Tropical Disease Bingo!

Posted by Thryn on June 16th, 2009 filed in Goal 3, Living, Post

Peace Corps Cameroon Tropical Disease Bingo!

We’re in Yaounde this week for Mid-Service Medical, during which they give every volunteer a physical and test our bodily fluids to see if we’ve acquired any fun new tropical diseases. To commemorate the occasion of being in Cameroon for a whole year, I made an official Peace Corps Cameroon Tropical Disease Bingo Card. We haven’t yet decided what the prize for the winner will be. Ideas?

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TOT/TDW and other peace corps acronyms

Posted by Thryn on May 23rd, 2009 filed in Teaching, Training

Quiche dinner in the transit house

Those of us who are helping with training this summer/rainy season are in Yaounde this week and next for the TDW (Training Design Workshop) and TOT (Training of Trainers). Gabe and I are here designing the technical training sessions for the 5 incoming computer literacy trainees as well as working with the science and TEFL volunteers and trainers to design, organize and improve PST (Pre-Service Training). A lot goes into organizing the 11-week-long program. We decide, based on our own experience last year and input from other trainers and volunteers, what sessions to change, remove or add, and in what order to have them. But let’s remember that the Peace Corps is a U.S. Government organization so the way we do everything is handed down from the air-conditioned offices in Washington D.C. all the way to our conference room in the Peace Corps compound in Yaounde, Cameroon.

In an effort to standardize training worldwide, the Peace Corps wants each country to have 2-3 core competencies and sector competencies. These are the fundamental things that the trainees will have learned by the end of training. Then once we have the competencies, we write KSA’s for each of them (Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes required to achieve each competency). Then we break everything into technical training sessions, and for each session we have learning objectives. Now each of these learning objectives has to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Bound) and include the Kirkpatrick Evaluation Model (clearly describe the performer, performance, condition, and standard). Semantics are paramount. Sound fun? It’s not that fun. But it has to be done and as long as we keep the big picture in mind–effectively training these new arrivals–we can make it through the tedious moments (like when we spend 15 minutes debating between the words “discuss” “identify” or “list” as the active verb in the learning objective.

In-between the semantic debates and frustrating arguments over logistical issues with the training calendar, we have time to relax, watch movies, and catch up with other volunteers we haven’t seen in a while. A few of us are cooking dinners for everyone most nights and I’m enjoying spending time with them in the kitchen (where we belong so Gabe says (he’s joking (allegedly))). But one of my favorite things of all is watching our APCD with a flip-chart. It’s a graceful dance of marker and paper that can only be described as pure magic.

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HIV Moto Project Update

Posted by Gabe on May 6th, 2009 filed in Goal 1, Post, Secondary Projects

Project T shirt slogan

The intense fundraising phase of our regional project in the West has drawn to a close, and we are happy and excited to announce that our project has been fully funded! Thank you to all those that contributed to our project–our success in reaching our fundraising goal is due to your immense generosity.

Having given some money to help the development effort in Cameroon, you may be asking “What now?” Well, we volunteers from the West Region had our last HIV Moto Project meeting Saturday, and all elements of the training seminar are in place. We are feeling very positive, and are all looking forward to having the training which will take place Thursday and Friday in Bafoussam. Moto drivers from around the region have been selected to represent their different villages, and invitations and T-shirts have been printed and are being distributed. “Oui, Nous Pouvons” can be translated into English as “Yes, We Can” and is based on a motivational phrase used in French-speaking Cameroon. It seems to be a popular sentiment in more places than one! The subtitle goes: “protect each other, live positively, help each other.”

During the seminar, moto drivers will be trained as peer educators in various topics related to HIV/AIDS including stigma, distinguishing facts & myths, and important medical information about the epidemic. Once the training is complete, each driver will receive a certificate of completion and we will schedule HIV/AIDS education events and testing in each village represented. We Peace Corps volunteers will work together during the training to educate the moto drivers, along with medical officials and NGOs such as RIDEV.

Having spoken with the moto drivers I selected from our town, I was pleased to hear that they are very enthusiastic about the project, and feel honored that they were chosen to participate.

