The Bosses

thoughts on travel

2010-11-16T17:55:00.002-08:00

I just finished reading a book by Rosemary Mahoney called "Down the Nile" in which she describes her travels down the Nile, alone, in a fisherman's skiff. I love the last line of the book. It rings so true for me.

"Travel never makes one cheerful. But it makes one thoughtful. It washes one's eyes and clears away the dust."

New videos on CAR-must watch

2010-09-06T19:20:00.002-07:00

Charity: Water along with ICDI (a group we worked with in CAR) is focusing it's September campaign on raising funds to drill wells in Bayanga among the Bayaka, a group we did extensive tree planting work with. These videos make me cry as I am transported back into the life of CAR. Watch and be amazed.

charity: water 2010 September Campaign: Clean Water for the Bayaka from charity: water on Vimeo.

The Bayaka. from charity: water on Vimeo.

The Fastest to Die - By Patrick Vinck and Phuong Pham | Foreign Policy

2010-08-05T09:17:00.000-07:00

For those interested in the impact of the these past years of war and decline in CAR. It is a tragedy that continues to place itself out and one that won't go away easily.

On a side note, school season is fast approaching. For those interested in helping out again this year, please let us know soon so we can plan. Last year we sent more than 31 children to private school thanks to YOU.

The Fastest to Die - By Patrick Vinck and Phuong Pham | Foreign Policy: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

My time in Quebec

2010-06-14T16:36:00.000-07:00

I will write more soon but if you want to see some of my pics from my time in Chicoutimi, follow the link to my photos on facebook....no facebook account necessary.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=179426&id=1044881256&l=d1dbfb4523

How do I show you love?

2010-04-16T22:22:00.002-07:00

I like to show love through service. Darren and I sometimes run into trouble because we both like to show love through service. We often play out scenes where we are both trying to nudge the other away from the sink in an effort to be the one to do the dishes. Unlike many couples who fight over trying to get the other spouse to do the dishes, we fight over the right to GET to do the dishes. Two servants married to each other can be fun and comedic. The same can be said for two servant sisters.

Clarisse and I found ourselves in a very interesting predicament while in Gaza performing a nutritional survey. It is important to remember that Clarisse is six years older than me, thus in Central African culture it is my duty to show her respect, more respect than I would show to a younger sibling. Besides the respect she is owed, I also love her as a sister and friend so want to show her love and respect.

In Gaza we stayed at the EEB health clinic, where we performed the survey and treated the most severe cases of malnutrition. The nurse who runs the clinic is one of Clarisse and I’s cousin, and he was our host for the four days we were in Gaza. There is an empty, four room house where we were housed and ate our meals, courtesy of the fine cooking of our cousin’s wife. Clarisse helped our cousin arrange the rooms and she made sure we had a room together so we could have maximum sister time. We each had a single bed to sleep on, basically four legs with a thin sheet of plywood on top to put a foam mattress on. In our case, there was only one mattress between six of us. Our cousin decided to give the mattress to me, as, in their culture, I am this cousin’s older sister and he wanted to show me love and respect.

When Clarisse and I went in to get ready for bed I took one look at the sleeping arrangements and an instant stubbornness rose up inside of me. I was determined that Clarisse should have the honour and privilege of sleeping on the mattress. Clarisse is, like me, equally stubborn and she was also bound and determined that I was to sleep on the mattress, plus it was the wish of our cousin, so for her the matter was settled. I placed my sleeping sheet on the plywood bed and Clarisse instantly removed it and put it on the mattress bed, at which point I snatched it back onto the wooden bed. We went back and forth like this with the rest of the team laughing at us from outside the window. I decided a compromise was in order. I proposed that we take turns sleeping on the mattress, that way we could both show each other how much we loved the other. I knew we would be there three nights so to maximize Clarisse’s sleeping time on the mattress I insisted that she take the first night. She relented and I am sure that she had the better night’s sleep; mind you, she did have the worst place in the car while I had a much less cramped seat so she certainly deserved and needed a good night’s sleep.

The third night was the trickiest night of the bargain. I went to bed early, taking my turn on the plywood bed. I had just fallen asleep when Clarisse walked in, saw the mattress on her bed and abruptly woke me up to tell me to change beds. I told her that it was my turn on the plywood bed but she did not agree. She said that tonight I was to listen to her, my big sister! I said, “but it is only fair, I slept on the mattress the night before, it was her turn”. Not good enough apparently. I refused to move so she refused to lie on the mattress. She laid out a wrap (like a wrap around skirt) on the cement floor in the corner and insisted that if I didn’t sleep on the mattress she would sleep on the floor all night. I continued to refuse and said that if she didn’t take the mattress I would sleep on the floor next to her. At this point we were starting to laugh at the utter ridiculousness of it all, and it only got worse as I got out of bed and laid down on the floor next to her. We were each trying to convince the other to take the mattress and in the meantime we were rolling on our sides laughing.

It reminded me of when my sister and I fought over a toy and since we couldn’t agree to both play with it in peace, our parents would take it away saying, “if you can’t agree to play together with it, no one will play with it”. Thinking of this gave me the solution to Clarisse and I’s problem. Isac, the Swedish doctor had come up with us and he did not have a mattress to sleep on. He had yet to go to bed, so I proposed that since we couldn’t agree we should give the mattress to Isac. We snuck into Isac’s room, stripped his plywood bed, put the mattress on top and covered it up with his things. Clarisse and I crawled onto our plywood beds giggling and waiting for Isac to come in. When he got onto his bed he started laughing and we told him that he had become the solution to our problem.

In the end we showed each other love by both having a rather uncomfortable sleep on top of a sheet of plywood and I think we both went to bed happy for not giving in. We will be laughing over the incident for years to come.

Time for good-byes

2010-04-10T12:21:00.002-07:00

I think the hardest part about saying good-bye is not knowing when you will return next. Everyone is anxious to know when we are coming back to stay for good. My answer, “I don’t know”. A totally unsatisfactory answer, even if true.

I spent yesterday in a meeting discussing strategy for moving forward with the agriculture work and CEFA, the new NGO/project in Gamboula. It was a good meeting with input from everyone present and I think we are in a good position to move ahead with the work.

Today I went to Clarisse’s garden for the morning. Her mom and oldest daughter were in the process of preparing cassava that had been soaking in a nearby fish pond for several days. We arrived in time to help remove the peel of the cassava which was then ‘washed’ off in the fish pond water and thrown into a giant bowl called a cuvette. I was ready to wade into the pond to do my part in washing the cassava but Mama told me that there were little bugs in the water that would ‘eat’ me so I should stay on the edge and help peel. The little bugs turned out to be leeches, which I have no desire to let eat me, so I gladly sat on the edge peeling. After three days in stagnant water cassava develops a distinct smell, sweet and fermented-like, which, after showering and putting on cream, is still on my hands. With some friends arriving to help, I was displaced from my peeling job to the job of lugging huge basins of wet cassava on my head, up to the small shelter built within the garden. I was not given a full basin, not having a neck able to support a large load and having just had my hair braided. I put a little cloth ‘donut’ on my head, was helped to heave it on top and stalked off down the trail, one hand helping balance the basin on my head. I managed to carry the empty basin back to the pond hands-free which I was pretty proud of. On the way home I carried a stack of cassava leaves on my head which met with many comments from other farmers along the road.

I have one more full day left in Gamboula, and while I am very excited about going home, it is not easy to leave here. Despite all the depressing things about this country, the nutrition garden and the Women and Children Gardening for Health program continues to be a bright light in the community. Nadege’s energy and love for her job amaze me; the garden is humming along despite the lack of rain and staff. It is easy to see the negative things around, the things that are easy to depress the spirit, but one look at Nadege and the garden and the women working away, meeting people like Mariam and seeing women receive seeds and machetes, there is hope. We can’t just roll over and die, we can’t just leave people in their misery, despite how normal it seems.

Having children isn’t hard; raising them is the difficult part

2010-04-09T08:18:00.002-07:00

Hamada-Gaza is at the same time hopeless and resilient. It never ceases to amaze me that people in difficult circumstances don’t, at some point, just decide to roll over and die. After seven hours on difficult roads, across bridges that required everyone to get out of the truck, inspect the bridge and then re-load on the other side, we started work on Thursday. The purpose of our trip was to do a survey of the health of children from 0-5 years. Rather than go door to door, the hospital health team sets-up under a mango tree and people start lining up to have their children weighed, measured, poked and prodded. Our team consisted of me, the food security specialist, two nurses, a midwife and a doctor. For each child that we saw, we asked a series of questions that were recorded and will, eventually, be entered in a report.

On the first day, my job was to ask the questions, while Clarisse weighed each child and measured their height and arm circumference. I used all the language skills I have, pulling out my Sango, French and the few words I know in Gbaya and Fulfulde. Even then, hearing people’s names and recording them is a talent I am still working on. Clarisse gave several lessons on health and nutrition, specifically focusing on the foods that are appropriate for infants and children. It is common here to find mothers starting children on solid food and water as early as two months, while the recommendation is not to start until 6 months. Breast milk is best! Giving water too early also results in the early introduction of worms and parasites which quickly leads to malnutrition.

I was shocked not so much at the state of health of the children we were seeing the first morning, but at the answers to the survey questions. In particular, I was asking each woman how many children she had. It was common to hear 8, 9, 10, 11, up to 14. But when I asked them how many of the children were still living, the answers were shocking. A woman who gave birth to 14 children had 9 living. Five of her children had died, all at various ages from one sickness or another. No one could give you details, it was just a fact of life. As I asked the name of the child we were weighing, many women didn’t know their child’s proper name, as though they had too many names to remember or the name itself had no significance. Even worse was knowing how old their children were. Very few women could give an accurate age of their child. One woman had no idea how old her children were, except to know that her first child was around five. She had four children under the age of five and the oldest two were both very malnourished. I asked her if the four kids were really four kids that she had given birth to (as it is common to raise other people’s children) and she replied, “Yes. A woman’s work is to give birth”. I wanted to cry for her. Her husband had left her and she believed that the only thing she was good for was having babies.

