The water well is complete! Interesting that he made it a faucet instead of manual. I can see the pro’s and con’s, but he said people were really happy to have clean water near-by. Check out some pictures in the AADB album. Tchi Tchi well
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This is from an email I got from Aladji, the general manager of AADB in Bangou a few weeks ago: la population de tchitchi doit fêter avec l’eau For the last year, AADB has been fund-raising, planning, hoping and praying for a water well in Tchi-tchi, a neighborhood in Bangou. Our hope was that the [...]
My first actual visit to Bangou, not counting a 30 minute stop by the bank, was during training when all trainees go off to their selected villages and stay there for a week. When I got there, the Volunteer I was replacing set up a meeting with the Chief of Bangou, along with a few [...]
One of my favorite things to do while I lived in Bangou was go to the ‘Ecole Maternel’, the pre-school. Those kids are SO cute, and at the pre-school they are taught basic English and French, since usually in Bangou kids will first learn the local language named Bangou.
The education system being as bad as [...]
I’d never payed much attention to Africa and its history, probably since it was never taught in our schools. I don’t think that even if we did want to teach it, we could, as Africa is made up of hundreds if not thousands of different tribes and nations with history that goes back thousands of [...]
My Peace Corps replacement whom I had the pleasure to meet before I left, wrote a letter to one of her family members about her time so far in Bangou. Since its posted on a public blog, I didn’t think it would be bad to repost it here. Makes me miss Bangou.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Dear [...]
Read this article on Cnet about how online donations are up this year. As more people are shopping online, you can also stop by your favorite charities Web site and give to those less fortunate. That bodes well for AADB which gives 100 percent of your donations to development and cultural projects in Bangou.
I’ve even [...]
I remember my dad telling me about his reaction to AADBs first project ‘Cadeaux for kids‘ when we gave Christmas presents and food to orphaned and other families in Bangou and Bangangte. The gifts seemed kind of trivial; pens, oil for cooking, a t-shirt, but the families generosity was disproportionally bigger.
You can see they joy [...]
I’ve been back in the United States now for almost six months, although I’ve only been stable the last one. I just moved to Washington, D.C. about three weeks ago and have been searching for a job and found a place to stay here.
But it pains me to see the state of affairs in the [...]
To say ‘Oh Ombe’ to the village I’ve been in for the last two years, I threw myself a little good-bye party. The party was a way to get everyone I’ve lived and worked with in the last 2 years at once, thank them all for welcoming into their community and to tell them that [...]
My colleagues and PC admin voted me SED PCV of the Quarter last quarter and I got a certificate as well as dinner at the Ambassador’s house as a reward.
As a non-strategic country, PCVs in Cameroon are a lot more in the forefront of the American community and the Ambassador Janet Garvey has been very [...]
The business classes are finished, thanks to AADB of course, as well as 5 community leaders who came an spoke on the last day of class. For the last day, after 11 weeks of learning about marketing, management, accounting and project management in the class room, we invited 5 community leaders from the area to [...]
I don’t currently have a phone right now, so don’t try to call me at my Cameroonian number. Please send me an email if you need to get in touch with me. But don’t worry, I’ll be home soon. I should arrive back in the States August, 26th, but I’ll be in the NJ/DC area [...]
Anthony, one of AADBs founders and Vice President, has been supporting AADB since I arrived in Cameroon with his generous donations. At his request we have been doing a scholarship since 2008 for the best 20 students at the Bangou high school. For 2009, thanks again to his donations, We were able to give more to the [...]
As much as I love my rooster, at the end of the day, he’s still what he is, and he was put on this earth for me to eat. So, after spending the last 4 months with him, feeding him, washing him, talking with him and playing with him, it was time to kill him.
Tara [...]
I’m teaching a business and project management class to entrepreneurs in Bangou. The course is 3,000 CFA and runs for 6 weeks, twice a week.
Part of making the classes sustainable is having a local teach along side of me, and it was when I met Jean Calvin who had taken the class twice already, that [...]
I don’t know if anyone remembers, but in the village of Badzuidjong, a small village, hard to get to, about 45 minutes from Bangangte, Tara Smith the volunteer in Bare started a project build a potable water well there. In the whole village there was not one place to get potable water, and people from [...]
One day I decided I was tired of my rooster running around all dirty and give him a bath. You can imagine what he thought of that idea:
Not a happy camper
But despite his protests I gave him a bath anyway, you never know when a young spring chicken may come around and you want your [...]
They grow up so fast. Can you believe it was only a few months ago that I adopted 5 chickens to test my hand at chicken raising. They’re getting so big now. But we all know what happens to chickens, they get eaten! (maybe that is why they are so scared.)
The other chickens aren’t big [...]
I only have a few months left here, and I’ve been working on leaving in place a stable structure for AADB. One of the things we have worked on is a logo for AADB, so without further ado, the AADB Logo…
If I were to go back and read the first posts on my blog, I would probably laugh at what I found to be worth blogging about. Things like eating a meal with your hands, being woken up by rooster crows and bathing with a bucket of water have become a normal part of living [...]
