My backyard from the balcony

                                          Center of town

Each volunteer is assigned a “community host,” which is a person selected by the previous volunteer we are replacing to help us integrate into our new community, introduce us to the right people, and collaborate on projects with. My community host, Christantus, is an extremely pleasant person, bright, and really striving to achieve his wishes of seeing his community develop. He speaks decent English, but is not too westernized at the same time, which I find to be a great combination.  He has some western thinking patterns of development, but is still raw and green enough to hold true to his African ways.  He speaks of aspiring to leave a legacy behind him. He covets the idea of people reminiscing about his achievements, what he had accomplished, and the improvements he had made in the organizations around his area after he passes.

Christantus came to Bafia for a two-day workshop with the other community hosts and then traveled with me up to my new site, Menji.  On the way to Menji we got on the topic of our families and his response about his children was nothing short of another awe-inspiring story of community. I asked him how many kids he had, he paused, and then described how he only had two kids of his own between him and his wife, a three-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy, but he also adopted six kids, and takes care of two others as well. The two others he takes care of are from his younger sister who passed away after giving birth to one of them. By blood he has only four people in his family, but chooses to provide for a family of twelve.

Christantus is a very busy man with many things on his plate between teaching at a local primary school in Menji, cocoa farming, beehive keeping, and the numerous volunteer jobs he contributes to. One of the six kids he chose to adopt was a boy who attended his class at school. The boy consistently made the highest grades of the class, but every time it was time to pay for the school fees for the year the father said he could not afford it and the boy could not attend school any more. The idea of the brightest kid in his class not going to school anymore because of a 2,000CFA annual fee ($4) just did not sit right in Christantus’ mind. He could not fathom it, so for two years Christantus paid for the annual fee to keep the boy in school. The third year of school dues came around and the father quit paying rent on their home, told the kids he could not afford them anymore and they were going to have to find their own ways: He was abandoning them and moving to another village. Christantus told the boy, “Come live with me, we may struggle with feeding another mouth, but we will make it.” He saw the boy out through high school, consistently finishing first in his class, paid for him to go to university and now the boy is a civil servant, providing for himself and living on his own.

The sense of community I have experienced here in Cameroon thus far is incredible. The whole basis of America is individualism. We wanted to separate from England, become our own individual country and start something new.  That resonates in us today and is a wonderful idea, made me who I am today, and gives some background as to how I so hastily left my loved ones behind in America while bettering myself, (on a U.S. Government paycheck), somewhere across the world. At the same time I think we could learn a few things from other countries where the sense of community and working together to achieve a more fruitful life is more prominent. In the end I guess it also boils down to us living in a capitalistic society where dog eat dog, no matter who I step on and who I burn I am going to get to the top is trained and encouraged. Not all the answers lie in African communities to solve our problems in America, or I would not be doing development work in Africa. Africans would probably be doing development work in America if that was the case, but there are bits and pieces of this community that I am now a part of that are truly inspiring to witness and I hope to do a decent job of sharing it with my home community.

Today we found out where our new homes will be for the next two years. My post is located in a small town, Menji, which is in the Southwest region of Cameroon, bordered by Nigeria to the West. The Southwest is one of two regions (Southwest and Northwest) that is Anglophone speaking, meaning I will be learning to speak Pidgin English in the near future. I will do all of my banking in the town of Dschang, which is in the West region so I will still be able to keep up with my French, as I will have to do all my banking activities in a Francophone region. The temperature is relatively cool, located in beautiful lush mountains, contrary to the humid-hot training area of Bafia. The Southwest region is popular with tourism as Mount Cameroon is located there, an active volcano reaching over 12,000 feet that I plan on climbing as soon as possible, and there are plenty of animal reserves as well in the region. I also will be within four hours or so of Limbe, a popular resort beach where I hopefully will get a chance to surf at some point.  I will be the third Community Economic Development PCV in the area and I am very excited about it, as there is a lot of work to immediately start on. This is contrary to many PCV’s who have to spend a lot of time finding work and creating a network for the first few months at post.

I did not find my business degree to suit my future aspirations fully so I was excited to know that my farming skills would be of use in the PC. The choosing of my post was weighted heavily towards my agriculture skills and the opportunities of agricultural work in the community.  The host institutions I will be working with are the Agricultural Delegate and the local credit union that both work heavily with the local cocoa farmers. The local credit union helps farmers by looking for good markets for their products and advising them on the new methods of producing good quality cocoa seeds giving that agriculture evolves on a daily basis. They provide loans to farmers for the expansion and the renovation of their farms, and they also provide banking facilities to the farmers.

I was a little disappointed in not being chosen to go to a Francophone region to better my French abilities, but this isn’t all for me and it shouldn’t be. I am here to hopefully make a difference in some peoples lives and leave some sort of a lasting footprint of my name here.  I would rather walk away from this experience having lasting relationships with my community members and departing with a legacy behind me than leaving with French fluency and no positive impact. In other words, my agricultural skill matchup outweighed my language fluency matchup for the choosing of my post and for me to better achieve what I came here to do.  That being, hopefully to have the influence on someone, even just one person, who remembers Jacob Pace the PCV who ad an impact on the way he/she was thinking or working.  The same way teachers, friends, and mentors for me have changed my perceptions by one thing they have said to me.

 Here’s to the teachers as I attempt to pay it forward.