On Friday a grandmother came with a 10 day old baby, born premature and weighing 1.9kg. We had to resuscitate the baby 5 times before the Doctor finally gave up and she died in the early hours of the morning. I think the baby girl was the first child I have seen die right in front of me and it was a tragic and emotional experience. What was worse is that they had this baby at home for several days before bringing her to the health clinic, where the government ‘nurse’ on duty proceeded to give this tiny baby girl everything from quinine (for malaria), several antibiotics and diazepam, all within a 24 hour period. Before coming to the government health clinic the family had tried various forms of traditional medicine, and, as a last resort, brought the child to the Baptist health clinic. By then it was too late and it made me so angry to know that this baby suffered so much at the hands of ignorant people. With only ten percent of children attending a school that barely works, there is little hope for the future.

There are many different food taboos that have been passed down generations in the region that make it a very difficult place nutritionally as well. Children are not supposed to eat papayas or bananas, as it is said to give them worms. They shouldn’t eat eggs, fresh meat (only meat that has been dried over a fire) or fish (the smell of fish is what makes kids limbs swell, supposedly). The end result of these taboos is children ending up with kwashiorkor, a form of malnutrition resulting from a lack of protein where the belly and limbs are severely swollen. Pregnant women are also subject to many of the same taboos resulting in low birth weights and generally unhealthy children. I am convinced that a bunch of men got together, decided on what was the best tasting food in the village and then made up a bunch of rules that made sure they were always the ones to get to eat them. With this sort of ignorance, what will it take to save the next generation? Certainly it will take more than a few visits from a village health team.

On the road of sorrows

2010-04-03T07:51:00.000-07:00

Wednesday I am heading to Hamada-Gaza, a town far north of Gamboula along some very horrible roads. I think it takes a day to get there; that is if the bridges are passable and it isn’t raining. I will be in the company of five staff from the Gamboula Hospital who will be going to assess the health and nutrition situation which, by all accounts so far, is not at all good.

Diamonds may be a woman’s best friend in North America, but here, they result in famine and hardship. Men, seduced by the prospect of striking it rich by finding a large cache of diamonds hidden beneath the ground, strike out into the bush to dig large pits and sift the soil looking for diamonds. The problem is that it is much like playing the lottery, with about as equal odds of winning big. You may win two dollars here, ten dollars there, but not enough to feed your family for more than a few days. In the meantime, if your wife is not digging beside you, she is laboring in the family fields without her co-laborer (her husband) and likely her older sons are also absent. Thus, when the husband comes home empty handed, not having held the winning lottery ticket, instead of losing a dollar or two a week playing the lotto, the family suffers much greater losses in the form of malnourished, diseased and dead children. Without enough food to eat from the family garden, or enough money to buy food or medicines in the market, families suffer to the point of death.

This has been the case in Hamada-Gaza, a village whose woes are augmented by a lack of roads that can support large vehicles (such as supply trucks or bush taxis), an overall drop in diamond demand and prices, increased food prices and decreased food production. It is a recipe for disaster. The team from the hospital will be going to help assess the severity of the situation, teach the local health clinic about how to ameliorate some of the worst cases with specially formulated milk and we hope to bring an empty car to bring the most urgent cases back to the hospital. I hope to explore the state of agriculture in the area, assess the availability of seed and see how CEFA could be of help. I will be glad to have Clarisse with me and I know, as hard as it will be to see starvation, it is a necessary part of my time and usefulness here.

The Importance of Earrings

2010-04-03T07:49:00.000-07:00

It is a common practice here that within a week or two of giving birth to a baby girl, to pierce their ears. As babies are likely to pull out earrings and swallow them or rip holes through their ear lobes, pieces of string are tied through the hole until they are old enough for earrings. While the practice may be a result of the desire for adornment, it also serves the very functional purpose of identifying the sex of the child. Any child without their ears pierced is automatically a boy. Because of head lice and other fun critters, it is common practice for girls and boys to shave their heads, so without earrings and the pre-pubescent lack of breasts, it is hard to know who is who.

Enter my visitor from North America, an agriculture missionary in Cameroon. She just arrived in Cameroon last month and is spending two weeks with us in Gamboula to get her agricultural bearings and to glean ideas from Roy and me. She is very tall, has medium length hair, and is not, currently, wearing earrings. So during her first two days here she has caused quite a stir, as she and I have been wandering around in the gardens, in our sneakers and pants. Most people are convinced she is a man with inappropriately long hair, and when I correct them and inform them she is in fact a woman, the first question they ask is, “why aren’t her ears pierced?”

As few topics of conversation are taboo here, particularly among family members, we discussed and laughed over her dilemma while having lunch with Clarisse and Nadege. The moral of the story is, if you are coming to Central Africa and you plan on wearing pants, be sure your ears are pierced, or else you will be the topic of some very interesting, if not embarrassing, conversations.

An Update on Thankfulness

2010-03-29T22:03:00.001-07:00

I have had the privilege of working with Mme. Thankful (the lady from an earlier post) this past week. She has been a joy to work with and even though she only speaks French, I have been making do with my kindergarten level language abilities to discover how truly thankful she is.

First, however, I must make a correction to what I wrote in an earlier post. Mme. Thankful is a Cameroonian woman who was married to a Senegalese Muslim, so she was also a practicing Muslim. Her sister died in childbirth 18 months ago, leaving behind a baby daughter with a serious breathing abnormality that resulted in Mme. Thankful taking the two month old to a major hospital in Yaoundé, Cameroon. During a two week stay at the hospital the bill amounted to more than 200.000 cfa (more than $400 USD, 5 times the average monthly salary). At the end of her two week stay the family’s money had run out and she was counseled to take the baby home and let her die. It was at this time that a family member of Mme. Thankful, who lived across the border from us in Cameroon, told her about the Gamboula Hospital. So Mme. Thankful brought her daughter, Happiness (no I am not making up the name) to our hospital where she was treated for three months. At the end of her stay she was overwhelmed with the generosity of Clarisse, the nutrition garden, the missionaries and staff, thus her desire to come back to Gamboula to help us. As a result of her stay here she became a Christian, and is about the most thankful mother I have ever witnessed. She adores her adopted baby and responds to her every cry.

She has been working in the garden all week and despite nearly stepping on a snake the other day, she has persevered and has left us with a tremendous gift to pass on to those needing the garden in the future. Mme. Thankful is also a seamstress and has been sewing for me in the afternoons. My brother, Remy, gave Clarisse and I some beautiful fabric as a souvenir of our visit to the diamond mine last week and Mme. Thankful has transformed it into a beautiful dress that I wore to church this morning. I have never received so many compliments before. While I wear pants and t-shirts all week it is fun to ‘dress-up’ on Sundays and be a little girlie. I will have to wear it one Sunday in Victoria.

The Diplomat

2010-03-25T10:49:00.001-07:00

Last summer I spent a week in the capital, Bangui, working with Roy and Benoit to establish a National Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). The NGO, Centre for Experimentation and Formation in Agriculture (CEFA), will follow through with the original agroforestry work started by Roy ten years ago. CEFA will be working at three sites: an experimentation farm which will conduct small-scale trials in order to improve staple crop, vegetable and animal production in the region, a demonstration farm where successes from the experiment farm are demonstrated for the general public to visit, and, of course, the nutrition garden, whose program continues as usual, but now under the umbrella of CEFA. I have been working with Roy since the summer to establish the NGO’s statutes and regulations as well as work on funding proposals and strategy papers for how CEFA will go about its work of village extension and training. Since arriving in Gamboula I have been working on making some of our ideas operational, looking at staff needs and planning the year’s activities. We will be having our first board meeting on April 7 for which there is a lot to prepare and is one of the primary reasons for my visit.

As a board member I have also had to respond to official requests for help and liaise with the community. The other day CEFA received a letter from the Mayor’s office requesting that we pay a particular tax, but of course the request made no sense to me. Benoit and I drove down to the Mayor’s office after I got all dressed up in my most diplomatic office to discuss the tax. It was a very good meeting and I realized that this is the type of work I most love doing. Not that discussing and negotiating taxes is particularly fun, but I do like meeting with community officials and I think developing relationships is a large part of what we doing here. The government here is extremely corrupt, so working with officials is not always pleasant. Instead of fighting corruption, missionaries and NGOs have had a tendency to give in to it, which does not make changing the system any easier.

After visiting the Mayor’s office we drove over to the Catholic mission. We were looking for the Priest, but, as he was not in town, we were greeted by a wonderful Sister who invited us in for a cold drink. I thought, when she said cold drink, she meant water, but instead, she pulled out a large bottle that looked awfully like beer. She put two large glasses in front of us and proceeded to pour each of us a large glass of beer. Now, many of you know that I am not partial to beer, having never really gotten past the first sip. But I am also a hospitarian. By hospitarian I mean to say that I will eat, or at least try, anything that is served to me. So, bottoms up, I downed that beer, along with a banana for good measure and laughed to myself about the oddity of the situation. Here I was, in a nun’s house, drinking beer with my Central African boss who, as a Baptist, is not supposed to drink alcohol. I guess Benoit is as much a hospitarian as I am.

