Archive for the 'Culture' Category
PCV Chris Hill served in Buea from 1974-74, working with credit unions as an advisor. He is now the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq.
From Politico
By: Anne Schroeder Mullins
July 22, 2009 04:50 AM EST
Before launching their careers on Capitol Hill, some congressional lawmakers got their first taste of mudslinging in a productive way — as volunteers in the U.S. Peace Corps. The program has served as an unlikely farm system for future members of Congress. Sen. Chris Dodd and Reps. Sam Farr, Tom Petri, Mike Honda and Steve Driehaus have all been among its ranks.
And it’s not just elected officials who have served in the Peace Corps before making their way to Washington. Journalist Chris Matthews was in Swaziland from 1968 to 1970, writer Maureen Orth was in Colombia from 1964 to 1966 — the same time as Farr — and current Ambassador to Iraq Chris Hill served in Cameroon from 1974 to 1976. (And he thought Africa was tough.)
The Peace Corps, which is hosting an event at the Capitol Visitor Center for staff and interns on Wednesday, gave us a peek at several politicos in their earthy Peace Corps days.
Ambassador Chris Hill
Volunteered in Cameroon (1974-76)
“In one month, I went from being responsible for very little in college to being responsible for the life savings of 6,000 credit union members in Fako Division, Cameroon. The Peace Corps gave me that chance. In many ways, it was the most important job I have ever had.”
Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.)
Volunteered in the Dominican Republic (1966-68)
“Over 40 years ago, when I arrived in the Dominican Republic as an English major who spoke almost no Spanish, I was asked a question I’ve been asked a thousand times since: ‘Why did you join the Peace Corps?’ The answer was simple: because an American president asked me to. My experience in the Peace Corps was perhaps the most formidable and richest of my life, and it is why I have spent my life in public service and continue to urge others to serve our great nation.”
Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.)
Volunteered in Colombia (1964-66)
“For two years, I lived amid severe poverty in Medellin, Colombia, helping the poorest of the poor figure out what they wanted from their government and then working with them to get it. I learned firsthand what contributes to poverty, and I’ve worked four decades to defeat it. As my wife said, I’m still a Peace Corps volunteer at heart; I’ve just changed my barrio.”
Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wis.)
Volunteered in Somalia (1966-67)
Petri’s spokesman shares this story: “Having finished law school, Petri was assigned to bring some order to Somalia’s legal code. Because of the country’s colonial history, some of the laws were in Arabic, some in Italian and some in English. They were numbered, so if you had a copy of law 100, you knew that there were 99 before it.
“Petri went to the custodian of the laws to request a complete copy. He was told that that would be impossible. He returned over the course of several days, sometimes bringing the custodian tea, and gradually obtained a law or two at a time. Eventually, the custodian took him to a room where the laws were kept, bound in twine and totally ignored.”
Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.)
Volunteered in El Salvador (1965-67)
“My time in El Salvador taught me so much. I went into the Corps as a college student shy of graduation with little direction; I emerged with the confidence that my emotional, psychological and physical limits had been pushed, plied and ultimately surpassed. I went into the Corps driven by the shame of my youthful lack of direction; I emerged determined to do something about the pervasive poverty surrounding me. I went into the Corps speaking one language; I emerged speaking another: Spanish, a gift that introduced me to a new world, gave me a new way of understanding new cultures and helped me connect to constituents in California. The Peace Corps got me back to the basics, and I realized that every day is a gift to be used wisely. That gift is what guides me now in Congress.”
Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-Ohio)
Volunteered in Senegal (1988-90)
“I lived with a family in a village of 300 people, and she lived with us. When I look at this photo, I think I was much younger and I weigh less, and I have less gray in my beard. The Peace Corps was a fantastic experience. It was probably, with the exception of my marriage and my children, the most important experience in my life. Those 2½ years were very valuable. I had a prototypical Peace Corps experience — I lived in a rural area, and you have a far deeper appreciation for how so many millions of people live life around the world that is so different than ours.”
Driehaus adds: “I like to tease the others — they were all serving the year I was born.”
