cameroon log

VSO politics

Wednesday October 22, 2003

Arlette, my placement officer (or whatever she is called) didn’t show up to work on Monday, which is when we were supposed to meet and talk business. She had a strategic planning session with some other company or NGO. But that isn’t really why. Since Raymond and Dianna showed up on Sunday, I got a little more detail of what happened. Arlette came out for the emergency meeting… but didn’t even meet with Raymond and Dianna. What was she thinking. Totally stupid, and ill conceived. Raymond and Dianna didn’t even know that she didn’t visit until they called Yusef, the VSO driver, and he was back in Yaounde washing the car. So apparently, Raymond was asking questions about the finances of his organization, and Dianna publically denigrated both her organization, and VSO at a town meeting. Bad idea. Her boss is a very well known Cameroonian development figure, both locally and nationally. Bad, bad idea to publically call him out as a thief and incompitant. I’m sure he is either out and out stealing the money from his organization, or, like many pseudo NGO’s here, it is pretty much a one man show… and since he can play the game well, and none of the funders actually do any real due dilligence (hell, most of them don’t even want to come out to the east… it is soooooo primative doncha know….), he gets funded, and uses the funds as a personal treasury. So it may be a bit early for me to cast any concrete judgement, but the whole NGO business is making me more and more sick. There is this fucked up relationship between the locals, and the funding organizations… which is essentially gussied up begging… or maybe, begging with annual reports. People here aren’t stupid, and the individuals who can understand the ‘western’ business jargon, can also clearly see its weaknessess… and many are clearly not above exploiting it. I know I sound like a broken record, but it just makes me sick. Anyway, Raymond and Dianna came, not surprisingly, to Yaounde very pissed off. The accusations against them included.. being spies, troublemakers, and of course, racist… aside from the spy thing.. its seems true to me. Dianna is Absolutely Convinced that she is right about everything. She makes Eric and I seem like amatures. She also has no sense of humor, and likes Celine Dion. That in and of itself would be enough for me to chase her out of town. Anyway, Arlette was pretty much ducking her responsibilities… so I had to wait another day for my meeting. The good news is that my problems can all be solved with a bit of the ol’ filthy lucre.. and now that Arlette is totally overwhelmed, I am not above using that to my advantage.
I get my fridge, and money to help with the cost of hiring a car to take me to Lomie. Yusef has a friend, who has a friend… I meet them and their 4X4 truck in the evening…and we agree to head out tomorrow morning early.. 4am. At 5:30 they show up.. tire troubles. This doesn’t bode well. I find out a few minutes later, that they also stiffed by Yusef’s friend. We pack the car, and head off to Lomie. That was some kind of ride. The first part went very smoothly. Then the nice paved road ended. We lost a mirror (which was taped on), and there was a sickening grinding noise from the rear axle. As we got to Among M’bang, we stopped for repairs. Being with a white man, all of the prices went up. It took a while to find the problem. The ball bearings were shot. We got some new ones.. and replaced them. This took several hours. It was during this time that I found out they had no real idea where Lomie was…and Yusef’s friend had told them it was a few kilometers away from Among M’bang. Oh shit…125 kilometers of totally fucked up road away. When I told them the distance (without even describing the state of the road… hell I didn’t want to be dumped there..and I paid my money already)… there a littany of curses against Yusef’s friend. After almost 4 hours of grueling driving.. and I mean grueling (even the stupid SUV advertisements don’t show their cars driving on roads like this)… getting us half way, they started growling again. We stopped in Among M’bang, and they took off with all of my stuff, heading back to Yaounde. I quickly hailed a moto-taxi,and offered them 2000 CFA (4$) if they could get to the gendarme’s checkpoint before them, and to tell the local gendarmes to stop these guys. They bike raced off, and on these roads it is no contest. They were apprehended, and stoned to death by the mob in town... Ok.. that last part isn’t true, but I though it would make a great story…basically the story of the worst possible day for these two guys, who were clearly having a bad day already. What they thought would be easy money led to a 18 hour marathon of things breaking, getting ripped off, and having to risk their lives.
Anyway, what really happened is that we got to Lomie just fine. I bought them drinks, we unloaded the truck, and I gave them some gas money to get back to Yaounde. I hope they made it all right. I felt sorry for them.