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Doing some graphic design in the Peace Corps

Posted by Thryn on April 24th, 2009 filed in Post, Secondary Projects

Ridev Website Homepage

Here’s a quick preview of one of the projects I’m working on that I’m hoping to finish next week. RIDEV is an organization supporting development and promoting the protection of human rights, based in Bafoussam, the capital of the West Region.

In addition to designing and building their website, I designed a new logo for them and they’ll also get new letterhead and business cards to go with it. Someone said something about drink cozies and custom printed pagne too–I think they were getting a bit carried with ideas about all the things on which they can put their new logo. I’m really enjoying all the design projects I’ve been doing lately. Don’t get me wrong, I love teaching computers, but it’s nice to put my BFA in graphic design to some good use here in Cameroon.

In between teaching classes, making websites, and working on materials for the HIV Moto project (update on that project coming soon!), I also designed a few t-shirts last week for Social Designer. They have weekly design competitions, and when I saw one to design a shirt defining and promoting world peace, I figured I might as well submit some designs, since I like peace and all. If you like them, you can sign up on Social Designer and “favorite” them to help me win.

World Peace T-shirts

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Teaching challenges in Cameroon

Posted by Thryn on April 20th, 2009 filed in Aid, Goal 1, Post, Teaching

Students working during open lab hours on Saturday

The second term has ended and after a nice two-week break, we began the third term last week. The second term went relatively well. Our students’ test scores improved, we’re learning the system, improving our teaching methods, and developing better relationships with our students. Teaching here can be obviously challenging for many reasons including cultural differences, differences in our systems of education, and poor resources. When faced with challenges, our francophone colleagues often say “on fait comment?” (what does one do?) but our anglophone colleagues are more inclined to say “we are just managing.” Here are 7 of the biggest teaching challenges we face and how we manage them.

7. Teachers don’t come to class. The absence or lateness of other teachers causes two problems. First, the students don’t take school seriously when their teachers come late or not at all (go figure), and second, when students are left alone in their classroom without a teacher, do you think they sit quietly and catch up on their homework? Maybe one out of 75. The other 74 shout, play games and/or throw things into the windows of neighboring classrooms. There are no substitute teachers. Over time, we have gotten our students accustomed to the fact that our classes start on time, but if students are outside making noise, well we sort of just have to shout over them.

6. Overcrowded classrooms. My largest class is 80 students, but that’s nothing considering many classes at our school have over 120 students. The students sit four to a bench, with barely enough elbow room to take notes, making a few things more difficult, namely giving tests, managing discipline, making sure they’re all following the lesson, and it’s near impossible to learn all of their names when I teach them for one hour per week. We’ve tried many classroom management techniques, some of which worked, some of which didn’t. I make multiple versions of our tests for example, and you should have seen the looks of shock and disappointment on their faces when I told them that their test is different than the person sitting next to them.

5. The classrooms are student-based instead of teacher-based. As opposed to the system we’re used to, where each teacher has his or her own classroom and the students move around, here the students stay in the classroom and the teachers move around. In a school such as ours, I honestly can’t imagine the kind of chaos that would occur if all of the students changed classes every hour, but this system has some distinct disadvantages. First, it’s difficult to prepare a classroom ahead of time for a lesson. I can’t draw diagrams or write points on the board before the lesson begins for example. It’s also difficult to control tardiness. But we manage by preparing our lessons for quick board work, and when possible, you can draw examples on large paper and bring them to class.

4. The front gate. Sometimes there is a staff member standing at the front gate, not allowing students to enter the school after 7:30. Sometimes the gate is completely unattended and students can come and go as they please. Needless to say it’s hard to expect students to understand or respect the rules when they are inconsistently enforced. The school in general is not very secure–explaining the poop incident as well as the widespread vulgar graffiti found in the classrooms. When there are graphic drawings of vulgar deeds on the walls of the classroom, I’m not sure what else to do but ignore them.