PCV Abba Greenleaf reports that she has a growing quilt-making project going in Cameroon. She is serving in Mayo Darle, Adamawa, as a Health Volunteer, and is originally from Iowa City, Iowa. Before joining the Peace Corps, she studied Public Health at George Washington University.
“I started quilting when I met a woman, Mairama, who is located in a village near the Nigerian border. She is an Umbororo woman who has been in Cameroon for about 9 years, since the Umbororo/Mambila conflict that forced her and her family to flee Nigeria. She was looking for a way to make money and so I taught her how to hand quilt. Now we have 9 women hand quilting and 3 piecing (using a machine to put the pieces together).
“Each month we have a meeting where I teach the women about a health topic and they get paid for their work and receive new work. They are learning, (petit a petit), how to be independent in their work, since I will be leaving Cameroon in December of this year. This means I am teaching them about budgeting, cotising money to buy supplies.
“It has been incredibly exciting to see these women learn the trade, turn it into a beautiful art while at the same time supporting their families. All the quilts are pieced on a machine, then hand quilted. Prices depend on size and the difficulty of the quilt. The smallest quilt usually costs about 15,000 cfa ($30) with the most expensive (large enough to cover a double bed) is usually around $100. All the quilts have pagne, and some are mixed with monotone color fabric to help ease the intensity (pagne is very bright and busy!). As you can see in the pictures, there is also the possibility of using the PC fabric. We chose to mix the fabric with green, yellow and red since those are the national colors. 
However, there are lots of different designs we can try out.
“If people are interested in ordering quilts; the address to use is agreenleafpccam@yahoo.com .
“My village actually just got electricity on the 20th of May, for 4 hours every night, but we are still a long way from Internet!
Cameroon, with one of Africa’s highest rates of deforestation, has set up a new national park to protect gorillas, chimpanzees, elephants and a rare type of antelope called bongo.
Read complete article here
On November 22, 2008, more than twenty Peace Corps volunteers from all over Cameroon and representatives of the NGOs that they work with joined traditional rulers, local elites, public officials, dancers, artisans, and more than 2,000 villagers from all 22 villages of Batibo Sub-Division in a celebration of the culture of the Moghamo people and their partnership with the U.S. Peace Corps.
Local tradition was on display at the grandstand and stadium. Each village decorated its own portion of the field, showcasing prized antiquities, weavings and carvings, traditional garments, and skillfully tapped palm wine. On the center stage, dancers presented more than ten traditional dances, including several which had been becoming extinct, while an announcer explained the significance of each one.
The day was also an opportunity for Peace Corps volunteers to highlight favorite aspects of American culture and expose the community of Batibo to the mission and work of the Peace Corps. In between traditional Moghamo dances, the main stage featured American pop music performances, an expertly choreographed hip-hop dance, and a demonstration of American football, complete with a crowd participation tutorial on
“the wave.”
The field also featured informational booths set up by Peace Corps volunteers and local NGOs, often in collaboration, that provided information and resources in fields such as medicinal plants, small business development, agroforestry, nutrition, irrigation, beekeeping, and community health. Festival-goers were able to learn interactively and make contacts for future projects and collaborations in those areas. In addition, more than 300 people took advantage of the free HIV testing and counseling that was made available on site through the efforts of several volunteers and the Provincial Technical Group.
Ultimately, the day will be remembered not only for the enjoyment and celebration of the moment, but also for the way in which it sparked the process of preserving and presenting Moghamo culture and enhancing awareness and understanding among the Moghamo people of The U.S. Peace Corps and the work of its volunteers.
Plans are already under way for a future edition of the festival, one that will hopefully be even bigger and better than the last!
Hope you enjoy the pictures!
Best regards,
Seth Shapiro
PCV Batibo
PEOPLE carry their produce to the market in Fundong, Cameroon, Africa. The deepening effects of the global food crisis and climate change are affecting Africa’s ability to eradicate poverty. GEORGE OSODI/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Bloomberg Specials
Written by Alison Fitzgerald & Christopher Swann / Bloomberg News
Tuesday, 06 January 2009
Mbanda Leo Ganglii, like any farmer in Cameroon, must contend with roads that turn to mud in the rainy season and fertilizer prices he can’t afford. And then there is government corruption. A local agriculture official demanded a $572 kickback from a $1,850 government contract to provide plantain seedlings for other farmers, Ganglii said. After refusing, he said he was warned that the deal might not be renewed.