Adoption

2010-03-23T13:46:00.002-07:00

I am adopted. I am the thirteenth child of Madelaine and Francois Nguebe, better known as Mama and Papa. I was visiting Mama the other day with a young missionary kid and introduced him to my mom. He gave us the most confused look. “But, but, but...” he said, looking at us, “that’s not true”. I suppose, in the flesh, it does look a bit impossible, with me a snow white Caucasian and the Nguebe’s as black as any Central African. But in spirit, I have become an Nguebe, the thirteenth, if somewhat pampered, child. As an adopted child I admit to having special privileges. When I first entered the family, five years ago now, I was chastened for sitting on a mat on the ground when a perfectly suitable chair had been hauled out of the house specifically for me to sit in. It used to be a big deal when I arrived in the afternoon to sit and visit, more along the lines of the patron coming to your house. Over the years though, the bond of adoption has strengthened. While I have yet to do dishes or make gozo for the family meal (the cassava staple), there being plenty of children and spare wives to do these tasks, likely better than me, I am slowly losing my place of privilege. While you may not think this worth rejoicing over, it is something I have sought after from the beginning. No more chairs of honour or friends addressing me as “Madame Darren”. Now, when I arrive, I am greeted with the same titles of respect that any other Nguebe would use for each other. I am “Angela”, “Mama”, “Aunty”, “my daughter” or “my sister” as the case allows. I have never been happier.

Five years since my adoption, I am sitting on a couch with Remy to my right and Clarisse across from me, watching French TV in the bar of GEM Diamonds-Likaya, an hour and a half from Berberati. Clarisse and I came to Berberati on vacation, two nights only, but it is a stretch given Clarisse’s responsibilities at the hospital and the kids-nieces, nephews and grandchild-we left crying at home on our way here. After spending the night at our sister Elise’s house, Remy, the firstborn and family patriarch came to pick us up this morning to take us to this Central African bush paradise.

Perhaps paradise is too strong a word, but since it closed operations it has become a very tranquil place to visit. It has more amenities than you could find anywhere in Berberati, the second largest city in the country. No outhouses in Likaya, just flush toilets, hot water showers, air conditioning and a second story bar overlooking the river. C’est tres bien!

It is hard, if not impossible to characterize a family, let alone a country. As far as the Nguebe’s are concerned, they are a Central African family that has been transformed by a living God. They are far from perfect. Between the twelve brothers and sisters (six of each sex) you can find any number of faults, but no more so than you would find amongst my dad’s own eleven siblings. However you break it down though, there exists something different among them. I have met them all and, while I know some better than others, generosity and perseverance are common characteristics.

In Memorium

2010-03-18T07:32:00.001-07:00

A good friend died last night. Kylee died after giving birth to a
beautiful baby and my heart goes out to her family and friends around
the world. I have few words to express how I feel right now. I do feel
vulnerable. Our lives are so fragile. But we shouldn't protect
ourselves in a bubble, rather we should seize each moment and live
with the joy of being alive.

I will miss you Kylee.

Regarding the Uncelebrated Holiday....

2010-03-17T14:28:00.001-07:00

I take it back, I did celebrate, I had to, I swear. We recieved a summons to the party at the residence of the sous-prefet (he is like the boss of several mayors in a district). When I say we, I mean Roy and Aleta as representativs of the agrilcuture work here. However, they have important visitors so they could not go. I went looking for the Central African head of the program, Benoit, but he had conveniently slipped away to his garden, not being one to celebrate the holiday either. So that left me. I figured it was duty to go, so I got dressed up in my finest, took the keys to the truck and headed to the party. On the way, I ran into Nadege and coaxed her into going with me. She got all fancied up and we sat amongst 60 or so other invitees to the party. Everyone else in attendance was either a local organzier of the President's political party, moslty women, or funcitonaries of the local government, from the mayor, the military, police, etc. We ate, we drank (pineapple pop for us, beer for everyone else) and took our leave after about 2 hours.

While it wasn't exactly fun, it wasn't torture either. I had a great time talking with Nadege and we laughed at the various people around us. I didn't have to pledge allegiance to CAR or anything like that but I didn't get to give any speeches either.

An uncelebrated holiday

2010-03-15T22:26:00.002-07:00

Today is a holiday in CAR but I am not celebrating. Today marks the 2003 anniversary of the current president coming to power through a somewhat bloody coup d’etat. Not something I would think of celebrating myself. Condemn, yes. Celebrate, no. So while everyone else is downtown watching the parade and worried that if they don’t show up they will be considered as an opponent to the current regime, I am taking my chances at home. Besides, I can’t see much that the current regime has accomplished since seizing power in 2003, unless you count five rebellions, astonishingly high rates of malnutrition and displaced people as accomplishments.

On the upside, my surrogate family is well and sends their greetings. The children in school this year are doing well and Clarisse’s youngest has started junior high school. She walks nearly 8 kilometres a day going to and from school but she is excelling and for that I am grateful. The nutrition garden is living up to its name, helping hundreds over the past year alone and is full of green leafy vegetables at present. Yesterday I helped dig holes for planting tropical yam: A task made easier by a sudden burst of rain, marking the coming of the rainy season.

Friday I hope to make it to Berberati to visit the other half of my surrogate family and spend some time with Clarisse. The following week I will be hosting a former ECHO intern who will be spending two weeks with me to learn about grafting and nursery management in the Central African context before she goes to spend two years in Cameroon doing something similar to the agroforestry work we have been doing here. I am looking forward to her arrival as I love training and am excited that Richard, the grafter I trained several years back, will be able to take a training role as well. His grafting has come along well and he has done some interesting experiments.

Paying a debt of gratitude

2010-03-10T13:39:00.002-08:00

I arrived in Gamboula on Monday night, after spending Sunday in Yaounde resting after a long two weeks in Uganda and Kenya. Translating is difficult and tiring, but it was rewarding to be able to open up a new side of Africa, the Anglophone side, to Benoit. I hope it assists him in the on-going work in CAR and gives him hope for what the future of his country could be. It was fun to see his reaction at seeing new people groups, such as the Masai, learning that they don’t steal from each other and experiencing their generosity. It was moving to see Benoit’s interaction with former displaced people in Uganda; people who had lived in Internal Displacement (IDP) camps for twenty years as a result of the rebellion of Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA have been terrorizing communities in CAR and fresh attacks occurred last week in the South East. Benoit asked them to go get him and take him home, to Uganda, as we don’t want him in CAR. Needless to say, they don’t want him back either.

On driving up the Gamboula road, I was greeted by Nadege, one of my sister’s and supervisor of the nutrition garden. She had been waiting for us by the side of the road. I jumped out the car and progressed on foot towards Clarisse’s house. As we got near to her house, she saw us in the distance, my white skin a beacon that I had arrived. She ran towards us, something rather unbecoming of an African mother, but she abandoned all sense of culture and just ran towards me, giving me a big hug. I knew then, what i have known for a long time, that this will always be a home of mine, no matter where in the world Darren and I find ourselves, we will always be welcome here.

I spent the morning with Nadege in the nutrition garden, weeding and talking and sharing stories. I have been trying to capture some of these stories on video and plan on sharing them with you via YouTube when I return to a high speed internet connection. One story is about a woman from Kentzou. She was a refugee from the banditry in CAR, married to a Fulani man, but not Fulani herself. Her child was terrible malnourished and sick and with the little money they had they took the child all the way to the hospital in Yaounde, Cameroon. After spending a lot of money they returned with their child to Kentzou worse off than before. Soon after, they arrived at the Gamboula hospital with little hope that the child would survive. However, the child did survive, and is now thriving thanks to both the medical and nutritional care she received in Gamboula. The mother was especially thankful for the nutrition garden, exclaiming every day over the vegetables, fruits and starches she was given free to help in her child’s recovery. They went home after three months and the woman continued to practice what she learned in the nutrition garden.

This mother recently came to visit Nadege and explained that she wanted to pay back her debt of gratitude to the nutrition garden. She gave Nadege some money to have a small area in the nutrition garden cleared to prepare a place to plant. The mother promised to come back with seeds and planting material to plant in this cleared space, in the hopes that her ‘donation’ to the garden would, in turn, help others who found themselves in the same position as herself: hopeless, hungry and destitute.

Surprise

2010-03-04T10:15:00.001-08:00

I have never seen Benoit so excited as I have this week. From being 'decorated' by Masai women, a ceremony by which they present you with gifts of beadwork jewelry, to seeing herds of zebra, giraffe and wildebeest along side the car, to hearing that Masai do not steal from one another and that you can leave your house unlocked during the day. It was one surprise after another for him and I think he will have stories to tell for years to come.

More importantly, we met many community initiatives working to bring about food security. They were all run by Africans for Africans and I think this was very good for Benoit to see. He saw how the challenges here are not much different from the challenges in CAR, and yet here Kenyans are making a difference, finding local solutions to local problems. I think this will change how our project is working in CAR for the better and will give us lots to talk and think about over the next month.

When I get settled in Gamboula I will start posting up a storm.

Quick Update from Kenya

2010-03-02T19:50:00.002-08:00

I have found time to write a brief note after returning from two days out visiting projects with the Masai near the Ngong Hills. Benoit was eager to learn about their culture and their struggles with drought and floods that had wiped out more than 80% of their cattle. As we drove down the road we could see skeletons of animals long dead from the drought. I drank a lot of goat's milk tea and ate my share of roasted goat, along with Benoit's help. We learned a lot from the projects we visited and have a lot more to think about now for our own project, CEFA, back in CAR.

We are heading out to Narok tomorrow, and will be back in Nairobi for two more nights after that. I have not had an inch of excercise in weeks but look forward to getting into the garden once I reach Gamboula.

From the road,
Angela

Uganda, February 21-27, 2010

2010-03-01T07:00:00.002-08:00

“When I get older I will be stronger, they’ll call me freedom just like a wavin’ flag”. K’naan said it and I felt it in Uganda. While poverty still has a hold in Uganda, I saw hope for a day free from poverty, free from reliance on IDP* camps and foreign assistance. Ugandan’s are a proud and independent people and from all of the projects I visited I was overwhelmed by the deep belief of Ugandan’s that they know the answers to their own problems, they have the solutions and many of the resources from within their own communities, and the assistance they require and are asking for is to complement this.

