In Which My Ability to Make a Point is Shown to Have Weakened Exponentially in the Past Two Years

Following the presidential campaigns from a decidedly not-American context, I've never been so grateful for our democratic process, the choices it affords (however slightly the choices vary), and the civic activity it inspires. I mean, I'm living in a place where politicians literally show up in a village with wads of dollar bills to pay for votes (apparently they haven't yet discovered the efficiency of tax breaks and defense contracts) and where supporting the opposition party is a little like trying to keep a cougar as a domestic pet, nearly always a lost cause, and sometimes dangerous. I'm also a little embarrassed at how detailed the campaign trail is reported here in Cameroon (how does a piece on Obama's relationship with his pastor honestly trump an update on the continued unrest in Chad? It's like 50 miles east! And why should the dude that sells me fruit care about Obama anyway?). The plotline of the soap opera that interests me the most however, is the plight of Hilary Clinton, equal parts impressive and maddening, but never less than fascinating. For anyone afraid I've decided to go political, don't worry, this all ties into my thoughts on African development and my experiences thereof. I have nothing to say about the campaign; I probably won't even vote. And don't you think if I was going to go Jane Fonda (too dated a reference?), I would have done it in college as a political science major like all those other Young Republican assholes?

Anywho, what interests me about Hilary is the masculine/feminine tap dance she is forced to perform in order to appeal to American voters. She obviously can't be a weepy, impulsive girl who hesitates to bomb an Iraqi textile mill for fear of 'ruining all the pretty fabric,' but the days of Margaret Thatcher are over, and neither can she don her trusty strap-on (we all know she has one) and storm around the white house, ordering the bombing of daycares and halfway houses, in between picking fights with the bodyguards. She must be convincingly pragmatic and holistic, understanding and decisive, sensitive but not sentimental. She must be identifiably feminine, but masculine enough to lead in the traditional sense of the Presidency. (The way I see it, we're simply not yet ready for a feminine Chief of State without that last qualification.) For my money, she did and is doing an ok job, though she still comes off too butch for many people's taste, and for a while I just accepted that it had to be that way. But then I took a look at my locality in Cameroon.

The situation of women in Africa (and Cameroon as my choice microcosm) varies a lot, but nowhere is it close to the progress western women enjoy. I occasionally grumbled in the States about vague discriminations I read or heard about, though only for solidarity's sake, because the truth is, I'd never experienced real, overt sexism. This isn't to say I'm not aware of the entrenched, insidious sexual assumptions that hinder women in the workplace and social situations without them even realizing it; I'm saying that stuff looks so incredibly minor compared to what I witness here daily. It's like me whining that my soup is cold while the chick next to me is being eaten alive by a shark that just jumped out of her bowl. I still have the right to complain, but understanding her plight (and indeed how the crap a shark can survive or even fit in a bowl of soup) will render me all the more informed in my quest.

I'm not going to go into just how thoroughly women's rights are eroded, or how bleak many of their lives are, because quite frankly it's a downer, and nothing that hasn't been written about numerous times. If you really want the skinny, I'll be happy to oblige you in the form of a personal email, decorated with clip art flowers and balloons to make you feel better. What applies here is the fact that for women with the luck to be raised with money, resources and education, things are decidedly better. There are even some ministers who are female, as well as school directors, doctors, and other elected officials. Such was not the case 20 years ago, so no one can argue that things aren't moving right along. What these women have in common with Clinton is that theoretically, they should be doing the same tap dance. They're women in positions of unprecedented power, in a country that in general still views women as worthless when childless and across-the-board capricious to a fault. But these women aren't tapping. They're not even line-dancing. They're doing their jobs, unabashedly female and making no apologies for it. They still take care of the household (though normally with help), dress delicately (in Muslim garb if applicable), and tend to bring a decidedly female perspective to the proceedings, regardless of the milieu. They can somehow be all those seemingly contradictory adjectives I listed above, without being inconsistent. Long story short, female Cameroonian leaders have their shit together, despite all indications that this should be impossible. For a while, this didn't make a whole lot of sense, and I admit I'm still not sure exactly how the dynamics work, but a piece of the puzzle came to me when my cell phone reception was activated.

