Busy! Busy!

I've been at post for almost 2 months now.. and have been surprisingly busy for a newbie. At first I wasn't busy. I painted my house, read 6 books, went to the bank where I "work" every morning but I was really just supposed to observe the bank for a few months and then start making recommendations and improvements, etc. This meant I was doing ALOT of french grammar exercises.

But things picked up. The accountant of the bank is going for a few months of training, which is great for him and the bank, so I’ve been doing a little accounting. Accounting or French grammar? Tough choice.. they're both so thrilling. However my counterpart at the bank and I are working on starting up a new project, a mutuelle health association, outside of the bank.

Brief description of health insurance here. Health care "systems" are another subject. Very few people have insurance, something in the single digit percentage. Its mainly private and very expensive. What happens when you don't have insurance and have to pay the complete hospital fee up front? A. Use up all of your savings B. Take out a loan from a family member or from a bank, like the one I work at, which is difficult to repay since you're not generating any income. C. Go to a traditional healer that may or may not be curative or don't see a doctor at all. Or option D. Die on the doorstep of the hospital. However, like mutual savings banks, mutual health associations are growing significantly in West Africa. In Cameroon they are a big success, particularly everywhere else except the East Province. Heard that one before..

So what we've been doing is building the structural part of the association, searching for qualified people (especially women) to be on the board of directors, on the surveillance committee etc. The large part of the work has been going to village meetings every Saturday and Sunday to present the mutual health association project and to have people sign up for it. Once there are enough members, the general assembly/ all of the members will convene, hopefully in November, and together they will make decisions about the association together with some guidelines and strong recommendations on specific things like monthly premiums. However it will be their decision to decide if premiums are best paid every month, quarterly, or annually. That’s the wonderful thing about associations and meetings here. People have the ability to decide and they'll trust putting they're money where they can see it. Insurance is not easily accepted here either. Simply put, you pay money every month to use incase you get sick. but when you're not sick, you don't get it back. That’s an idea not everyone grasps. Another good part about this being a community project, like the MC2 bank, after overhead costs, the profit goes back to the community. The money will be used to start preventative health programs, a pharmacy and finally it will fund the construction of a clinic.

Yours truly is one of these board advisors for the association. I'll let you sit with that thought for a moment because it certainly took me a while to grasp. (How did I get here and who thinks I really can handle this position!????) After meeting with a couple ngo's in the capital on how these Mutual Health Associations are run, I am now trying to catch up on all the work that needs to be done BEFORE it is formed like feasibility studies and cost analysis. It's good that it's taking off so quickly however there is some serious work that needs to be done to make sure it's going to succeed... and I'm really really nervous about that.

How to promote insurance: I go to village meetings, usually about 5 or 6 of them each weekend with my counterpart, a retired doctor, the president of all of the village meetings all across town and speak about the importance of this health mutual. Thankfully, they do most of the talking about the association. I present myself, explain my role as a peace corps volunteer how I’m available to work on individual projects outside the bank and the mutual health, explain how I oversee the management of this project, etc. These meetings are separated by gender and village. So sometimes I'm speaking in front of a room full of chatty women, probably talking about my choice of pagne (they're always really dressed nicely), but usually very receptive and interested in the idea of health insurance. Other times I’m at a larger village meeting, 50 people or so and I am the ONLY female in the room, and I imagine, as I have heard before, males taking about their opinion on women making decisions and running things. The white American girl standing up and speaking is enough commotion, and then I start speaking French.... Its nerve wrecking. For some reason, having an American overseeing this project installs a lot of confidence in people that no one is going to take they're money and run. A frequent problem here of promising new projects or village banks that turn out to be scams. So since I'm American, this development project is legit? Not sure where that conclusion is from.

You never know what’s going to happen from one meeting to the next. I now know how to share the kola nut, properly, when the chief of the village hands me the largest nut. Last weekend in between meetings I had 2 beers (equivalent of 4 in the states) with the sweetest chief. I've become an expert at mimicking what my other colleges do when cultural custom questions pop up... Power goes out, monkey is served, everyone else is drinking beer, pick up a new hand shake, and that’s how it goes.

From these meetings I know a huge part of this city including several neighborhoods that I would have never known they were there. I've also introduced myself to about 700 plus people. From this I am going to work with a GIC (pronounced jeek) a business association that in turns gives huge benefits to individual members. Kind of like a Coop in the states, and this one specifically is an agricultural GIC. I'm going to see how I can advise a group that assists with elderly care, like hospice, so I’m really excited.

The first project I worked on is with an owner of an ice cream production and sales business, which has only been running for a couple months now. He also happens to be the son of a gentleman I work with on the mutual health project. He's only a couple years older than me and thankfully speaks English. Although sometimes I talk too fast. This is an excellent first project to advise because he was a great contact and was already very well organized, so the basic stuff was out of the way. But I had a huge period of self doubt about this all. Who put me in charge or advising a business???! Who am I to be recommendations in the Cameroonian context? I haven't even been here a half a year! He's lived here his own life and has a master’s degree. Looking over his accounting books, I was thinking how much I hate numbers. When have you ever heard me say "I like math". Umm never. So I freaked out a bit, made some excel sheets and recommendations. And since the business is expanding, it’s going to be a continuous project.

Oh and in November, my postmates are going to do a girl's empowerment camp. More like a long weekend packed full of activities... in French. I don't mean to stress that most things I do are in a foreign language, lol it's more like a reminder to myself followed by a brief panic. TIA: This Is Africa. This is Peace Corps.