I was privileged to visit a grain amaranth growing project in Eastern Uganda called Garner Amaranth. They were growing and promoting a high quality grain amaranth for use as a nutritional food supplement which is particularly beneficial for people suffering from HIV/AIDS. For those unfamiliar with amaranth, it is in the same family as ‘pig weed’, a nasty weed in North America. Its seeds are slightly smaller than sesame but have a very high protein quality and can be ground into flour or popped, like popcorn, but much smaller, making it very digestible. We were treated to a tasty meal by Garner, which, not surprisingly, incorporated amaranth into every dish. I am not sure if it was the power of suggestion or not, but I woke up feeling healthy and strong the next morning!

From there we drove north to the Teso region of Uganda, an area affected by the rebel army of Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). As late as 2003, the area had been attacked by the LRA and as a result thousands of people had been living in IDP camps; makeshift towns that housed more people than is healthy, disrupting culture, livelihoods and relationships. Now, fortunately for Uganda and unfortunately for the Central African Republic, Sudan and Congo, the LRA has been kicked out of Uganda and are operating in the bush on the shared borders of CAR, Sudan and Congo. Just last week, LRA soldiers had attacked a small town in CAR capturing 30 people who had gathered for shelter at the local Catholic church. Benoit, my Central African colleague, was most upset and asked Uganda to come and get him and see he can face justice. I am pretty sure Uganda does not want him back.

We had a chance to visit farming cooperatives and learn about the way they are organized and work together. It was inspiring and I know Benoit learned a lot that he will take back to CAR. While our context in CAR is different from that in Uganda, I think it was inspiring for Benoit to see fellow Africans, with similar food and agriculture challenges solving their own problems in an organized and, in many times, profitable way. We will have a lot to discuss when we get back to CAR as far as project organization and program planning go.

This trip has been valuable for Benoit to see his African brothers and sisters taking steps towards their own freedom in ways that can be achieved in CAR as well. With time, they will be singing freedom from poverty in CAR too.

This is Benoit seeing sunflower, an oil crop, for the first time. He is very interested!

On our way to Teso

2010-02-23T20:56:00.000-08:00

This is just a quick note to let you know that things are going well
here in Uganda. We are on the road and I happened to find a free
wireless connection to quickly post this note. I have a fabulous team
and translating is going well. Benoit knows more English than he lets
on! We had rain all day yesterday which is badly needed here and
cooled things off nicely for our first day out. Though we were all
running on very little sleep yesterday, today we are refreshed after a
good nights sleep and plenty of grain amaranth in our lunch yesterday.
It was definitely a power lunch.

Okay, more soon from the road.
Angela

The Gamboula Nutrition Garden: An overview

2009-12-21T11:08:00.000-08:00

I thought I would share this article I wrote to give everyone a better picture of what the Nutrition Garden is all about. It is long but informative. This program, supported by individuals in Canada and the United States, was also the subject of my Master’s thesis. If you have any questions or comments, please send them to me at spoiledfornormal@gmail.com.

Case study of the Gamboula Nutrition Garden, Central African Republic

1. Background

The social impacts of the current crisis in the Central African Republic have been felt the hardest by women and children. The lack of health care, clean water and sanitation contributes to and exacerbates malnutrition among children. There is 38% global chronic malnutrition in the country, with which numerous long-term effects have been associated. Forty-three percent of the population, or 1.6 million people, are currently food insecure in CAR to date. This is not due to lack of land as only 4.4% of the arable land in CAR is currently in use. Rather, evidence points to the lack of variety in the diet coupled with the current insecurities in the country and the effects of the global economic crisis for the high level of food insecurity.

In an effort to help stem some of the underlying causes of malnutrition, Evangelical Covenant missionary Roy Danforth started a large fruit tree orchard behind the Gamboula II Eglise Evangélique Baptiste (EEB) hospital in 1998. The fruits produced were intended to provide food for the nutrition centre as well as provide an opportunity for hospital patients to become acquainted with new fruits introduced through a large scale agroforestry program in the area. In 2006, a nutrition garden was added to the orchard and the Women and Children Gardening for Health (WCGH) program was started.

The WCGH program is hosted by the Gamboula Nutrition Centre, a ministry of the EEB hospital in Gamboula, CAR. The hospital receives minimal outside funding and is based on a user-fee system. The nutrition centre charges patients per room and for other medical charges such as medicines, intravenous supplies or blood transfusions. All of the food is provided free and is supplied by the nutrition garden, by the World Food Program or via donations from expatriates living in the area. The nutrition centre treats, on average, one hundred children per year, though this figure is expected to be much higher for 2009. The physical effects of malnutrition, such as marasmus, kwashiorkor and chronic undernourishment, are treatable through remediation in the hospital’s nutrition centre. However, many families return to the same farming practices and the same lack of variety in the diet that contributed to the malnutrition in their family in the first place.

Gamboula is a town of around 5,000 people situated twenty-five kilometres from the border of Cameroon and thus in close proximity to thousands of Fulani refugees who fled from recent violence in the north. Gamboula itself is also host to hundreds of Fulani IDP’s and people of several other Bantu tribes. The primary occupation of the people in the region is subsistence farming, particularly after the closure of a large tobacco company that employed nearly five hundred people, as well as the closure of a large forestry camp in the nearby town of Bamba. Gamboula is situated on the main access road between the capital city of Cameroon, Yaoundé, and the capital of CAR, Bangui.

2. Purpose of the WCGH program

The WCGH program and the nutrition garden are uniquely situated to help children and their caregivers recover from severe malnutrition as well as provide training to caregivers to prevent the recurrence of malnutrition. The WCGH program serves two main functions. The nutrition garden provides food for the nutrition centre as a means to meet the immediate dietary needs of the children in the centre. In the nutrition centre, nutritious food is good medicine. In addition to introducing healthy foods into their diets, the garden also serves as a model for teaching mothers gardening techniques so that they and their families can begin or improve upon their own gardens and remain healthy. The WCGH program provides a machete, vegetable seeds, fruit tree seedlings and other planting material to each woman who completes ten hours of work/training in the nutrition garden.

3. Size and composition

The nutrition garden is approximately twelve acres in size and consists of seven acres of fruit trees and five acres of vegetable gardens and field crops. The fruit tree portion of the garden was planted in 1998 and the fruit is consumed by the nutrition centre while the seeds are saved for use in the fruit tree nursery of the Gamboula Agroforestry Program. Space for vegetable gardens and field crops was added in late 2005. Vegetable gardening is the main dry season activity while field crops such as beans, improved cassava, yam, sweet potato, peanuts, egusi melon, Fulani potato and corn are the focus of the rainy season.

4. Program Activities

Training – The WCGH program currently supports one full-time staff person who is responsible for the oversight of the garden, food production and training of the women from the nutrition centre. Women whose children are hospitalized are encouraged to work in the garden three days a week, during which time their ‘work’ is actually hands-on training combined with direct lessons. Each woman who completes ten hours of training is given a machete, vegetable seeds and fruit tree seedlings to take home.

Food production – All food produced in the nutrition garden is given to the nutrition centre. The nutrition centre relies on the food produced in the garden in order to care for the children in the centre. Without the garden the centre is at risk of closing due to lack of funds to purchase food. Excess food is given to the caregivers of the children, often women who are also malnourished and other children who are staying at the hospital with them. There is no food service at the hospital beyond what the nutrition garden provides. The nutrition centre staff teach women how to prepare crops introduced through the nutrition garden in culturally appropriate and palatable ways to aid in the adoption of these crops in the home garden.

Follow-up – Following up with women once they return home is essential to their success in incorporating what they have learned while participating in the WCGH program. Each woman is visited three times in the first year after leaving the hospital, in conjunction with the three growing seasons in the region.

Materials distribution – Each woman that participates in the WCGH program, completing ten hours of hands on training in the nutrition garden receives a machete, as well as vegetable seeds and fruit tree seedlings, according to her needs. Approximately half the caregivers attending to children in the nutrition centre participate in the WCGH program. Fruit trees were recently added to the list of materials that women could request to take home with them after hearing accounts of women taking seeds home from fruits they had eaten in the nutrition centre. Some women, whose children have a long stay in the hospital, some as long as three months, plant seeds in plastic sacks, placing them outside their rooms to grow. Many of the most popular fruit tree species seeds do not travel well, thus the decision to provide seedlings of fruit trees rather than seeds. The most sought after fruit trees in the nutrition garden include jackfruit, carambola, Madagascar plum, oil palm, breadfruit and canistel.

Experimentation – Within the space available in the nutrition garden, we undertake experiments in new gardening techniques as well as variety trials of species we would like to make available to the program’s beneficiaries. Experiments to date have included trial plots of inter-planted crops including papaya and pineapple; bananas, plantain, sweet potato and taro; vetiver mulch on vegetable beds; and yam cultivation. Variety trials included seventeen varieties of beans collected from Kenya, six cowpea varieties provided by ECHO as well as trials of other beans varieties gleaned from local markets, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo. While performing experiments in a demonstration/production garden is not ideal, as visitors may mistake trial crops for successful introductions, they do help promote the idea of local experimentation. Experiments planned for the future include trying different methods of seed preservation and storage and Moringa production and processing.