Cameroon has gone from a land of the occasional land line to almost completely cell-compatible in about 5 years. This means people used to sending written messages to family with strangers on motorcycles (or cows, as it were) or not communicating at all suddenly have immediate access across the country. This jolt in technology has led many new customers to use their phones less-than-efficiently, simply because they're not used to the idea of phones period, let alone portable, anywhere and everywhere phones equipped with cameras and mp3 players. Some are too habituated with communicating rarely that they hardly use the phone (racking up neglect charges they're not even aware of). Others call someone a neighborhood over and talk for half an hour, costing them 30 American dollars when they could have just walked the few blocks. Some people's knowledge of manipulation ends with turning on the phone and playing Snake. Globalization dictates that these people have a right to new technology (at that they're a new market for it), but no effort is made to adopt the technology to African society, or to inform the population on how to best utilize it.

The same is true, to a different end, with women's rights and the structure of the state. Cameroon began campaigning for more women in positions of power mainly because the international community advised it that it should. People began advocating for Western-inspired rights and regulations, even at a time when the percentage of girls completing grade school was below 50%. The ideological jump, much like a technological one, forced the concerned players to improvise and make sense of the developed world ideas and Cameroonian realities. Traditionally, men and women were (and still are in a lot of places) considered fundamentally different creatures. While America's long and gradual struggle for equality included a distinct element of sameness, that 'women can perform just like men,' no one would argue so in Cameroon because men and women can't be equal; they are simply different and incomparable. Therefore, when women were originally thrust into positions of responsibility, there was never the expectation that they would act like their male counterparts. I'm sure they were originally assumed to be too sentimental and maybe not as smart, but they proved themselves without losing their gender identity, because it was never expected of them to change. In this case, the Cameroonian adjustment actually aided the proceedings.

I'm not arguing that it's bad that Cameroon has cell phone service, or that promoting western democracy and values is wrong or misguided; I'm simply noting that often, very little attention is paid to the context of the new environment, so can we really be surprised that 'democratic' Cameroon has been ruled by the same man for nearly 30 years? I find it terribly interesting that a makeshift women's lib movement actually produced dynamic leaders, but I'm well aware that wasn't an intended outcome, nor is it true across-the-board. It's simply a happy accident that the female elite in Cameroon don't have to battle the expectations of masculinity Hilary Clinton faces, and I'm not sure how much that fact helps the pesky other 95% of the population still trying to get through high school healthy and unmarried.

Yay Cameroon! There are monkeys and giraffes and elephants too! Everyone is smiling and happy!

…Ok, I can't figure out how to load balloon images. Hopefully the exclamation points sufficed to mask all the, you know, social evils.

Until next time, SLAV

Rainy? Season

Ok, in all honesty, I started writing this blog over a month ago, and its original inspiration was the dark irony that the U.S., particularly my region, was experiencing devastating floods at the same time that Cameroon was in the middle of a pretty serious drought. You get what I was going for? Opposites. Anyway, I went on to talk about the nature of the drought, its implications for my village and so forth, in what I consider a delightful little commentary on rural populations' utter reliance on consistent climate patterns, and how scary this is in the face of current global trends. I was pretty happy with myself, until I forgot to upload it when I was internet-accessed, and realized by the time it would see the light of your computer screen, the floods would be extremely old news, and the drought talk completely obsolete. So, instead of providing further proof that I am quite severely behind the times, I scrapped all the weather talk and wrote an update of my projects. Out of sheer laziness (and the desire to thematically tie-in this introduction), the original title remains. Note: For insight into just how out of the American cultural loop I am, you need simply play me a hits station on the radio and watch my eyes dart around as I tentatively as who aldskf is.

Right now, our health team in the midst of two preventative campaigns, 'Polio Eradication' (government-mandated) and 'Breast Milk Promotion' (me-mandated). You can guess which has better funding. Polio is still crippling people here, despite its disappearance in the developed world circa 1940. I would estimate I know about ten people personally who've been wheelchair-bound since childhood (if they can afford the wheelchair-most can't) and though rates have slowed dramatically in the past ten years, (particularly) rural kids are still contracting polio through dirty water and ending up with malformed limbs and an almost complete inability to make a living. In urban areas, the majority of street beggars are polio victims, who literally crawl or slide around on their hands and knees with a plastic bowl for donations. Babies that come in for weighings and vaccinations receive the polio vaccine automatically via two drops of pink liquid in the mouth, paid for by the state (which means paid for by the WHO or other aid organizations). Normally I give it while a nurse gives the kid a tetanus shot; we've found its bitter taste to be a good distraction from the shock of the shot.

