walk into my office early in the morning, and I see someone already sitted infront of my desk waiting for me, it interrupts my gentle morning flow, and disturbs my peaceful energy. When I come to the office in the morning, I need at the very least 30mins to settle down,breath out, unpack my laptop, jot down my tasks-to-do for the day, and get into my element before I can cater to whomever. And so I have made it a policy to my past morning-intruders that they should book an appointment with me if they want to see me in the morning. If not in the afternoon is fine! To those I know talk too much and would interfere my thinking process with their rants, I say,"Please my brother, let's plan to talk for 30mins later on, and I will be all ears during that period." Whether later on we meet or not, at least I have bought some time for myself to do some productive work! 
But all that put aside, I'm loving how my office has become a hub of ideas and of people meeting, networking and partnering and 'friendshipping'. Whether it's my friend working in the construction sector in Douala, bumping into another friend - young successful real estate agent - on their way in and out of my office; Or it is a friend of mine who just came back from her studies in Communication in Morocco, meeting a journalist in my office... or the President of the National Youth Council creating a partnership with a friend who is a Business consultant... I mean, people come, go, chat, meet, lunch, build, create, discuss! it's dynamic, it moves, it shakes, and I'm loving what I see! In addition to that, I'm loving the fact that people can just come to my office and find a book in my mini-library that captivates them. I can even say I like that more than having people meet; cuz I just love sharing books, and ideas, and valuable knowledge.
MOST VALUABLE "THING" IN YOUR LIFE
Today, a situation got me to think of what are the most precious THINGS in my life... I woke up this morning to the pungent smell of burned rubber, strolling in my room, leaning down above my bed, and tapping my shoulder to wake up. Half-asleep half-awake, I wondered who was the impudent intruder who dared to disturb my Monday morning slow and grouchy wake up process? I jumped on my feet, ready to discover where that smell came from. I looked around. I had the creepy feeling it could be my fan, my phone, or my laptop burning. It wasn’t. Thank the Lord! I peeped through one of my white windows openings, at the mechanics garage about 6 meters away, at a 45° angle down across from my bedroom window. There were my culprits! These fellows decided to do the burning of all their plastic, rubber, and all possibly toxic material at 7 o’clock in the morning! On a MONDAY MORNING! How much more insensitive can you be? I peeped, longer than a peep allows, to make sure the wave of smoke coming from the garage wasn’t an uncontrolled fire that would expand and start burning the walls of our house, and shatter this 22 year old temple of love, warmth and precious memories! That was fortunately not what was happening. Thank the Lord again!
But then, what if it was? What if the fire was coming slowly towards us, towards this house, towards this room. OMG. Just the thought of it froze my mind. Yet, it made me think for a couple of minutes... What If our House was catching fire. What is the most precious THING I will run out of the house with?
The first thing that came in mind was my laptop, and then my books. Somehow, I automatically threw in my soon-to-be-ashes box my three 2-meters-high closets full of cloths, along with my jewelry collection, belt collection, sunglasses collection, hat collection, perfume collection, and all the other accessories I fancy a lot, but could clearly live without! At least that’s what I discovered after my 2 mins thought process… give me my laptop, give me my books, and throw me on a desert island (with food, water and some sort of energy to keep my laptop alive) and I’ll survive, joyfully!
How about you? Your House is burning in 5mins… What THING would you carry out of your burning house?
NOVEMBER BABIES
There is something with November babes and the love of their Month that I haven’t seen with people born in other months. There’s something about the pride and love of their month that reflects, most often, their love of themselves and the belief in their greatness. I mean, I have screened down my facebook newsfeed, and 75% of my friends born in November (including myself) wrote something fabulous about November, and how it is, incontestably, the best month of the year. Why? Well duh, because they were born that month! It’s interesting because I rarely see such collective expression of love for their birth-month from people in the non-November months. I have therefore come to the conclusion that November babes are simply megalomaniacs. And I, as a proud November baby, am not the exception to the rule!