‘Serial staffing’ – Funding is by far the biggest limiting factor to the activities carried out in the nutrition garden. Currently, the program budget can only support two full time staff people, one sentry and funds to hire temporary labour when needed. The senior staff person is responsible for planning all of the garden’s activities, conducting follow-up, vegetable and fruit collection for the nutrition centre and training the women who participate in the WCGH program from the nutrition centre. In place of a second full-time staff person, the program hires women on a weekly rotation. In other words, each week one woman is hired to work for one week for a set salary to do various labour tasks in the garden under the oversight of the garden supervisor. Women who request work in the nutrition garden are added to a growing list of names. Each week, the first person on the list is notified of her up-coming week of work and she has the option at the end of the week to put her name back on the list, at the bottom. When this system was started the project already had a list of fifty-three women requesting work. This process, called ‘serial staffing’, meets several needs of the nutrition garden. First, it fills a need for temporary, unskilled labour in the nutrition garden, freeing the supervisor to conduct training or follow-up activities. Second, it helps the project fulfill its mandate of teaching women about adding variety to the families’ diet through gardening by exposing many more women from the community to the activities and crops of the nutrition garden. Through their week of work women are exposed to the various training activities, crops and techniques that they may not otherwise have the opportunity to see. Third, serial staffing helps take the pressure off of the Central African staff to hire friends or relatives for a single full-time position, spreading the opportunity for work among more than fifty women in the community each year. It also allows the permanent staff the opportunity to observe who they may want to hire in the future based on their skill and work ethic displayed during their week of work in the garden.

Large tasks are accomplished by hiring groups of women to perform certain jobs on contract, with a set lump sum agreed upon for the work. The project most often hires women’s groups from local churches who are raising funds in order to attend or host conferences. Most often this task work is used for clearing fields for planting, making large amounts of compost or for weeding in the fruit tree orchard. Most recently, the project has started to include a training component in the task work, taking one hour in the beginning of the work project to teach on composting, tree planting or other important topics.

5. Challenges

Seed production is by far the biggest challenge for the nutrition garden. Many of the plants grown in the garden originate from seeds collected on trips throughout the Central African Republic and the Congo as well as seed sent from ECHO. These seeds are essentially irreplaceable and great care is taken in the nutrition garden to ensure that each time these crops are planted, a certain number of plants are set aside for seed collection rather than food production. However, crops set aside for seed collection are often harvested for food by hospital patients or their families out of desperation and hunger. The nutrition garden is often visited by people other than those connected to the nutrition centre and crops are often stolen, including those set aside for seed. The nutrition garden collects seed in order to replant in the garden as well as to distribute to WCGH participants.

In an effort to protect and preserve the garden’s valuable and often rare seeds, the project has started to engage local farmers in contract growing. Seeds are given to local farmers who are known to be good growers, with the understanding that the nutrition garden will buy whatever seed the farmer produces at a predetermined price. So far, contract growing has been tried for growing certain varieties of beans not available in local markets as well as some vegetables that are not common in local gardens. Issues of seed quality have yet to be addressed and standards will need to be put in place if the scale of contract growing for the nutrition garden grows. Along with seed production, the nutrition garden struggles with seed storage. Methods for seed storage gleaned from ECHO will be addressed in the coming year.

6. Conclusion

The Gamboula Nutrition Garden and its Women and Children Gardening for Health Program, is an example of how agricultural development can effectively intersect with relief. The WCGH program profits from the ‘captive audience’ of women tending to their malnourished children to introduce nutritious foods to their diet, expose women to greater diversity in the diet and garden as well as valuable nutrition training, all in an effort to prevent their subsequent children from becoming malnourished. In many cases desperation leads to opportunity. The same opportunities for intersecting development with relief exist in IDP or refugee camps, hospitals or schools. Given the right setting, projects similar to the Gamboula Nutrition Garden may be appropriate.

WCGH is a project of NMSI (www.nmsi.org) and CEFA (a non-denominational, non-for-profit organization registered in the Central African Republic).

World Food Day

2009-10-16T13:20:00.001-07:00

Think on this:

More on malnutrition in CAR from MSF

2009-09-21T19:51:00.000-07:00

Falling on cows, ultra-marathons and life on a bike

2009-09-20T19:34:00.003-07:00

We Bosses have been walking up a storm lately, all to get ourselves ready for the 56km walk around Lake Cowichan. I am not all together sure why we wanted to subject our bodies to this particular form of insanity but we had fun preparing (long-walks around the city) and I dare say we had fun while doing it. Well, maybe until the 50km mark at which point my feet hurt, we were walking along the highway and I was a tad bit grumpy. We were thankful for downhills which provided the opportunity to run and the other walkers in our midst that provided me with the added motivation of beating someone to the finish line. It worked. We planned on taking, at the fastest, ten hours to complete the course, twelve hours maximum. We finished in eight hours and fifty-three minutes. Our bodies said thanks for the workout and allowed us to get out of bed this morning on two legs, instead of on all fours.

In other news, my dad fell on a cow, breaking his wrist while on the same day I got hit by a car while riding my bike home from work. I am fine, my dad had surgery and you can read more about it on my other blog "Spoiled for Normal".

This week it is back to thesis writing for me, classes and homework for Darren, and work for both of us sprinkled in between. Never a dull moment being a Boss.

Getting hacked

2009-09-09T11:21:00.001-07:00

I am sorry to say that my Google account was hacked into last night and a promotional-type spam sent to everyone on my address list. If you received a spamish message from my account I sincerely apologize. I have changed my password and hope that this solves the issue. Darren figures that the hacker used names from my blog that appear frequently and that this is how they got my password. So I have a different password, a really, really out of the normal secret one. So don't even try to guess it....

Under the Gun-video on Northern CAR

2009-08-21T20:47:00.001-07:00

Follow this link for a short video on the situation in Northern CAR. It is informative and accurate.

Under the Gun

IRIN Africa | Great Lakes | Central African Republic | CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Children at edge of survival, says UNICEF | Children Health & Nutrition Conflict | News Item

2009-08-12T07:29:00.001-07:00

PLEASE read this. One of the three provinces mentioned is ours-Gamboula is within it. Now more than ever we are focussed on helping the nutrition centre with long term nutrition solutions via the nutrition garden.

IRIN Africa | Great Lakes | Central African Republic | CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Children at edge of survival, says UNICEF | Children Health & Nutrition Conflict | News Item

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More disturbing news from CAR

2009-08-11T13:59:00.003-07:00

While living in CAR, away from the conflict zone, it is hard to know what is happening in the country. It isn't until I am back home with reliable Internet access that I find out what is happening just to the north of Gamboula. Just goes to show you how poor the infrastructure and information systems really are.

The humanitarian situation appears to be worsening. Read here for more details. A second article by the UN describes the situation as such; “It’s not like any other humanitarian situation I’ve run across,” Catherine Bragg, Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator, told reporters in New York. (Click on the purple link to read the complete article). The article goes on to point out that the situation in the north has been compounded. "More recently, she added, humanitarian needs have increased due to attacks by the Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the south-east and a rise in malnutrition in the south-western part of the country."

Once again I am reminded that hunger results from conflict and conflict results from hunger. And I press on....

Sharing rebels unwanted

2009-08-03T06:25:00.002-07:00

The notorious LRA, a disastrous rebel group from Uganda are venturing further into CAR helped by its porous borders and the already stretched military currently occupied in the north of the country.

Nearing the end of the journey

2009-08-01T16:33:00.004-07:00

After nine busy days in Ohio, meeting people connected with FRB growing projects, I flew to Fort Myers. I had five great days at ECHO that gave me a chance to catch up with NMSI folks, our monthly supper group of friends, and of course ECHO friends and family. I was going from eight in the morning to midnight each day which may help explain why I am still sick. Since leaving CAR I have been nursing a chest infection of some kind and woke up this morning in Minnesota to something akin to the flu. I have never been sick for this long but I haven't traveled this many days in a row either. Needless to say I will need a weekend's worth of sleep when I get home next week.

I will be speaking at a Covenant church in Kimball, Minnesota tomorrow morning and then spend the rest of the day at a lake picnic in Spicer. On Tuesday we will be driving to Molene, Illinois for the FRB annual meeting. These meetings include an ice cream social at the John Deere factory which will be a very cultural experience for me. I fly out Friday morning and will be dropping into Darren's arms later that afternoon and it will take a lot to part us! In all I have four more talks to give in the next six days after which I will be very tired of talking about myself, CAR and the ills of the world.

What has impressed me about all this traveling around is the sincerity and enthusiasm of the different churches and farmers involved in FRB growing projects. It is amazing to see a field of wheat and to think that that field is the reason why we can do what we are doing in the CAR.

Made it in the paper

2009-07-20T09:59:00.002-07:00

http://www.hutchnews.com/Faith/seeds2009-07-17T21-35-05

Follow the link to see what I got up to Hutchinson, Kansas. I am currently in Bryan, Ohio and will be here all week. I will try and post an up-date soon.

Goodbye Kansas

2009-07-15T13:51:00.002-07:00

I didn't see Dorothy, Toto or the Wicked Witch of the West (thank goodness) but I did see lots of corn and soybeans and met some wonderful people doing good work for those they have never met.

I am in the Wichita airport on my way to Michigan via Minneapolis. The road trip of the year continues on.

Missouri gold mine

2009-07-10T07:09:00.001-07:00

One of the highlights of my time in Missouri was visiting the farm of an eclectic farm/artist couple who live in one of the most unique and delightful homes I have visited in a while. When farm meets artist it is a beautiful combination. The other thing of beauty on this farm was the discovery of a gold mine of Golden Chanterelle mushrooms. There were hundreds growing up under the oaks in the forest and we picked 6 pounds in no time. Chanterelle mushrooms sell for $20 a pound so it is like sitting on gold. We picked until we felt greedy and boxed them up for the farmers market. We also fried some up, mid-west style, and boy were they delicious. I could have eaten twice as many as I did but it is probably better that I didn’t. While I know that everything tastes better fried, these golden beauties would be a treat no matter how they were cooked. I wish my new friends all success in finding a market for their gold!

