Girl Power, Feminism, and Lady-Topics

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of participating in the National Girls’ Forum. The planning committee worked in Yaounde over the weekend and arrived in Limbe early in order to set up. Despite hectic last-minute changes and much running amok, it was delightful to be back in conference-planning mode and to be able to work on such an important issue. The girls that attended the conference were dynamic and enthusiastic, and, tacky as it may seem, their participation gave me a good deal of hope for the future of girls in Cameroon.  Even my Program Manager Amadaou, who was sitting in on the girls’ sessions, mentioned how moved he was by the girls’ participation. The end-of-conference celebration terminated with the girls learning a dance to Beyonce’s “Grown Woman”, and it was both charming and impressive. Not-so-subtle brag: my friend Agnes, who accompanied me to the Forum, absolutely killed it and acquired the nickname Beyonce from her peers as a result.

Back at post, I’m realizing that pretty much all of my projects focus on girls’ empowerment: girls’ clubs, girls’ health classes, a girls’ scholarship program, plus life skills classes and sports teams with girls and boys that promote gender equality. I can’t say I would have originally anticipated this, but I’m very happy with it as it stands.

Until my later years in college, I was a reluctant feminist at best. In chipper upper-middle-class circles stateside, it can be easy to look around and simply accept that gender equality exists. Here in Cameroon, and specifically in the conservative Adamawa region, such is not the case. There is a marked difference in the lives of young boys and young girls in the area. Boys are expected to go to school and receive their high school diploma, while girls (especially Fulbe girls) are often expected to marry after CEM 1 or CEM 2 (roughly the equivalent of 5th/6th Grade). If a family lacks in money, it is the girls that are removed from school first. Outside of classes, boys can work on their homework or play with friends, while girls are tasked with the bulk of household chores. The division of labor in the home is heavily slanted towards women. Throughout town and indeed country-wide, people casually assert that women are the “weaker sex”, are reliant on men for support, and exist in order to have a family and please their husbands.

Daily, I encounter sexist thinking and find the need to stand up for myself as a woman. Explaining why I am here working and have not yet “settled down with a man and had babies” is always a fun one. Being sexually harassed, and/or proposed to, as I walk through town is simply the status quo. Shocking Cameroonian men with the fact that I know how to drive a car (and learned how to before they did!) is a good time. And speaking of driving, explaining to pretty much every taxi driver in the Grand South that no, I don’t want him to drive me to his house so that we can “mix our colors” is swiftly getting old.

Half of the harassment I receive is because I’m a foreigner; the other half is directly related to my gender. So while life will be rather annoying (“derange-y”, as we say) for two years, I simultaneously can see a light at the end of the tunnel, whereas my female Cameroonian friends have lived with the sexism and harassment since birth and will continue to cope with it for the rest of their lives.

My friend Marie is a particular inspiration to me on this front. She teaches at the technical high school, where she is the only female auto-mechanics instructor in the department. Her peers in university, her departmental colleagues, and her current students have been and are almost entirely male, but she holds her own. She’s smart, hilarious, incredibly engaging, and a great teacher: I’d sum her up as being generally badass.

Agnes, who came to Girls’ Forum with me, also fits this mold of being a woman working in what is generally regarded as a man’s sphere. As one of the two female soccer refs in town and one of few in the region, she’s encountered many a douchey male soccer team that sees her and exclaims that she should go home and send another ref, since they don’t want a girl to ref their game. Her retort? She blows her whistle and yells “Get to the line! I’m your ref, I’m in charge, and you’re playing NOW!” I’ll repeat myself and sum her up as generally badass.

I could go on all day about the amazing women here who inspire me, but I have plans to blog post with portraits and will wait for that time to do so. Suffice it to say, girls’ empowerment is an incredibly important issue in Cameroon that I am thrilled to be working on, and the wonderful ladies that I spend my time with constantly inspire me to do just that.