URBANIZATION
Earlier this Saturday afternoon, I went to visit an aunty who lives 15 mins away from my house. As I was in the taxi, cruising through the road from Chapelle Ngousso to Lycee Bilingue, I looked on the right through my window, and started observing what I had stopped seeing for the past weeks. On the road we were driving on: In front of us, there were a couple of potholes the taximan had to skillfully dodge in order not to hit the car coming down from the left side of the road, On our left and right hand sides, the gutters full of stagnant water mixed with all kinds of dirt giving it a black-greyish color with spots of red, yellow, blue substances. Next to the gutters, on my right you could see some cottage businesses – call-boxes, buyam-sellams, wooden bed frames and mattresses on display, mini barbershops, a soya-man (selling roasted meat in the open), and many more micro businesses, and entrepreneurial Africans trying to make their living despite all the obstacles! These very people I’d applaud on another day, and that I’ve always praised for their ingenuity and ability to cope and survive in this difficult society; are the ones I will dare to chastise today. As much as I’d like to keep admiring their entrepreneurial spirit, there are things that we (as a society) must say NO to, and must reprimand each other for… I’m talking specifically here about the problem of DIRTINESS. Dirtiness in our streets! Why are we overlooking DIRTINESS? And before I continue, let me say to those who are already thinking of how they’ll tell me that I’m bringing my Western mind to African context, that “CLEANLINESS” is not a Western thing! It’s a human thing.
I would also tell them, I’m not asserting that the problem of dirtiness is a cultural thing, nor even a Cameroonian thing. Last year I was in Ngaoundere, in the North of Cameroon, and I was impressed at how the streets were clean there. There was no litter around, the restaurants were we ate looked well kept, no pile of trash lying around in town, no gutter full of all kind of toxic stuff. In short, Ngaoundere, as I blogged a year ago, is a clean town. Just like Sangmelima, in the South of Cameroon, renown for being the cleanest town in the nation. But in Yaoundé – LA CAPITAL - especially once you get away from downtown – where, as my friend Adedayo Bolaji-Adio, recently blogged:
Shallow efforts, indeed, because when you go into peripheral neighborhoods of the city, boy oh boy! What you see, hear, smell, taste and feel, are the palpable pains of urbanization.
And so I wonder, beyond all these talks of urbanization in Africa – the unplanned cities, disorganization, collapsed infrastructure, chaos, etc, where have we placed the individual? Beyond the government’s duty to use the tax-payer’s money to keep the city clean, what have we asked of the individual?
I wonder, where we have thrown our collective senses? I mean our basic senses: Our sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch? We have plugged out our eyes, and thrown each one of them in the abandoned Municipal Lake, We have placed our ears under the loud speakers of the bar next to the cemetery. Our nose has been shoved under the pile of dirt at the corner of the street; our mouth, glued to SNEC’s (the national water company’s) rusty water tap. And our skin, we have peeled it off and dumped it in the slimy water filling up our open gutters. Where have we thrown our collective senses?
I wonder, if the man selling soya can’t feel the sweat on his forehead dripping drop by drop on the aromatic smell of the meat he is roasting? And the young teenage boy displaying his freshly baked/or fried puffpuff/beignets/doughnuts by the side of the road, can’t he smell the stench of the pile of trash 1 meter away – a smell that could turn over the stomach of his potential customers and turn them away from his alluring display? The woman roasting corn, with her teenage girl next to her selling roasted plantains, can’t they see the sanitary towel tainted with blood that was thrown in a bucket next to them? And for crying out loud, the teacher in front of the primary school, can’t he see the used-condom that is laying at the foot of the mango tree in front of the school – which any imaginary kid could confuse with a balloon and carelessly get a lifetime fatal disease? I wonder! I really do wonder, where have we thrown our senses?
I would like us for one minute to forget about the government, forget about foreign aid, forget about our mayors and deputies, for this one minute, let’s remember each single one of us, each single person reading this rant from a young- revolted-but- hopeful –African- woman, to ask yourself the AIDS question: “Am I Doing Something?”
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Excerpts of previous blogs I wrote in 2009 on cleanliness, germs, and numbing our senses:
Excerpt of Journal #4 - (Aug. 27th, 2009) - Rediscovering Cameroon
“ You don’t want to think about how and in what conditions some foods are prepared here, back home. All that matters is the taste. ‘cause for real, if you wanna dive into the culinary details of the food you eat here, you will stop eating, and starve to death.
I see it this way, we have the art of sharing germs with each other, we might even be immunized to half-million of the germs specie. Lol. In pidgin they say “Durt no be kill black ppls.” Lol. It still kills though. i.e. probably the other half-million of germs we aren’t immunized to. Sometimes I think it’s all in the head. 4 real.
Beyond that though, I think at the end of the day we are all ONE. We are all manifestations of One Being. Whether it’s dust, sand, cars, rocks, plantains, groundnuts, dogs, cats, men, women, babies… we were all created by one hand, and so sometimes eating dirt/germs doesn't kill u, because we are all ONE. That's my way of making sense out of this man....
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