On the road

2009-07-10T07:00:00.001-07:00

UCC group in Boonsville

It has been one long road trip since I arrived in the US. Many of you know that I am generally not a fan of road trips but I am enjoying all the interesting people I have been meeting along the way. In Indiana I spent a few days with Amish farmers learning about productive, commercial farming with animal power. Many of my stereo-types surrounding the Amish were broken down and I was inspired by their commitment to family and community. I understand that likely no two Amish groups are alike so I hate to post generalizations about all Amish communities based on the one that I experienced. However, the one thing I can say is that it appears that all decisions made in Amish communities are always with the good of the family in mind. The reason I was given for the use of horse traction, besides the decrease in dependence on fossil fuels and their love for horses, is that animal traction depends on the family and the community. It promotes family. This appears to be the first priority of the Amish. That being said, the families we visited are using very modern agricultural techniques, spraying fertilizer and applying the latest insecticides with horse drawn modern sprayers. We saw several Amish driving cars out of the necessity of business and for family vacations. One family we spoke with had flown to Oregon, rented a motor home and driven clear up to Alaska. This did not fit my view of the Amish. Of importance for Gamboula and what I really wished Benoit could have seen was the ingenuity of the Amish. They have modified large equipment for use in horse drawn farming. This ingenuity is inspiring and could be of real benefit to small farmers in CAR, helping them imagine the possibilities for locally devised farm equipment.

Leaving Indiana I flew into Kansas City (KC) and was met by my wonderful hostess Laura. We drove into Missouri and landed in a small town two hours from KC. I had two wonderful speaking engagements, one on Wednesday night and one on Thursday. Both were churches involved in FRB growing projects and it was great to have the opportunity to extend the thanks of small farmers in CAR to farmers and churches in the US who raised funds through farming to support projects like the Gamboula Agroforestry Centre. What I thought would be a 25 minute presentation turned into more than an hour because of the interest and questions from the audience. The questions people asked were fascinating and I am constantly reminded how spoiled I am to be working in such different parts of the world. Part of the fun of traveling like this is being able to help people in mid-west America see the people of CAR as fellow brothers and sisters rather than foreign people in a strange land. Our struggles across the globe are all the same, we all want peace, to live with dignity, to provide for our families and to enjoy the freedom of choice. When we see each other as the same, rather than the other, we can begin to imagine a world better than the one we live in now.

Wheat harvest with animal traction

Fulani refugee article

2009-07-07T19:18:00.003-07:00

Read the following article for more insight into the Fulani (Mbororo) and the reason for the influx of Fulani children in the Gamboula nutrition centre.

Influx of refugees creates silent emergency in eastern Cameroon

DHAHONG, Cameroon, 6 July 2009 – On the surface, the refugee situation in eastern Cameroon looks like a success, but it is also one of immense chaos. Since 2002, over 60,000 refugees from the neighbouring Central African Republic (CAR) have been integrated into host communities here.

Quick Update

2009-07-06T07:00:00.003-07:00

A month has past since my last post and for this I apologize. I was completely without Internet access following my stay in Bangui. So here is the quick and dirty version of all that happened since then.
-On leaving Bangui I took my dear 'daughter' Anne back to Gamboula as she was becoming very malnourished living with her aunt in Bangui. I am happy to say she is doing much better now that she is back in Gamboula. I was a 24-hour mother and well....no plans for our own kids yet, though Anne is a delightful little girl.

-Darren arrived in early June along with new computers and programs for Gamboula and the hospital. He was immediately put to work and everyone was so happy to see him after a two and a half year absence.

-I finished up my research and am so pleased with the way the nutrition program has been running and the direction that the staff want to take it in the future. In terms of numbers, more than 150 women have been trained and have received machetes through the program in the last three years. Thank-you to all who have helped make this a reality. New for the project this year will be a follow-up program with women in the area to help continue with lessons in the garden and to re-enforce what they learned while at the hospital.

-Darren and I went to visit family in Berberati and stayed with our oldest brother at the diamond company where he works. We learned all about the process of diamond extraction and met Claudine, their pet chimpanzee. She was lovely and am definitely going to avoid eating monkey after that. Just looking at her finger nails and eyes...
-On the 29th of June Darren and I parted ways in Yaounde after a day long drive from Gamboula with our new Swedish friends. We met a wonderful couple in Gamboula, a doctor and teacher, who are helping at the hospital for two years. We all have similar questions about missions, development, mission stations, etc., so we had a great time with them and we look forward to visiting them in Sweden some time in the future.

-Darren flew back to Victoria where he jumped back into work. I flew to Chicago where I met up with Bev, the international director for overseas programs with the Foods Resource Bank (FRB). I was intended to travel with FRB this summer as a translator for Ben, from Gamboula, but he was denied his visa. As were two of the other four invited guests. In light of this FRB invited me to travel in Benoit's place so here I am in Odon, Indiana.

I am traveling to an Amish farm today where I will be spending the day learning about vegetable production and staying the night in an Amish home. I will be traveling to Kansas tomorrow and will eventually make it to Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and Florida. I am speaking about the past and future programs in Gamboula, learning about FRB and breaking down all my stereo-types of the mid-west. I will try and blog as I go now that I have everyone a little more caught up.

Starting from the Beginning

2009-06-03T15:47:00.001-07:00

We had a long and uneventful trip to Bangui on Monday, unless you count the 70km side trip to a sawmill town when we picked the wrong way at a fork in the road. We took the fourth parallel route instead of the northern route. The northern route is favoured by bandits and while it has been quiet for the past few months we heard of an incidence just last week so we took the southern route. Considering there are only two major truck routes from our side of Cameroon to the capital Bangui you would think that it would be a fairly decent road, given the amount of supplies one would think would be needed here. On the contrary, it is a narrow, sandy, pot-holed road with a few nice flat sections. The 700km trip took us more than 15hours so we were very tired by the time we arrived.

We came to Bangui in order to meet with David Zokue, a very knowledgeable and well-positioned man in the capital who is helping Roy, Ben* and I start our own NGO in the country. The NGO, Centre d’Expérimentation et de Formation Agricole (CEFA) or the Centre for Agriculture Development and Training is being formed in order to manage a centre of the same name that we hope to start in Gamboula. We are still working out the details of who, where and when but we have the what down and all this week we have been formulating the NGO’s Status and Regulations according to CAR models that David has provided us with. It has been very interesting and intense and Roy, Ben and I spent three very full days going back and forth from English, Sango and French in order to clearly and accurately get across what we think and then get it down on paper. We finished the initial stage on Thursday after an all night session of me typing it all out in French. Thank goodness I chose a laptop with both French and English keys so I know where to go for all the accents. I spent Friday morning with Ben as he corrected my French, made sure all the nouns agreed with each other and I had all the accents properly assigned. It was tiring and I know he was probably wondering what kind of Canadian I am that doesn’t know her French well. Believe me, it is on the list of things to do!

We met with David on Friday and he picked apart our status with a fine toothed comb. He had just finish chairing a committee that was reviewing the CAR electoral code so he didn’t have a whole lot of time to spare. We made it through correcting the statutes but did not get to the rules and regulations. He promised us time on Monday so rather than leave Saturday we are here for another three days and will meet on Monday to finish editing.

Once we are back in Gamboula we will be looking at nominating a board of directors which will consist of Central Africans and foreigners, including myself. I was originally intending on being a co-director of the project but with Darren and I still plugging away at school I think it is best that a director who can start this summer is selected and work begin. As a member of the board I will certainly have to come out for board meetings once a year and will be involved in the direction and vision of the project. It is exciting and daunting at the same time.

We had a free day yesterday (Saturday) so I met up with Joe* early in the morning and we took a taxi out to see his older sister who lives a few kilometres from town. This is the sister who took Anna, my baby, from Gamboula to live with her here in Bangui even though she doesn’t have the means to properly look after her. Finding garden space near a capital city is very difficult for many reasons I will expand on in a separate post. Needless to say they depend on her husband’s very small salary to pay for all their food, household and medical needs as well as his share of the cities alcohol consumption. They have one meal a day and this is obviously not enough. The meals they do eat generally lack in protein, either in the form of meat, peanuts or beans and you can tell. Anna is weak, scrawny and prone to fevers. Joe was going to bring her back to Gamboula during his vacation in July but I do not want her to wait that long. I have asked to take her back with us on Tuesday which will be far easier on her than going with Joe in public transportation and Roy has agreed. She is as light as a feather so she and I will share a seat in our very full truck. Honestly, if there was ever a child I would choose to raise it would be Anna.

In other news, I know I wrote some time ago that Ben was denied his visa to the United States (don’t get me started...) so he is unable to attend the Foods Resource Bank (FRB) meetings and meet out partner farmers. However, FRB has asked me to come for five weeks without Ben to tell the story of CAR and I have agreed. Darren arrives here in one week (YIPPEEE) and we will have three weeks together in country. We both fly out of Yaoundé on the same day at the end of June; Darren returning to Victoria while I head to Chicago. This also means that I will be in ECHO’s neighbourhood sometime in July which I am really looking forward to.

For more thoughts, check out spoiledfornormal.blogspot.com, my ‘other’ blog that is more musings on the state of the world and how I would love to change it! It is pretty raw so I apologize beforehand.

*I have changed the names of people in order to protect their privacy. I will use the same name throughout so please write me if you want to know who they really are. If I know you, I will tell you.

Family Reunion

2009-05-21T16:51:00.002-07:00

It has been a busy couple of days as I make plans for my research and meet with Roy and Benoit to discuss the agriculture work here. I hope to conduct my first interview on Saturday with the help of Jan who has graciously agreed to translate from Fulfulde to English for me. Clarisse has tomorrow off of work so we are going to rent a motorbike and go in search of some women to interview. We are aiming to interview four women who have been through the Women and Children Gardening for Health Program while their children were patients at the nutrition centre. While almost 150 women have been through the program they come from near and far and tracking them down is no small task. They do not have addresses or phone numbers; we only have a name and a village name to go by so Friday should be interesting. This is also field season so women spend hours each day preparing their fields, planting and weeding so finding them becomes even more difficult. We will persevere though as my thesis depends on it and I hardly want to change topics now!