Six Months in Country

Last week marked my sixth month in Cameroon, and I’ve been trying for a few days now to summarize my experience thus far: to determine favorite anecdotes; to sum up all of my projects and travels; to extrapolate a greater meaning, a lesson, a purpose of sorts from it all. I can’t say I’ve succeeded in deducing some sort of enlightened, revelatory fact about my time here thus far, but I can attest that I have already done some, seen much, and learned more.

One of my original reasons for wanting to do the Peace Corps was that I wanted to see what development work actually looked like on the ground. Development work is varied, and I can’t say that I was completely sold on the Peace Corps approach to begin with, or that I’m fully onboard now. I have begun to see, however, what grassroots community development focused on teaching knowledge and skills, as opposed to giving funds or building schools, can look like. And despite my occasional frustration with Peace Corp’s lack of financial resources, I can still say that I much prefer our approach to others, such as the Plumpy Nut program, that I think are fine(ish) in theory but become problematic in the field. I’ve seen how projects can go awry: how hospital volunteers enroll their non-malnourished babies in the program so that they themselves can have plumpy nut bars as a snack. Elsewhere, I’ve seen how corruption and nepotism can keep good projects from advancing in the community and can keep utterly unqualified people in jobs they can’t perform. I’ve learned how people will lose motivation and vanish the second they learn that they won’t receive money out of a project. At the same time, I’ve met many truly dedicated, determined individuals who work tirelessly to combat these frustrating parts of society here to make development work. These are the people like my counterpart Franc, or my A2Empowerment contacts, or the IMC team who really motivate me to continue my work here in Cameroon. They are, simply put, wonderful people.

From mid-February through mid-March, I was finally able to get out of Meiganga for a bit and see other parts of Cameroon. It took me about five minutes upon the train arriving in the muggy, humid as hell Grand South for me to realize that the Adamawa is the best region in the country and that I should never leave it again. I exaggerate (travel is fun!), but I will say that Yaoundé is much more tolerable when sitting pool-side at the US Embassy or drinking chilled cocktails at the air-conditioned Hilton. After an obnoxiously fancy time in Yaoundé, I headed to Bamenda, the capital of the Northwest region, where I was promptly befuddled by the presence of English-speaking taxi drivers and a store with deli meats. I spent around 10 days there for our In-Service Training with the rest of my stage from Bafia, and it was both a wonderful and overwhelming time. I didn’t know what to do with myself when surrounded 24/7 by people who all spoke English: I have no idea how I’ll cope upon returning to America. Discussing projects and learning about everyone else’s sites, I was able to compare my situation in Meiganga to others. Many PCVs warn against comparisons, saying you’ll resent people with the “Posh Corps” lifestyle. I have to say, however, that the challenges I face in my post, like a more conservative culture, limited girls’ rights, and heightened poverty, generally make me all the more motivated to do work here. While I wouldn’t say no to running water, I’m generally happy with my post and the projects I plan to pursue here.

I also had the opportunity to do some touristy things over the past month. From Bamenda, a group of us ventured around two hours away to the Ndewara Tea Estate, where we took a moto ride around the property to see where Nestle and other major companies grow their tea, and later got to play with a chimp, who was randomly kept there by the estate owner. Later, my friend Kate and I detoured through Bansoa after the conference to see our friend Becky’s post. We did much fripping (thrift shopping), chatting, and cooking, and it was a delightful trip over all. These little trips were really rejuvenating, and I’m looking forward to a bigger trip to Limbe in a few weeks.

Moving forward, I have a very busy few weeks planned now that I’m back at post. I was selected to be on the National Girls’ Forum Committee, which means I get to help organize an annual conference on girls’ empowerment. I’m thrilled, since conference planning is more or less my jam. This year’s conference is in a mere three weeks, so the countdown is on and last-minute planning is underway. The conference is in Limbe this year, so I’ll get to go see some black-sand beaches and bioluminescent waters and gaze dreamily at Mt Cameroon in the distance for a few days. Until then, it’s back to teaching life skills courses in Meiganga. I’m also beginning to recruit peer educators who I’ll work with on sexual reproductive health, gender-based violence, and HIV/AIDs awareness campaigns. So far, some truly delightful girls from my Centre Social class have expressed interest and I’m looking forward to working with them!