Quick Pictures

So simple and yet, this is one of my most recent favorite pictures. Just a snapshot of my friend Olivia and her family. To me, it so perfectly represents what a normal afternoon is like in village. Let's sit outside the kitchen and hang out.

Here I am with a group of refugee women (there is a refugee village 8 km down the road from Dir, they come from the Central African Republic and have been established there for about 3 years) after a soy culinary demonstration. This refugee village, Mbigorro, is 1/3 villages the clinic's head nurse has chosen to try to develop soy products with.

A snapshot of a Fulbe girl early in the morning as we watched the cow get slaughtered. Can you possibly imagine a 3 year old in the States watching that with such a calm look on their face? Ain't this little girl beautiful?

Time Flies

Yikes! Four months! Where to begin? The past 4 months have been a whirlwind of visitors (as my Mom, Dad and sister, all came out...I'm a LUCKY lucky girl that all the members of my immediate family are willing to take a "vacation" to Cameroon and experience the life of a Peace Corps Volunteer).

Right after my parent's visit I took a 3 week vacation to Senegal/Cape Verde with 2 other volunteers (Eddie and Joe). I honestly didn't think I needed a vacation, but being out of the country allowed me to do so much processing. I hadn't realized until I stepped into a more developed setting how normal poverty, death, and corruption had become to me. I needed to get away to process that. And as a bonus, I absolutely fell in love with the country of Cape Verde, its culture, its people = )

I think that the reason my vacation came at the perfect time was because my Mom ended up spending 5 weeks with me in country. That's no small hunk of change, and for her, after 2 weeks the novelty of fetching water, no electricity, bucket baths, and seeing exactly WHAT you can cook on limited seasonal ingredients, wore off, and she got to see a little bit more of what's under the surface of these people's smiling faces. That despite their laughter, and ability to dance at a moment's notice, there are so many daily suffrances.

Explaining that to my Mom, trying to put into words the things that trouble me here, brought a lot of questions to my mind.

What struck me the most about my Mom's visit was seeing her reactins to the culture and the people. She was so in awe of the tiniest details, so compassionate towards the people. In so many ways, like a little girl walking through a toy store 2 days before Christmas. Seeing her in this environment, made me realize, "Oh sweet Jesus. That was ME when I first got here." Where did my awe, wonder, and compassion go?

I know that that's part of the rule of life, and that because I have established myself here, that I am living amongst the people and being a part of the community I can't hold on to those feelings of awe forever. Nonetheless, it scared me. Volunteers say that it's really hard to NOT get jaded in your second year of service. That you do end up getting exhausted of constantly being stared at, at being seen as the "White Savior who has come to fix all the problems", of having constant demands thrown at you. And before my parent's visit I could sense those feelings starting to creep in.

However, coming back from vacation I felt the opposite. I felt so rejuvenated and refreshed. Being away made me realize that I missed my daily life in village. Coming back and seeing people's reactions was a jolt (as I realized that since I was gone for close to a month people thought I had left for good without saying good-bye). People were happy to welcome me back, happy to see me, and I realized, "Oh my goodness. I really am a part of this place now. People expect to see me walking around."

I feel myself re-dedicated to the people and the work here. Especially as I realize how quickly the rest of my time here will go (service ends in December). I'm realizing that 7 months is not much, and how i need to make the most out of it, especially and I honesty don't know if I will ever have an opportunity to live this quality of life again (although I hope that's not the case). I'm realizing what an honor it is to be living this simple life.

So, WORK: Phase II of the soy project is in swiiiiing. Meaning that culinary demonstrations and agricultural lessons are happening to teach people the nutritional value of soy, the technique of planting, and getting them interested enough that they will buy and plant their own soy beans (planting season for soy in the Adamaoua is anywhere from mid-May to mid-July).

A comical story: When my sister was visiting we spent one of the days with another volunteer, Danielle, who taught us how to make soy milk on a gas stove. We needed to learn because we had a culinary demonstration in the bush a few days later where we would be teaching people the same thing.

So, off we went to preach soy and spend the day in the bush. We gathered a small crowd (especially, since I am no longer a novelty, but a second white girl certainly was!) and people waited to see what concoction we were coming up with. We talked soy and talked in general, but 2 1/2 hours later and 3 tries the soy milk would just NOT give. I didn't know what I had done wrong and had to assume that it had something to do with the fact that we were preparing it over open wood stove instead of gas.