I hitched a ride to Berberati yesterday with Kim to visit the other half of the family there. The kids saw me coming down the lane first and they squealed with glee, came running at me and gave me all kinds of hugs. It is so nice to be loved. Elise set about making lunch while I sat and talked with Eloi and Lars, pretty well avoiding the elephant in the room. When Elise came in to sit and chat she told me about the happenings of the year, starting with the accident and then the burns that she sustained at ICDI from a leaky stove. Yikes! Eloi said he hadn't told me about the accident yet but that he would, and he did, in his own way. He took responsibility for it, but more so expressed his gratitude to God for preserving his life and that of his family. He is living in Berberati until his one year probation is over. I guess this helps him stay out of trouble and help Gamboula calm down. What I enjoyed most about my visit and what I am most thankful for in this country is this family that has taken me in and made me one of their own. I sat and listened to the trials and tribulations of the year gone by as one sister to another, not as though Eloi was my staff member and I had come to hear his side of the story. I just listened and sympathised and put all judgement and questions aside. He is my brother, he is in pain (though not physically thankfully) and what more can I do but listen and pray and cry and laugh. This is what family is. The more time I spend with them the more I realize our common humanity, that tragedy and sin and joy and forgiveness bind us together regardless of race or origin or faith. I am in awe and I am humbled.

Roy, Benoit and I plan to go to Bangui in the coming days to take the first steps towards starting the Agriculture Resource Centre that we are dreaming of for this region. There is a lot to be done and part of my time here will be spent in meetings planning for this project. I am still not sure exactly what our future holds but I am excited about the future work that the Resource Centre will be involved in. There is change in the air and hopefully some rain too!

The Passing of Mama Maggie

2009-05-18T19:49:00.000-07:00

I had a beautiful afternoon with Clarisse. We sat in the living room sipping lemonade while looking at pictures of her Canadian family. We looked at pictures of mom and dad, Sarah and Rob, Koko, Darren and the llamas in the backyard (no, she has never seen such a creature). I blessed her with gifts from home including cold tablets and a Costco sized bottle of ibuprofen.

She in turn blessed me with her story of hope and thanks despite an extremely stressful and trying year. Last summer, Clarisse’s brother was the driver of the agri project truck that crashed killing, four people and seriously injuring our brother, breaking his pelvis in three places. Shortly after he was released from the hospital, two months later, Clarisse’s aunt Maggie died. Maggie had raised Clarisse from infancy and was truly her mom. I knew she was very sick, even during my visit last year, and spoke to Clarisse the day she passed, but I never heard the details until today. I asked Clarisse if she passed in peace and Clarisse told me that she did. In fact, she knew in the morning that was going to die that day and she asked Clarisse to stay near to her, to read Psalms, to pray with her, to sing to her and to not bother with any more medicine, food or IV liquids. She knew she was “going home” as she told Clarisse. In the end Maggie’s sister (Clarisse’s mom), her mother and Clarisse were in the room when she took her last breath. They were able to hold her in her final moments and bury her in her home village across the border in Cameroon. As she told the story I was torn between sorrow and joy. I know that she is missed tremendously here, you can hear it in Clarisse’s heart and I feel it in my own. But the joy that Maggie displayed and the peace in which she passed is cause for joy, and I can only pray that when my own time comes it will be with such grace and peace.

The Journey Home

2009-05-13T17:49:00.002-07:00

Two plane rides and 550km later I have arrived in Gamboula. The last few days in Kampala were a struggle as I balanced my excitement to move on to Gamboula, while focusing on finishing final assignments for the class at Makerere University. In the end, after a few very late nights, I left Uganda having turned everything in taking only the joy of being finished classes, some Ugandan coffee and a fun new hairstyle with me on the plane to Yaoundé!

Despite my initial hesitation, I really enjoyed my time in Uganda. Amongst the many lessons that I learned, I now realize that government officials are only people and I can talk to them just like I do anyone else, with a little extra observation thrown in. I was actually quite mortified to think that I would be spending a few days interviewing people who were the equivalent of a provincial premier and his aides. However, I surprised myself with the ease in which I took this new role, as a consultant, and I am eager to go Bangui to see what officials I can meet within the international aid community. In the end, our ‘mock’ consultancy in Uganda was a good exercise. We went to Kayunga District, we observed, we interviewed some 82 people and we were able to make recommendations as to where the Canadian International Development Agency could intervene in order to reduce poverty.

Now that I am officially finished all of the courses for my MA, I am in Gamboula to begin the final leg, my major research project. However, I have decided to take the week off, catch up with old friends, mourn the loss of Mama Maggie who passed away while I was gone, and just enjoy not being glued to computer for ten hours a day. I have no internet, only a quick chance here and there to send email for which I am thankful.

We arrived last night around 6:00pm and we could see a major thunderstorm on the horizon. I jumped out at Clarisse’s house, as per usual, and went inside for a quick visit. Apparently she and one of the missionaries had been going back and forth over who would feed me on arrival. Clarisse wanted to feed me, but the missionary was expecting me and one other person on arrival. Well, when I stopped in ‘briefly’ to say hi to the family, wouldn’t you know but the rain started to fall and the thunder and lightning was so strong that I was trapped and was ‘forced’ to stay and eat my favourite meal with Clarisse. By the time the rain died down enough to leave, I had eaten my fill and we walked to the missionary's house in time for tea and dessert. We had such a good laugh about it. Of course I wanted to eat with Clarisse and God gave me the perfect excuse to stay. We once again expressed our love for one another with words of thankfulness and amazement that God has kept us close over the last year and that he brought us into sisterhood in the first place. Her family is by no means perfect, nor is mine, but there is a lot of love. A thing of beauty.

I took a grand tour with Roy this morning, looking at all the work that has gone on in the last year. Summer production in the nutrition garden is in full swing and it is very impressive. The winter veggie season has come to an end and they are now in the process of planting many different kinds of beans, corn, peanuts and root crops of various kinds. I am excited to start my research project and to hear what Nadege, Clarisse and others think about the direction the garden could take. Next week we begin in earnest.

As I was walking around the station last night I had this feeling like I never left and that nothing had changed. Of course many things have changed, children have been born, others have died, but life goes on as it always has. I sat on the front lawn of the guesthouse today greeting friends who had come by to say hi. I am blessed with the love shown and I think this is what I miss most when I leave, the closeness of the community here. It is something to cherish.

A Little Solitude

2009-04-25T16:06:00.002-07:00

I am completely surrounded by people. I like people, but it is increasingly difficult to get anything done when your house is full of conversations all day long. I have not written a blog in days owing to the fact that the internet in our house has not been working and we have been in lectures from morning until evening. The lectures have been fantastic. The best of the year. Our lecturers have come from very diverse and interesting backgrounds. The director of the East African Standby Force, the coordinator of the Multi-Country Demobilization, Disarmament and Reintegration program, the head of the World Food Programme for Uganda and other interesting Ugandans with varied perspectives on development and conflict.

One of the most interesting lecturers is our instructor, Phil Lancaster, who currently resides in Victoria. He has been in some of the most interesting war zones and situations on the continent. One of the gems of the week was the statement that “the DDR challenge is one of massive unemployment”. When rebels give up their arms and prepare to go back to their communities we must look at their return primarily as a problem of unemployment and respond accordingly. Otherwise it is very easy for men and boys to return to arms.

We have also been busy preparing ourselves for our field visit this week. Most teams left this morning due to the distances to be traveled, but our team is not going far. We will be traveling to the District of Kayunga, which is primarily an agricultural district that has been neglected by international assistance (or so we think). We will leave tomorrow afternoon and will spend Monday making courtesy calls to local officials and making contacts in the main city. The rest of the week we will be traveling in pairs, one Mak U student and one Canadian, interviewing people in order to accomplish the task before us.

The aim of the Kayunga District field visit is to assess international cooperation in development and peacebuilding programs/projects and how they align with national development objectives and the Millennium Development Goals in order to identify gaps in assistance.

This will be accomplished by reviewing the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability of international programs under the themes of social services, livelihood development, land issues and peacebuilding.

I have been blessed with wonderful teammates, both Canadian and Ugandan, and as I am looking at livelihoods and land conflict I should get my agricultural fix. The area is known for vanilla and passion fruit among other crops and fish, so I have my little seed bags ready for collection.

I have learned a lot this past week, both about development and conflict, as well as about myself. I am still not sure how well suited I am to life in a large city, in as much as I do not naturally enjoy its conveniences. I have been eating my meals at the local open-air market, buying chapatti, avocado and tomato. The last two evenings I went out with classmates and ate at expat restaurants. Though the food was delicious, probably the best Indian food I have ever dined on, I could just as easily eat out once a year as once a month or week as the case may be. My three lovely room mates and I made our way home while the rest of the gang went to visit Kampala’s night club scene.

All but three people from our group are heading out to field sites other than Kampala so in order to keep our suite at the University and have a place to store our belongings, rather than dragging them around the country with us, our place has become storage central. Everyone has agreed to pay a share of the room fee to balance out the costs, so it works out well for everyone. Now that everyone has come and gone I am looking forward to a day of quiet, just me and the room full of mosquitoes at present. I will eventually wander out to find an internet cafe and a bite to eat. Today is my mental day which means no taxis, no people, no fancy dining and no one to look after but myself. Rediscovering the introvert within me has made me realize how much I need this every once in a while.