“The provincial coordinator called me and said since we are not ready to offer a bribe, the contract we just signed with the minister of agriculture will be the last,” said Ganglii, 36. His farm is in Boyo, about five hours northwest of the capital, Yaounde.
Incidents of this kind are impediments to improving food production in Cameroon and Africa as a whole, farmers say. While Cameroon is fertile and a variety of crops could thrive, it became a flash point in the food crisis this year when riots left 40 people dead. Its problems don’t result from war or drought. Mismanagement and outright graft have led to neglect of farming, said Joachim von Braun, director of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.
Cameroon has budgeted $309 million for the military in 2009 and $105 million for the president’s office and services to the presidency, compared with $106 million for agriculture, which employs 70 percent of its people.
“This is not a problem of natural resources,” von Braun said. “It’s a problem of leadership and governance and corruption.”
The condition of Cameroon’s agriculture is central to the tragedy in sub-Saharan Africa, where 236 million, or about 25 percent, of the world’s hungry people live. The total of undernourished grew this year to 963 million of the world’s 6.8 billion people, the Rome-based United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said this week.
Cameroon is “one of the best-endowed primary commodity economies” in Africa, according to the US Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA reports that 10 percent of the country’s roads are paved and 30 percent of the population is unemployed.
Even former Prime Minister Simon Achidi Achu acknowledges that with better roads and more efficient farming, the country could become a breadbasket for its own people and those of neighboring nations, instead of relying on aid agencies and foreign governments.
“If you drop a seed on the ground in Cameroon, something grows,” Achu said during a tour of his 200-hectare farm in Santa in the Northwest province, where he raises cattle, grows potatoes and farms fish, some of which he exports to Gabon.
Cameroon President Paul Biya, 75, has governed for 26 years. After the food riots in February, Biya’s administration responded with an emergency plan to solicit loans of almost $1 billion from the World Bank and others to double food production by 2012. Yet Ganglii and von Braun question whether indifference and unethical government will undermine the efforts.
The Biya regime didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment. The presidency and the Agriculture Ministry didn’t answer a series of questions posed via e-mail and telephone to Philip Ekaney Metuge of the Ministry of Communications. Ganglii didn’t disclose the name of the Agriculture Ministry official who demanded a bribe.
In 2003 African delegates meeting in Maputo, Mozambique, set a target of spending 10 percent of their national budgets on farms, up from an average of 4.5 percent that year, according to von Braun’s research institute. Four of the 51 countries have met the goal, even though 70 percent of the continent’s workforce is in food production. The nations in June recommitted to spending 10 percent of their budgets by 2010.
Cameroon is among those that have fallen short, devoting 2.4 percent to agriculture in 2009, according to figures released by the government in November.
“You can blame the donors and the international lenders for the food problems in Africa, but the responsibility rests mainly on the national governments,” said Namanga Ngongi, president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, an advocacy group based in Nairobi, Kenya, and former deputy executive director of the United Nations’ World Food Program. “African countries have grossly underinvested in agriculture.”
Those that spend more on farms escaped the worst of this year’s food crisis. Malawi—which suffered from a famine as recently as 2002—now devotes 8 percent of its national budget to farming and 2.4 percent to the military.
Malawi subsidizes fertilizer, reducing the cost of 100 kilograms to $14 from $60 in a country where half the population lives on less than $136 a year. The 2007 maize harvest yielded a surplus of about 1 million metric tons. Malawi became a net exporter, sending 400,000 tons to Zimbabwe and selling 91,000 tons to the World Food Program.
“This is a great source of pride for ministers and government officials,” said Mark Ashurst, director of the Africa Research Institute.
At the same time, because of poor infrastructure, the World Food Program also distributed food to 1.4 million people in Malawi last year.
