How is it from the Whiteman?

Belated greetings and well-wishing from Bamenda, Cameroon! I am currently about half-way through my Independent Study Project for my SIT program, in which I am looking at the perceptions, realities, and interventions for nutrition for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). I am based in the capital of the Anglophone Northwest Province, which means that my French is not exactly getting much use—but either is my English since most people here speak only Pidgin (hence the title--here "whiteman" is a genderless term to take the place of nasara [fulfulde] and la blanche [french] elsewhere in the country--one of the benefits of a diverse country, i guess, is never running out of names to call foreigners). Bamenda is a pretty big town/small city, and as the provincial seat it affords me access to the provincial delegations for all the different ministries, as well as a lot of NGO’s that find the Anglophone setting more amenable to their missions.

My advisor is a social worker with a local NGO called Alpha Medical Services Organisation, which is basically contracted by the Provincial Technical Group for the Fight Against HIV/AIDS to go into communities and help them set up the government-mandated Local AIDS Control Committees while also assessing the local HIV/AIDS situation and local context. Though I am not doing direct service for my ISP, I am working with my advisor to develop a brochure for PLWHAs and their caregivers that AMSO can give out to their LACCs to advise them on good nutrition, and also almost every person I have interviewed connected with the PTG, Provincial Hospital, or various NGO’s has asked for a copy of my final paper, so I would like to think of this as a kind of indirect service. Hopefully my findings will help all of these stakeholders improve their effectiveness at what they are currently doing, or to help them devise new interventions.

I would have loved to have gotten involved with a PLWHA support group or peer education program, but as I am repeatedly finding, things are slow to happen in Cameroon, and if they do happen, it is usually infrequently. Three and a half weeks is about as small of a timeframe as you can feasibly get an ISP done in a country where the President has been president for the past 26 years—asking for a regular service placement seems absurd in some ways, especially since I am still not even sure if the idea of direct service exists here, beyond the Peace Corps volunteers that are constantly around. And even with 2 years to “get something done,” they still experience sometimes insurmountable obstacles and mind-numbing inefficiencies. Cameroonians involved in local and international NGO’s are almost always professionals, and an undergraduate student would have little to contribute to their work.

What Cameroon needs is not a cadre of well-intentioned but unskilled international volunteers (I hesitate to put most Peace Corps workers in this category, even though in Cameroon they are almost always of the 22-year-old fresh-out-of-college type, because I think that their sustained presence in a community achieves a lot of intangible goods, even if their outputs are negligible), but widespread poverty alleviation, “bonne gouvernance” without corruption on every single level, infrastructure (14 hour rides on unpaved roads will convince anyone of that), less tribalism (with over 300 languages and as many ethnic groups it is hard to have any widespread national unity), and a better education system (illiteracy abounds, and even if you are literate, you most likely have never been asked to think critically in your life, only rote memorization). One can find these problems almost anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, and maybe a few in Durham; but I finally realize my naivete when I tried to tell someone this summer that the relative poverty of the American poor could be equated to the absolute poverty of the African destitute. It is not the same—not even close. Downtown Durham is not deepest, darkest Africa.

But that does not mean that the poverty and problems we can find in Durham (or anywhere in America) should not be fought against, and with the deepest commitment. Even though we have paved roads, good-enough governance, and universal education, we should not ignore the “underside” of our well-functioning system, and I still think that Hurricane Katrina did more to highlight our determined ignorance of that underside than anything else in recent history. If anything, being in Africa has only strengthened my determination to use the fruits of the privileges afforded to me by simply being born to a middle-class American family to work towards effective solutions to problems in my own country, as well as elsewhere, though I am still unsure of the order for now. There are a lot of injustices to be found the world over, but I increasingly think that it is simply irresponsible for Americans to ignore the ones right in our own backyard, and instead traipse off to the far corners of the earth to fix problems there.

Last year at Duke I was involved with Students of the World, a documentary/activist organization. In May I traveled with SOW to Porto Alegre, Brazil, to document the work of the NGO Embarq on sustainable transportation. Throughout last year I was nurturing the idea of starting a domestic counterpart to SOW, or at least starting a parallel domestic trip, applying the SOW methodology and ideology to problems at home rather than exclusively abroad. If anything, my time abroad has led me to deepen my commitment to this idea, and while I have been gone SOW has definitely signed on board. So when I get back I will be working on getting a domestic trip off the ground, and I definitely think my experience abroad will help me in ways I never expected in framing the goals and objectives and realities of such an effort.

-Rachel Massell, October 2006