3. Electricity. It can go off any time of day, several times per day, disrupting practical lessons in the lab. We manage by always preparing a back-up theory lesson, but the unfortunate thing is that with 19 computers and thousands of students sharing the lab hours, if a practical lesson gets cancelled for a class, those students might not touch the computers for another 4 weeks.

2. The chalkboards suck. Each one has a different flavor. Some eat an entire piece of chalk in a half hour, others are chipping and have large areas that are unusable. Others are badly positioned and the glare from the windows makes them impossible to see. For my Form 4 class I just stopped using the classroom altogether because their chalkboard is unusable (and the noise from the neighboring Form 3 classroom makes teaching impossible). For others, I plan the lessons based on the condition of the board. For Lower Sixth, there are only a few spots on the board I can use, so they have most of their notes given in dictation and I only write new vocabulary words to show the spelling or draw small examples.

1. The anglophone students have no computer books. This is by far the biggest challenge, but also the one which we’ve had the greatest success in overcoming. Unlike U.S. schools, where the school issues books and students return them at the end of the year, students here must buy their books and I don’t think I have to emphasize how poor many of the students are. We are in the process of finding affordable computer books and workbooks for our students (we may end up writing them over the summer). They have to cost $2 or $4 maximum in order for most students to be able to buy them. In the meantime, we started a system of making study sheets for the material we teach, with vocabulary, screenshots of the programs, and more detailed information than we can write on the board. We give one copy to the class prefect, and the rest of the class makes their own copies that they use to study. Since we started doing this at the beginning of the 2nd term, the students test scores improved drastically! It’s amazing what a difference having material to study can do for learning!

Next year we’re sure to face more challenges, but it’s clear that with each term we are learning how to work with, around, and sometimes against the system and becoming better teachers. At the very least, all of my classrooms were poop-free at the beginning of the this term so that’s something.

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Beep Your Horn for HIV Prevention

Posted by Thryn on March 25th, 2009 filed in Aid, Goal 1, Post, Secondary Projects

Moto drivers in West Cameroon

Cameroon has one of the largest HIV epidemics in Sub-Saharan Africa, with almost half a million adults living with HIV in 2005.* It should be noted that these are only counting the people courageous enough to get tested. If you think HIV is a touchy subject in the U.S. or other developed countries…consider the fact that during training, we met a man who found out he was HIV positive when no one in his village would talk to him or shake his hand after the hospital revealed his status before even telling him.

Despite the efforts of NGOs and government-sponsored programs to educate the population about HIV and prevention, the number of HIV positive Cameroonians is still growing. Here in the West Region, the volunteers are working together on a project that will train and empower moto taxi drivers as peer educators to promote HIV prevention. These moto drivers are men, usually between the ages of 14 and 30, many who have had to drop out of school to earn money for their families. They work from morning until night, giving people rides through town for 100CFA (about 20 cents) per ride. They also spend a lot of time talking and waiting with other moto drivers when there are no customers. This is why we thought they would be ideal peer educators to disseminate information about the importance of HIV prevention.

For our project, two moto drivers from each of 11 villages in our region will attend a two-day seminar on HIV prevention and transmission, and be trained as peer educators. We will also offer free HIV testing. After the seminar, we will work closely with them to schedule and facilitate informational seminars in our communities. Our goal is to diminish the spread of HIV in the West Region, and to empower the moto drivers as development agents, ensuring that the progress we make will continue after we leave.

We need to raise money for this project! We are actually extremely behind in our fundraising efforts and urgently need to complete our fundraising in the next two weeks or the project won’t happen. I know everyone is thinking, “but you guys, there’s an economic crisis!” But we assure you that no contribution is too small. You all know I always say, something is better than nothing! Visit our Peace Corps project page Beep Your Horn for HIV Prevention for more information and to donate your hard-earned cash to help your favorite West Region volunteers realize our regional project. Remember, your donation is tax-deductible!

*Source: UNAids 2007 AIDS epidemic update

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A personal toilet for 2.6 billion people?