Cameroon imported 400,000 tons of rice last year and grew 100,000 tons, according to the Agriculture Ministry. It sold 25,000 tons of food to the World Food Program, which distributed 5,772 tons in Cameroon, about a quarter of it to refugees. Cameroonians also eat cassava, plantains, yams, millet, corn, chicken and fish.
Unlike Malawi, Cameroon has sources of wealth beyond its farm industry, including the 85,000 barrels of oil produced each day. At the average 2008 price on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the country’s oil would bring in about $8.8 million a day.
The Cameroon government’s $1-billion, three-year plan unveiled in June includes creating a farmers’ bank to make loans for expanding operations or buying supplies. Subsidies would cover half of fertilizer costs and tractor imports for large operations. A 15-percent import tax on tractors would be eliminated. The government would buy 50 community tractors for each of Cameroon’s 10 provinces to rent to small growers.
Prime Minister Ephraim Inoni said in November that Cameroon will provide financial and technical assistance to 5,000 young farmers next year, subsidizing fertilizers and pesticides and giving loans at reduced rates.
Susan Simon Wembe, who began her plantain grove of 2 hectares, also in Boyo, using just a hoe, might welcome a tractor and fertilizer. To sell her crop, she carries branches of plantains on her head or back 2 kilometers down a narrow, rutted mud road. It takes one-and-a-half hours on foot, she says.
“They are so heavy,” she says. “I get so tired.”
At the market, consisting of a few wooden sheds and tables beside a two-lane paved road, she and neighboring farmers offer plantains, peanuts, sugar cane and chickens to the patients and workers at a hospital. Wembe says a bunch of plantains standing 3 feet tall can fetch about 3,000 CFA francs ($5.90), the currency used in several Central African countries.
Buying the farm tools under the emergency plan requires foreign aid, said Rabelais Yankam Njomou, the technical adviser to Agriculture Minister Jean Nkuete, in an interview at the ministry in Yaounde. Nkuete canceled three appointments for interviews in three days before allowing Njomou to speak.
“The main way to solve this problem is to get money,” Njomou said.
People in the countryside see few signs of a government commitment to farming.
In Ndop, one of the main rice-producing districts, Samuel Wankii, director of the Upper Noun Valley Development Authority, works in an office beside a processing plant that can dry, parboil and bag 10,000 tons of rice a year. The plant sits idle, gathering cobwebs, because the government eliminated the budget, Wankii said during a tour. He demonstrated how he keeps the processor in working order in case the money ever comes back.
“In Cameroon, we do more talking than doing,” he said.
A few miles down the road, a group of young men perform the work that would normally happen in the processing plant, soaking and boiling rice in old oil drums, then spreading it on tarpaulins in a field across the street to dry. They then bag it by hand.
Cameroon is already receiving foreign investment—though it’s for football, not farming. China is financing and building $640 million of sports facilities—a soccer stadium in each of Cameroon’s four largest cities.
The African country’s soccer-mad populace has embraced the plan. Taxi driver Djindje Jean Marc says he hopes Cameroon will one day host the World Cup.
The gleaming steel of a turtle-shaped training center for athletes has already risen in Yaounde. It looms over the cinderblock shacks with corrugated metal roofs that line the roads beyond.
In smaller villages, such as Mvomeka’a in the South Province, most Cameroonians live in shacks made of mud bricks and sticks. Only 20 percent of Cameroon’s households have electricity.
Still, there are pockets of luxury. One country home in Mvomeka’a, designed by French architect Olivier Clement Cacoub, features a personal golf course and a 500-meter landing strip. It’s owned by President Biya.
In a 2007 report, Transparency International, a watchdog group, reported that 79 percent of Cameroon citizens said they had paid a bribe to receive a basic government service. Farmers say they must pay off local officials just to get access to government programs and research.
“For the least service to be rendered in either private or public administration, the official demands something in kind [gifts, sex with regards to women], or money [the most common means],” Transparency International, based in Berlin, said in the report.
What government funding there is seldom reaches the regions that need it most. A study by the Yaounde-based Citizens Association for the Defense of Collective Interests, a group that advocates food self-sufficiency in Cameroon, found that 5 percent of the money allocated to the Ministry of Agriculture actually reaches rural areas.