Kebouh, the cultural festival for my village of Bangou was also, in a way, my going away party. Even though I still have over three months left, the chief of the village told me I would be receiving a village ‘notable’ title, so I asked my colleagues to come support me and check out the [...]
I’m sure there are other Peace Corps blogs writing about COS conference, but I’ll add to it.
We recently had our COS conference, which stands for Close of Service, which means we have about 3 months left of service. Because we have been ‘au village’ for almost two years, I guess they feel, and rightly so, [...]
The owner of the house I’m living in asked me to get rid of my kids, my chickens, by the end of the week. This is going to be really sad since I’ve become quite used to them. I may get rid of 4 of them and keep my favorite one inside my house.
So a [...]
Maybe I’ve been overly positive about Africa during my time here, or maybe things really have been too good. So I guess I needed a little reality check to keep me humble.
I go to the Development Center/Computer lab about once a week to check out the progress but mostly to get online myself. Since I [...]
One of the biggest changes in my attitude has been towards ownership and communities, and I can illustrate this with two examples.
When living with roommates, both during college and afterwards, I would always get mad when one of my roommates took something of mine without asking. Like, lets say I had coke in the fridge, [...]
Municipal Councilor Emmanuel, Depute Datouo and PCV Angel Velarde
It took a few months, but finally (actually for the last 2 months or so) the Development Center of Bangou ville is operational.
The first part is a Computer lab where students and functionaries that live in Bangou ville can connect to the internet and type out and [...]
“La regle.”
That’s all he said to me. Taco will sometimes come up to my house and say the word of whatever it is he needs. So he came to the house at 7:30 in the morning and said “la regle” - - ruler. I just said “what?” Then he repeated his command.
“The ruler what?”
“I need [...]
I went down to give my kids a lunchtime snack of bread crumbs and I noticed that the little rooster wasn’t there. I figured he was busy eating random scraps from the bush in my back yard, so he missed out on the snack; which is fine because he will usually out eat all the [...]
Cameroon is a bilingual country separated by exactly such a Babylonian frontier. To the west lie the Northwest and Southwest provinces, Home to cities like Bamenda, Limbe and Buea and where most of the oil revenue comes from. To the East lies the rest and the majority of Cameroon which includes the largest city and [...]
I could fill pages with stories about my lovable chickens.
They’re all now know me as their dad, or possibly mom, but in any case, anytime I come around, they’ll crowd around waiting for me to feed them, and if I don’t, they’ll wonder off, but come back every few minutes to see if I’ve changed [...]
I decided to start raising chickens. You may be wondering when I’ve raised chickens before, and the answer is never, but I’ve seen movies (do the chickens have large talons?) and it doesn’t seem very difficult.
So I went on market day and picked out 5 baby chickens and 1 baby rooster. The chickens were about [...]
a quick update from tara on the Well project that some of you contributed to when I sent out the email just before Christmas. She didn’t thank you on her blog, but I’ll thank you here. Thank you to everyone that donated. My focus is Bangou and will continue to be, but this town, which [...]
A man without a profession, without a skill to feed himself and his family, is at the mercy of any person with power. In Africa this is ubiquitous and forces most people to be at the mercy of corruption and unscrupulous men with money.
Add to this missing a limb and life could be difficult. Ano [...]
Last Christmas I was able to give, from the gifts and money you sent, Christmas presents to orphans and poor families who could not afford to do anything for Christmas.
This year, again I stayed in Bangou, but since my role here is in terms of development, AADB instead donated a generator to the Chief.
This Chief, [...]
While visiting my Japanese friend in the town next door I started hanging out with a turkey there. Turkeys are ugly as sin but they have great personalities and aren’t scared like chickens, so I spent a lot of time feeding it and basically just hanging out with him.
Unfortunately, we met [...]
keep your eye on the big dark turkey coming after me…
There was a cultural festival in Batibo, which is a village in the Northwest province of Cameroon, about 2 ½ hours from my post. Usually admin is pretty strict about us traveling, but I was going to be part of the cultural festival, as a performer with another volunteer, and to represent the diversity committee.
[...]
Recently I spent a few days in Yaounde shopping for the Development Centre of Bangou ville and doing some medical stuff. While I was there I got the chance to catch up on some internet stuff. Funny how I’m helping open up a computer lab and I don’t have a computer or internet access myself.
[...]
Corruption is part of life in Cameroon. You can’t get rid of it, you can’t escape it. From an outsider’s perspective, it seems so easy, just ask that your politicians not be corrupt, and only vote for the ones that are not, but it isn’t easy.
The culture is such that what we call corruption is [...]
I was reading here about an ammendment to make English the official language at all public meetings in Missouri.
I think they’re missing the point. American should adopt more languages, not less. One, of the many, reasons that America is so great is that you can find someone that speaks every language in the world within [...]
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