Posted by Thryn on March 21st, 2009 filed in Aid, Post

Image from Core77.com design blog

I saw this pretty cool article on Core77.com’s design blog about a project that aims to help improve the sanitation problems that particularly affect developing countries. Peter Thuvander, co-designer of the Peepoo Bag summarizes the problem:

To let you in on the numbers, approximately 2.6 billion people lack sanitation. The consequences of this are horrific. One child in the world dies every 15 seconds due to contaminated water. If there ever was a holy grail of design and technology, this is it.

The United Nations Millenium Development Goals (in which 189 countries pledged to meet 8 development goals by 2015) calls on us to increase the proportion of people with sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. The Peepoo bag has the potential to help us reach these targets. It’s a personal single-use toilet and it sounds pretty awesome because it first sanitizes the human waste, preventing it from contaminating the environment, spreading diseases, and doing all of the bad stuff that poo can do, and the fully biodegradable bag also breaks down into fertilizer. The bags could be collected if the infrastructure exists, but even if they are not and simply discarded on the side of the road (as most things are here for example), it would not contaminate the environment.

I won’t get into all of the excrement situations that I’ve personally observed here in Cameroon that could be aided with the Peepoo bag, just trust me when I say that a lot of people could use this. It’s currently being tested on a large-scale in the developing world such as in India and African countries.

To read more about it, check out the website peepoople.com, and while you’re at it, you can also read more about the UN Millenium Development Goals and see all of the goals we we need to meet by 2015!

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The rainy season is coming…

Posted by Gabe on March 20th, 2009 filed in Living, Post

Mountains during the rainy season-clear and beautiful

Mountains during the dry season can hardly be seen, if at all

Yesterday afternoon, after Thryn and I ducked into an omelet shack to avoid increasing raindrops, we knew that the rainy season is finally on its way. We felt relief sitting there eating our spaghetti omelets watching the downpour just beyond the awning. It’s been somewhat of a long hall these past couple of months, with way too much dust, very dry heat (though nothing like the Grand North!), and most difficult of all–no water. It has been twenty-one days now without water service, and when you’re in the middle of town like us, and on the upper level of a building, it’s pretty tough to get by if there is no running water. We are very lucky however that our friends here look out for us, one in particular helping us keep our water reserve containers replenished.

We’ve heard that this is the worst water crisis our town has seen in a long time. I was told it’s been five years since the water was out for over a week. And they are saying that perhaps two more weeks may go by before the water returns! But I’ve observed that the life here goes on. People are a little more stressed than average, but still working hard and continuing there lives normally. One can get by on very little and still be happy.

And now we just wait. Soon the rain will become more frequent and bring with it the return of our water supply, cooler temperatures and clearer skies. When we first arrived at post, I remember being mesmerized by the view of the beautiful crisp mountains all around us. Recently the mountain range has been completely obscured by the particle-laided air. This morning, on our way to school, we saw the mountains all around us for the first time in a while. It feels great to see them again!

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Name your dream…

Posted by Thryn on March 17th, 2009 filed in Aid, Cross Culture, Teaching

Duck, Duck, Goose by Kevin Meadows in Namibia

One of my best friends, fellow adventuring volunteer teacher, one of the “best men” at our wedding, and more importantly a stand-up photographer, Kevin has entered the awesome photography competition “Name Your Dream Assignment” in which photographers submit their ideas for a dream assignment, and the winner receives $50,000 to shoot their idea. I seriously love the idea he submitted and it’s not just because we’re friends:

School

Schools are where people learn to read and write but also where cultures pass on values to their children. I will photograph how schools reflect our common experiences as people and the gaps they reflect between us in our global society.

Each day, billions of children go to school. For many it is a right of passage that is merely endured. For others, the weight of families and communities are on their shoulders as they desperately try create a new future for their families. Some schools give their students access to the latest cutting edge technology. Other schools are not more than a shady spot under a tree where students write in the dirt. Despite the wide disparity of resources and educational value some things are common through out. There are children, teachers, and dreams of the future. By photographing schools worldwide I hope to to show what is a common experience among billions of us as well as what is unimaginable to so many.