“They just share it among themselves,” said Amesinda Jonathan Jam, a farmer in Boyo who grows plantains and other produce. “Most people are not trustworthy.”
Since 2005, an anticorruption effort known as Operation Sparrow Hawk, which Transparency International says was started because of international pressure, has led to a growing number of arrests at state-run companies. Gerard Ondo Ndong, the top executive at the Inter-Communal Mutual Aid Fund, was convicted in June 2007 of misappropriating $26 million from the organization and sentenced to 50 years in prison, according to a 2008 Transparency International report.
In Cameroon, cases involving the ruling party “are not settled fairly in court, and bribes are often paid to secure a verdict,” Transparency International said. Critics “see the waves of arrests as the government’s attempt to please donors as well as a settling of scores within the Cameroon administration.”
Not far from Ganglii’s farm in Boyo, Lawrence Chiamoh talks of expanding his pork and poultry operation.
Chiamoh has about 100 roasters in a henhouse. A larger coop stands empty, and Chiamoh says he would like to fill it with 1,000 egg-laying hens.
“A person cannot always afford a whole chicken,” he said. “But anyone can buy an egg. Eggs sell.” An egg costs about 12 cents while chicken can reach $5.50 a kilogram.
He’s trying to get $6,000 in financing and says he slips extra cash to agriculture officials as part of this effort.
“This is Cameroon,” Ganglii said in an e-mail. “Poor farmers like us are enthusiastic enough, but some people of bad faith are there to block us. How therefore do we fight poverty, achieve food security? Only God knows.”
When life is more complex than just fields to tend, a passel of wives is more a financial strain than a status symbol.
By Alexis Grant | Christian Science Monitor, November 13, 2008 edition
Fongo-Ndeng, Cameroon
Benoit Ndi Wamba didn’t know exactly how many children were in his family. Like most Cameroonians born into large polygamous families, he never had a reason to count.
But with money tight after the death of his father, the 23-year-old was partly responsible for finding money to pay this year’s public school fees for his siblings. So he ticked off their names, one by one. There was lanky Jean, 21. Sylvain, 18, a top student. Janvier, an 11-year-old who wears, in this French-speaking province, a T-shirt that reads “Fabulous.” And Mr. Ndi Wamba himself was entering his first year of university.
Those were just his mother’s children. Then there were his other brothers and sisters, born to his late father’s other three wives. A handful of grandchildren and cousins also lived with the family, complicating the count. All referred to one another as brother and sister, explaining only after much prodding who, as Cameroonians say, has the “same mother, same father.”
Yet one thing was clear: With more than a dozen children who hoped to attend school this year, the Ndi Wamba family faced a pile of fees.
It was a problem Ndi Wamba swore his own children would never face; he would marry just one woman, he said, and have significantly fewer children than his father.
“If it was just my three brothers and me, we would not be having this problem,” Ndi Wamba said sternly, a folder of university enrollment forms tucked under his arm.
An increasing number of men in this central African nation are coming to the same conclusion, rejecting the polygamous lifestyles of their fathers and opting for monogamy instead. With the rising costs of school, healthcare, and food, it’s simply too expensive to have a large family, they say.
• • •
I met the Ndi Wamba family six years ago, when I was a college student studying polygamy. They were supposed to serve as a case study, but instead became my second family during the three weeks I lived with them in the village of Fongo-Ndeng, in western Cameroon.
When I returned this September for a visit, their lives had much changed. Nearly a year after the death of their 78-year-old husband, the four wives still donned all black, mourning not only his spirit but also the loss of his government pension. With the help of friends and family back home, I paid tuition for the women’s children and others who live on the compound, 18 in all.
Again I chatted with the women as they cooked over open fires on the ground in their kitches, alternating among the four dirt-floor houses that, along with their husband’s empty house, created a semicircle around an often-muddy yard. When he was alive, the husband, too, split his time among his wives, spending one night with one woman, the next with another.
Traditionally, polygamy has been a symbol of wealth and status, particularly in rural areas. Village chiefs until recently married as many as 25 women, while other men typically wed between two and eight wives.