I rolled my eyes at Alison and said, "Oh Goodness, this is embarassing" as I had to explain to people that "Sorry folks, I actually JUST learned this 2 days ago and looks like I didn't really learn all that well. I promise next time I come back, it'll work!" I expected people to lose interest in the soy, but they all laughed and said "No worries" and then proceeded to gather around the big pot and finish the 5 kilos of boiled soy bean GOOP with smiles on their faces!!! Alison and I looked at each other in shock, so true that NO food goes to waste here.

A couple of weeks later when I was back in the bush for another demonstration I was happy to learn that nobody got sick off the new recipe (something else I feared would quickly make them lose interest in the soy!) To the contrary, they wanted more GOOP! Yikes!

On a very different note, about a month and a half ago my next door neighbor (17) gave birth at home and lost the baby. Giving birth at home is a HUGE problem in our community and something we're constantly trying to teach against at the hospital.

I can't tell you how may newborn babies come in one week after birth, or mothers for that fact, with turrrhible post partum infections (due to conditions in the bush, or the rooms they give birth in). After antibiotics the mother's are usually fine, but the babies almost always don't make it. I can't tell you how many moms have come in when they've realized the birth is complicated and cried for hospital help. At that point, the nurses at the hospital try, but it is usually too late to change the outcome of the birth (our clinic does not have facilities, and since losing our doctor in September...still waiting for a new one... no one to do C-sections). I can't tell you how many women who test positive for HIV during prenatal consultations (testing and medication is provided free to all pregnant women thanks to the Cameroonian government. Antiretroviral treatment during pregnancy (as well as birth at a hospital and treatment for the baby during breastfeeding) GREATLY decreases the chances of a baby catching the virus from their mother) give birth at home, not only putting their baby at risk, but also endangering those who assist them at home (and don't take universal precautions by wearing gloves).

What's disheartening about these situations is that they are almost all preventable. They don't NEED to happen and they CAN be avoided. These babies shouldn't be dying.

But...that's also such a hard concept to transmit to people in such a religious society who believe, "God gives, God takes away."

As much as I have seen these situations, the passing of my neighbor's baby was such a close relationship that it really hit home (literally). This was such a young girl who has come to live in our concession for the past 6 months. She was loyal about coming to prenatal visits, and from day 1 when we took her history and realized that she had already lost a baby from home birth, we flagged her as DEFINITELY needing to give birth at the hospital. We urged her to bring in her notebook from the first baby she lost (here in Cameroon, patients hold on to their own medical records via notebook) but she had lost it. We further re-flagged her when the baby continually presented in Breech position (feet first, normally the head should be the presenting part). Breech position is not something to worry about in the first 2 trimesters, as sometimes the baby turns itself, but in the last trimester, it assures a complicated birth.

Not only, was she faithful to her visits at the hospital, but we had many conversations at home on our porch about how important it is to give birth at the hospital. As we got closer to one another, I told her to come get me NO MATTER what time it was. And yet...

When the baby came in the middle of the night, she stayed at home with only our 80 year old grandma to assist at the birth.

At 6am my little neighbor boy (14) came to wake me up with a pounding on my door and a "COME QUICK!" I did, to find the young mom crouching in one corner of the room and the blue baby in the middle of the room. It was too late. He was big and beautiful and would have been perfectly healthy if they had only gone to the hospital (a 10 minute walk from our house).

I was at a loss, SO confused as to what went wrong? What step was I missing? Where was the message lost? My neighbor grandma, who swears by traditional medicine said, "She's cursed. She's lost 2 babies now. It's a curse." and I screamed, "There is NO CURSE. She has NO BAD LUCK. That baby would be ALIVE if she had only gone to the hospital."

Whether it was money, lack of approchability, nurses not explaining things enough in laymen's terms. I still don't have any answers as to why they didn't come and get me until the last minute or why they didn't opt to walk to the hospital. However, that feeling that morning has taught me an immense number of things. Mostly, that there is still so much more work to do here. That I can't stop looking at any moment as a teaching moment. That there is such a value to the connection and the conversatinos that we have with mothers at prenatal consultations.

And one of the biggest lessons is how people cope with loss and suffering here. Two weeks after, the young mom and I sat in the kitchen shelling beans and she sat there softly singing a church hymn about how she was full of God's joy. I have so much to learn yet, from how to find the joys in this world despite the suffering that comes with being a human.