Kevin has taught in Maryland, Namibia, and most recently, Costa Rica. I think the perspective he could potentially bring to a wide audience through photographing schools around the world–from schools in the developed world, to perhaps the school in our little town in Cameroon–is important and essential in so many ways. I really feel this is a story that should be told, and anyone who has seen his photographs knows that Kevin will certainly tell it well. Between now and April 3rd, the public will vote on all of the submitted ideas. The top 20 will then be judged by an “expert panel.” If you have a moment, please vote for Kevin’s idea by following this link, and help him win! (Note: you must register with the website to vote, but it’s a small price to pay for helping him realize this dream assignment. To read more about Kevin and see some of his online photo galleries, visit his website.

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The coming of the Pope brings change to Yaounde - good and bad

Posted by Gabe on March 16th, 2009 filed in Aid, Post

Yaounde-a view of the stadium

A big topic of discussion this week is the pope’s visit to Yaounde, Cameroon. From a recent article in the New York Times (no longer free) and a report released by Reuters, to announcements on local radio and television, the visit is naturally getting a lot of attention and is in some aspects very controversial.

While the visit by the pontiff is a milestone in that it is the first time Pope Benedict XVI  will visit Africa, it is causing quite a stir here in Cameroon due to the fact that the Cameroonian government is destroying and clearing out the stalls of street vendors in Yaounde. While it is said that these vendor stalls were not established legally, some of the controversy revolves around the way in which Yaounde authorities are going about the “cleaning” process. Traveling through Yaounde this week, one will see positive things like less trash all around, recent planting of flowers along the roads and at intersections and fresh paint on buildings and walls. But one will also see negative things like craters of rubble where small shops and vendor stalls used to be before they were abruptly demolished. The Peace Corps office also advised volunteers of the possibility of a rise in crime in the aftermath of the destruction and in the midst of the excitement during the Pope’s visit this weekend.

The questions on many minds is whether all this destruction was necessary, and if it could have been avoided. While it is against the law to own and operate a stall along the street, these laws were not enforced (and therefore not respected). From my experiences in Yaounde, the street vendors seemed to be the life of the city. One can buy anything from clothes, shoes, electronics, fruit, and cell phone credit. Now on the eve of the Pope’s arrival, it can be seen in the collateral damage and absence of venders, and is widely reported that the laws have been suddenly and harshly enforced with tragic consequences. The report by Reuters recounts street vendors being chased down and beaten by authorities, and their products destroyed. The same report contains a testimony by a woman whose stall was demolished overnight along with all of her equipment.

After these reports, the issue quickly became a topic of conversation in the blogging community. A missionary in Yaounde wrote about the demolition and refacing, and his article stirred a wealth of commentary from bloggers including Steve Jackson, a VSO volunteer in Bamenda who also wrote a post on the topic, and Thryn also added her two cents (or 10 CFA):

This is a really complicated situation. Our country director sent us an email about it, but it was to alert us to the potential of petty crime and theft that will likely result from the destruction.

Even if it’s true that they wouldn’t move if they were asked, they should still have been given the opportunity. Perhaps if faced with the reality that their stall will be in fact destroyed, they would have made the decision to clear out their merchandise and move. Two wrongs don’t make a right so-to-speak.

We see the same patterns over and over here from big issues like destruction of illegal stalls, to small things like enforcing tardiness at our school. The authorities are consistently inconsistent with rule-enforcement, ranging from not enforcing them at all, to beating people and destroying property for breaking a rule. One day they don’t let any students in the gate after 7:30, the next day the gate is left unattended. One day people are permitted to sell merchandise on the street, the next day their stall is destroyed. I wonder how they expect people to understand and respect the rules if this is how they are enforced?

The complexity of this issue mirrors the complexity of so many other things here in Cameroon. Something that can seem very positive can have many sides, and be more complicated in reality. As for us, we feel truly sad for those people whose lives were affected so negatively by this upcoming visit.

Some more information:
msnbc - Cameroon readies for Pope Benedict XVI’s visit
International Herald Tribune - Pope to see both ugly and bright sides of Cameroon
crtv - Official Programme of papal visit

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