The campaign goes far above and beyond these measures. It's not called an 'eradication' for nothing. During the drives, generally 3-day weekends, nurses and community health workers and random volunteers literally go door to door ('saare be saare' in their language), giving any and every kid under 5 a few drops of the vaccine. Every neighborhood, outskirt village and rural site is accounted for, and every house mapped out. The goal is obviously to hit every kid, though the majority are already vaccinated. Incredibly, the main difficulty achieving this isn't a lack of organization or motivation from the volunteers (an issue common in most community health projects), but the refusal of parents to vaccinate their children. In central Bibemi, where I live and work, this isn't much of an issue, because the parents are educated enough, or the Good Word has spread enough that everyone understands the concept and utility of vaccinations. In the true country, however, villagers exhibit strong distrust of hospital staff and particularly their 'white medicine' ('lekki jey nassara'). Some believe the drops will harm the kids; others refuse to believe it's free; many just assume it's not necessary. The nature of these villages and their people make such reactions easier to understand, but I find describing such isolation and simplicity of lifestyle hard to articulate adequately for Americans. I'm gonna give it a college try.

There are places in Cameroon where a few extended families (a few hundred people) will live and farm miles from the next village. This is an issue because they have no method of transportation other than walking, and no hospital, school, or place to buy…well, anything at all. During the rainy season, they plant food to survive on the rest of the year, sometimes the same exact meal for weeks at a time. They sell their cash crops to buy clothes (like, one outfit per person per year) and other extremely basic amenities, which someone will walk maybe a day to purchase and bring back. If they're from the same tribe, they will speak mainly their tribal language, with some of the men learning Fulfulde to be able to communicate in outside markets. The women will never learn it, nor will they have use since most never leave the little village. Maybe someone knows a spot of French. These are places where tribal traditions from 100 years ago are alive and well, and with them the misinformation and ignorance progress has eradicated from 'civilized' Africa. Girls are married at 12, boys sent to the fields instead of school, and infant mortality is shameful.

I don't want to give the impression that the majority of Cameroonians live like this, or that such societies are completely devoid of societal value. This is the rural extreme, and most people live at least a little more in contact, with a few more amenities. I describe the bare minimum because I've seen communities like it, however few. The people are generally content, and their rewards are many within the family, but they must constantly give their absolute all merely to survive another month healthily.

Ok, so that was a bit of a sidetrack from the polio thing, but let's move on to talk about…BOOBS! I spend a lot of time researching maternal and child health topics for my health center, and the day I came upon 'exclusive breastfeeding,' it was rather like a key fitting nicely into a lock, or in this context, a baby's mouth fitting snugly onto a nipple. Illness among babies in their first 6 months are extremely dangerous and damaging, and the main reason for the high mortality rate. The kids get sick so much because they often lack basic natural immunizations, are poorly fed, and drink dirty water. Exclusive breastfeeding, which means giving only breast milk (and a lot of it) for the first 6 months, guards against all these risk factors, and it's free! The first days' milk ('colostrum' for those of you not in medical school) provides natural immunities tailor-made for the baby. Many babies go without because the mother believes the milk is bad, since it's generally yellow and stringy. All of the kid's essential vitamins, as well as complete hydration, are provided by breastmilk, so the baby doesn't need other food, like porridge, formula or even water until around 6 months. If the mother doesn't give water, it drastically lessens the chance of contamination, and if she gives it often, the baby ends up fat and extremely well-nourished.

Sounds simple, right? Just milk. But misconceptions about breastfeeding abound here, and it turns out almost 0 women actually practice exclusive breastfeeding. Since it's been found so tremendously effective in preventing infant death, our health center decided to launch a promotional campaign. This means we present and explain it at every consultation, talk it up in the neighborhoods, and visit women's group meetings to reinforce the drive. Pregnant women are particularly targeted. So far, women have been open to listen, and ask a lot of questions. It's clear many don't believe it really will keep their child healthy, because it's so deceptively simple. But more than any topic I've spoke on or promoted, I feel this one has the potential to save lives and leave results my coworkers will be able to see. It requires nothing but information and the confidence to try.

On a much more frivolous note, I finally have cell phone reception, a dream that's been eluding me for months. This means anyone feeling like hearing my voice is completely free to call; I make no promises on what it will cost you, but I will certainly answer, day or night. This luxury would of course kick in when I only have 5 months to go…

Anyway, nice chatting with you (I guess 'at you' is more accurate); hope everyone 'supportent bien' (is doing well). I'll write soon, when my lapse again becomes embarrassing. SLAV