1 down, 5 to go

Turns out, my neighbor’s chest pain was in fact due to acid reflux, and my prescription of pepto bismol was dead on. I credit my medical savviness to the fact that I’m brown and obviously genetically predisposed to being a doctor. Yet alas, I am a Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa. Again, sorry mom.

Our first session of the business training was very stressful, but went very well. About 45 of the 50 people who registered actually showed up the first day, and about 5-6 newcomers showed up and tried to register on the spot. We allowed them to sit through the class but did not allow them to register, out of principle.

I taught Entrepreneurial Spirit and Goals and Action Plans on the first day. I bumbled through the curriculum with my mediocre French in front of 50+ attendants. I actually broke out into a sweat at one point while I was straining to comment on something that I was having trouble translating.  Luckily my counterpart Ibrahim and his staff were with me to facilitate communication. That was crucial to say the least.   We also invited a special guest for our first class to share his personal story. He is an Al-Hadji that owns a popular fruit shop in the main market. Al-Hadji means someone that has been to Mecca for the mandatory Muslim pilgrimage. Around here, it is also a status symbol, implying a certain level of success. His story was inspiring. He quit primary school to sell Papayas because his parents died. He then started a tiny farm which he grew into a plantation over the course of 40 years. It was a sort of rags to (not glamorously) riches story due to determination, discipline, and work ethic, the type that is incredibly rare to find here. Also, he did it all without any help or financing. For anything and everything he bought, he saved up for it. Now in Cameroon, that is a completely foreign concept. In any case, he got a huge ovation, as he should.  

With one class done, we have 5 more to go, which we will be teaching once a week over the next 5 weeks.  Will let you know how it goes

random update

I seem to be getting worse at this blogging thing. Since the last post, there was the festive Eid. As usual we dressed up, ate a lot, and visited people. There was also a ceremony at the Lamido’s palace in town which we attended. The Lamido is basically the chief of Ngaoundere. There was lots of marching and horse racing. We also saw the Lamido who came out with an enormous entourage which included personal fanning assistants and a guy that held up a sun umbrella for him while he was mounted on his horse. Biya forced me to take countless unnecessary photos of the event because he thought people in America would find it just that dazzling. I will put them up, but I guarantee you will not get through them all, and you will be left underwhelmed

I also took a mini vacation to the northern regions. It was a lot hotter and muggier than my part of the country. It is also more desert like, especially the far north. My trip was lots of fun and was the inspiration for my decision to not take my CFA Level III in June, but climb Mount Kilimanjaro with a friend of mine instead.  Mt K is in Tanzania. It takes about a week to do, and is more of a strenuous hike than an actual climb.  We are in the process of planning logistics but I have already started training.  As for the last CFA exam, I will hopefully take it once I’m back in the states.

Work has picked up. I’d been preparing for months for a large scale business training seminar which will begin on Tuesday. The team that will be taking on this endeavor with me comprises of the staff of Small and Medium Sized Enterprise. We started by identifying some serious needs that need to be met in the business community and setting goals to address them.  Next, we presented, studied, and revised the 12 subject curriculum amongst ourselves (during Ramadan) before we decided we were ready to schedule the course. We then put up flyers and broadcasted radio advertisements about a call out meeting where participants could register and learn more about the course. We expected about 60 people to attend and had set up classroom seating accordingly.  Amazingly, only 12 people showed up. We continued the presentation anyways and asked participants to fill out a form and pay the sign-up fee to register, which we set at a measly 1,500 CFA ($3) just to cover the actual workbook they would be using. Fyi, charging some sort of fee is essential as it weeds out unmotivated and/or lazy people who we do not want to work with anyways.  Finally, only 7 people actually registered. We were quite disappointed at the prospects of our seminar and decided to set the registration deadline for 10 days later, in case anyone who could not come to the meeting, still wanted to attend the course.  We preferred around 30 students ideally, but we expected a maximum of 15 would end up registering for the class.  It turns out, however, through pure word-of –mouth, a total of 50 people ended up signing up and paying the registration fee by the deadline.  We even had to turn dozens of people away that said they would pay the fee at the first class, or that showed up a day or two after deadline. Needless to say, we got more than what we bargained for, and definitely have our work cut out for us. We will see how it goes

Also, I have been working as a sort of micro consultant for small enterprises. I am currently working with a packaged drink start-up, a hotel that would like to undergo a renovation project, and a women’s group that would like to start income generating activities.  With my microfinance institution, I have been pushing the bank to complete our application for KIVA, the non-profit internet lender; because I think it would be a huge boon. I even went to headquarters to meet with the CEO just for that reason. The meeting went great, although the CEO is a pretty intimidating dude. He started his banking career as an investment banker for Chase Manhattan bank in London, which he did for around 10 years. Not sure what brought him back to Cameroon. Finally, I am working on a project to fight against malnutrition. We’d been putting together a proposal to team up with UNICEF in order to get some support and credibility behind it. We have already met with several UNICEF officials and will be sending the final version out in the next few days, after which we will start setting up sessions with communities in the Ngoundere area.

On a completely random note, my neighbor has fallen ill with some chest pain. When I asked her husband what it was, he said people are claiming it is sorcery. Apparently they had bought some traditional medication for her which needed to be burned over a fire so that the fumes could be inhaled by the patient. Once she did that she started uttering the name of a well-known sorceress on the other side of the village.  I did my part by giving her some pepto bismol. After all, it does cure just about everything