The lifestyle has its advantages, mainly the production of a labor force to cultivate fields of corn, beans, and root crops like manioc. But modernity has taken its toll, even on families like the Ndi Wambas who have shunned other changes such as electricity and running water. Crops can feed many mouths, but only hard currency pays school fees, which start in secondary school around the equivalent of $45 annually and mount for higher grades.
“Before, maybe polygamy was good,” explains Charlotte Nguimfack, who has four children with her monogamous husband. “Life wasn’t difficult like it is now.”
While those economic difficulties are driving polygamy’s decline, other factors also are at play, including the spread of Christianity, which prohibits polygamy. And as more women become college-educated, some have begun to demand monogamy.
In the early 1990s, a quarter of married men in Cameroon had more than one wife, according to the country’s National Institute of Statistics. By 2004, just 11 percent were polygamous.
Likewise, the percentage of women who had at least one co-wife dropped to 30 percent in 2004 compared with 39 percent in 1991, institute data show.
Similar decreases are occurring in other countries across central and western Africa, says Savage Njikam, who oversees the University of Douala’s anthropology department.
“The more educated people are, the less likely they are to have the same household as their grandfather,” says Mrs. Njikam, a social anthropologist. “But you still will find educated women who will accept being second wives.”
Monogamous men and women cite another reason to avoid polygamy, one their polygamous counterparts are reluctant to discuss. Some multiwife households suffer from jealousy and conflict.
Sallahou Aboubakar, who grew up in Cameroon’s Muslim north in a two-wife home, says his mother’s disputes with her co-wife influenced him to choose monogamy.
“The wives don’t stay peaceful,” says Mr.. Aboubakar, who lives with his wife and their newborn baby in Yaounde, the capital. “It always causes problems.”
His wife’s aunt, Adamou Patou, overhearing the conversation speaks up to illustrate the point, telling a tale that has her family, all sitting on mats on the floor, roaring with laughter.
When her husband was alive, she says, she and her co-wife fought endlessly, mostly over where the husband would sleep. One morning, after the husband had spent too many nights with Patou, her co-wife entered the bedroom to find the husband freshly showered and back in bed. She threw a bucket of charcoal dust into the room, covering the bed and her husband in gray powder.
Despite such stories, some young Cameroonians continue to keep polygamy alive. Bertrand Folepe, who married his girlfriend when she became pregnant six years ago, took a second wife two years later at the urging of his parents. His father, who had eight wives, wanted him to marry a woman from his village.
Mr. Folepe didn’t protest; he is proud to carry on the tradition. On display in his family’s sitting room, which he shares with both wives, are portraits of each couple, side by side.
“If in the future I have a lot of money, I’ll take more [wives],” says Folepe, who makes a living selling small livestock.
Folepe, who lives with his wives and seven children in the small city of Dschang, has urbanized the polygamous lifestyle. Instead of dwelling in separate, adjacent homes like his family in the village where he grew up, his entire family shares one house. Each wife has her own bedroom, but the two share an outdoor kitchen, swapping cooking duties each week.
Other city-dwelling men have modernized polygamy differently, by creating separate households of independent families that share a father.
Even as traditional polygamy declines, it’s still common for men and women to have multiple partners, by either going outside their marriage or divorcing one spouse before marrying another.
Martha Ngum, head of the sociology and anthropology department at the University of Buea in southwest Cameroon, calls the latter trend “serial monogamy.” Women are driving the shift, she says, because they now attend university, work outside the home and are financially independent more than ever before.
But outside Cameroon’s cities, it’s still a man’s decision whether to take more than one wife and a woman’s responsibility to accept his choice.
Decades after accepting their husband’s decision to engage in polygamy, the Ndi Wamba wives now face another duty: providing for their many children without his financial support.
On the few days when the women aren’t cultivating the fields, they earn petty cash selling snacks at local markets. The wives hope their eldest sons, like Benoit, contribute small income. They also look to relatives for help; several of the children already have left the village compound to live with an uncle or grandmother.
For this family, the years ahead will not be easy. But as the Ndi Wamba women often say, “We must endure.”