Welcome to Makerere

2009-04-19T21:18:00.002-07:00

Saturday afternoon I made my way over to Makerere University with the help of Jeff and found my new 'dorm room' for the week. I am staying with three other women from my program in a two room apartment. It is a very functional place with a small kitchen, living area and two rooms with two single beds in each. We also have internet via an ethernet cable so your computer must be plugged into the cable. This posed a small problem for four blogging/facebooking/student researchers so we reached out to our IT hero for help.

Darren, via skype, hurray for Darren and skype, helped me configure my computer into an ad hoc wireless internet server. All that means is that while my computer is plugged into the internet everyone else gets a wireless signal off of me. It was genius for us non-techies and has given us our own little internet cafe. We are thinking of selling the password to our cohort friends who didn't rent rooms with internet...

Yesterday afternoon we went on a walk of town, eventually finding our way to Garden City, no not Victoria, but the mall I visited with Christine last Thursday. I ate falafel for lunch in the food court. It was absolutely ridiculous. The East African experience is so vastly different from West Africa I am boggled how people can make generalisations about the African continent.

We weren't the brightest people choosing to walk in the heat of the day and I did not use enough sunscreen but it isn't the first time. I spent the evening visiting with students from our cohort as they arrived on campus and enjoyed the last hours of freedom before classes and our project here starts.

This morning is the first day of classes and I have that nervous feeling in my stomach. We have heard that the original plans for the next three weeks have been changed so none of us are too sure what to expect.

The past couple of days I have learned that foreign countries with foreign languages are definitely more fun than countries that speak English. I find that it is easier to connect with people in markets and on the street when you are speaking a different language. It makes the whole experience more challenging too. I am a borderline extrovert. Having spent two days in an estrogen packed apartment I am feeling the need for a little me space but again, this is part of the challenge.

Darren is my hero!

Jeff and Christine's House

2009-04-18T00:59:00.000-07:00

Kampala

2009-04-17T22:26:00.001-07:00

It is a breezy overcast morning here in Kampala, Uganda and rainy season seems to have officially kicked off. I arrived Wednesday after a long three days of airports, plane rides and layovers and have been staying in the home of Jeff and Christine, NSI missionaries here in Kampala.

I was immediately struck by the orderliness of Kampala compared to Yaoundé and how similar Kampala is to Nairobi, though Nairobi has much more of the international city feel with high rises and such. I went shopping with Christine Thursday and was able to access a bank machine, buy a SIM card for my phone and purchase groceries and very reasonable prices. Uganda has a very productive dairy and produces delicious yogurt and milk. I certainly won’t go hungry while I am here. Food here has a heavy East Indian influence owing to their large population in the country, especially before the Amin era. This may also help to explain the over abundance of Jackfruit trees. Just as common as mango trees, every plot and wild space has multiple jackfruit trees growing and the fruits can be found for sale all over the place. I have yet to try one but I am told they are quite low in latex. This is definitely on my list of things to do. I will also have to pocket some seeds for Roy.

The expatriate community is very large here compared to CAR (about 3500) though relatively small compared to Kenya (about 30,000). I attended a bible study Wednesday night with expats who are involved in missions, business and even security operations in Somalia. There is instant community here though I think this would also make it difficult to meet and make friends with Ugandans depending on the job you do here. Kampala has all the perks of the US including dinner parties,pilates classes, golf and coffee shops. It is a completely different lifestyle than that of our little community in CAR.

Living in a large city like Kampala or Nairobi as a development worker, missionary, business person, etc, is certainly a lifestyle choice. It is expensive but less so than London or New York and the climate is much better! All of the houses are gated in with guard dogs and razor wire and I feel trapped behind walls that don’t let you see out or others see in but I suppose this is the point really. My first reaction is that I could live in a place such as this though it wouldn’t be my preference and I think I would enjoy it about as much as I would enjoy living in Toronto or Dallas or LA, which isn’t very much. I am definitely more comfortable and at home in small towns, where things are more open, people come and go and you can walk to the stores and markets. I suppose any of the towns in CAR would serve me well, even perhaps Bangui. What I have discovered about myself n these few days so far is that I would love to visit the big city on occasion, but I am definitely cut out for more rural situations. I think this also satisfies my desire to learn and rely on a second language and to be challenged to find kindred spirits among the local people (which can be a real challenge).

I am so thankful that there are metropolitan-like people,such as Jeff and Christine, who choose to live and enjoy city life in places like Kampala. They and their two boys have a lovely and welcoming home. Christine raises chickens which she slaughters and sells to the expat community and is just starting to raise meat rabbits as well. We need her to come to Gamboula so we can raise our own big fat meat birds as well!

I am heading over to Makerere University today to settle into the guest house and do some pre-reading for the start of classes on Monday. I am very nervous about this residency, as nervous as I was on the first day of classes. We are undertaking a very big project during our three weeks (details to come) and I feel unprepared and totally out of my comfort zone. I suppose it wouldn't be a learning exercise if I knew exactly what I was I doing though, so I guess I am in the right place.

Au Revoir

2009-04-13T11:52:00.002-07:00

I am off to the airport in ten minutes. My first stop (after several connecting stops) is Kampala, Uganda on Wednesday. I will be attending my last class with RRU along with 19 classmates. We will be assessing Uganda's progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. On May 8 I will fly to Gamboula and be reunited with my friends and family. I will stay until the end of June and will be looking at the progress of the nutrition garden, helping launch the new Agriculture Resource Centre and collecting data for my thesis project.

Along the way I WILL be blogging so stay tuned to hear about my "spoiled for normal" life. (Spoiled for Normal is life lived outside the box, in case you were wondering).

Think about Darren when I am gone. Write him, phone him, feed him. I will miss him as always.

Angela

The Beauty of CAR

2009-03-13T10:01:00.003-07:00

Last summer I received an e-mail from a gentleman in Poland. After reading our blog he wrote about his desire to travel there. He had a keen interest in the CAR and had a lot of questions about traveling logistics and safety. This spring, after many e-mails back and forth, he wrote to say that he had had a wonderful time in CAR and can see why the people and place is firmly rooted in our hearts. While I may have a knack for writing, my new Polish friend has the wonderful gift of photography. I just viewed his on-line gallery of photos and was compelled to share the link with you. It is well worth the 10 or 15 minutes it takes to view them all.

He travelled all the same paths we have and I recognize many of the Ba'aka women in his pictures from Bayanga. His route from Kentzou to Gamboula (our home town) up to Berberati, through Nola and on to Bayanga is one that we are very familiar with and it brought a smile to my face to see how other people view the places that I love.

You can find his gallery at: http://joasia.blogs.com/photos/republika_srodkowej_afryk/index.html

Enjoy the adventure.

The Global Village

2009-03-04T16:58:00.004-08:00

I have been doing a tremendous amount of reading for my courses and wanted to share an interesting article with you.

But first...a quick update. I have purchased my tickets and will be leaving for Uganda April 13. I will be spending three weeks in Uganda participating in a consulting exercise which is the capstone/final project of my Masters degree. Following Uganda I will be flying across the Continent to Cameroon where I will hopefully meet up with Darren. We will make our way to CAR where I plan on conducting my thesis research on the nutrition garden. Darren will stay for three weeks and I will stay until the end of June. I have tons to do before then and just sent visa application number one away today. I am feeling swamped and always have that feeling like I should be reading something.

So, the following story has been copied from the UN Millennium Development Goals document "Freedom from Want" found at http://www.un.org/millennium/sg/report/ch2.pdf

I am sure you have heard similar stories in the past. This one distills the world's six billion people to one thousand and gives you a glimpse of how conflict arises out of poverty and as a result of poverty. I hope it helps you in understanding how conflict and food security are linked and why I, as an agriculturalist, am studying human security and peacebuilding.

"Some 150 of the inhabitants live in an affluent area of the village, about 780 in poorer districts. Another 70 or so live in a neighbourhood that is in transition. The average income per person is $6,000 a year, and there are more middle income families than in the past. But just 200 people dispose of 86 per cent of all the wealth, while nearly half of the villagers are eking out an existence on less than $2 per day. Men outnumber women by a small margin, but women make up a majority of those who live in poverty. Adult literacy has been increasing. Still, some 220 villagers— two thirds of them women—are illiterate. Of the 390 inhabitants under 20 years of age, three fourths live in the poorer districts, and many are looking desperately for jobs that do not exist. Fewer than 60 people own a computer and only 24 have access to the Internet. More than half have never made or received a telephone call.

Life expectancy in the affluent district is nearly 78 years, in the poorer areas 64 years—and in the very poorest neighbourhoods a mere 52 years. Each marks an improvement over previous generations, but why do the poorest lag so far behind? Because in their neighbourhoods there is a far higher incidence of infectious diseases and malnutrition, combined with an acute lack of access to safe water, sanitation, health care, adequate housing, education and work. There is no predictable way to keep the peace in this village. Some districts are relatively safe while others are wracked by organized violence.

The village has suffered a growing number of weather-related natural disasters in recent years, including unexpected and severe storms, as well as sudden swings from floods to droughts, while the average temperature is perceptibly warmer. More and more evidence suggests that there is a connection between these two trends, and that warming is related to the kind of fuel, and the quantities of it, that the people and businesses are using. Carbon emissions, the major cause of warming, have quadrupled in the last 50 years. The village’s water table is falling precipitously, and the livelihood of one sixth of the inhabitants is threatened by soil degradation in the surrounding countryside.

Who among us would not wonder how long a village in this state can survive without taking steps to ensure that all its inhabitants can live free from hunger and safe from violence, drinking clean water, breathing clean air, and knowing that their children will have real chances in life? That is the question we have to face in our real world of 6 billion inhabitants."

All wrapped up in cuteness

2009-01-09T15:17:00.000-08:00

This is our pretty little puppy (well, she is almost four) Koko. In a moment of weakness we brought her home from Central Africa two years ago and she is capturing hearts all over the place. She is a very mixed breed but some where in there is a bit of Basenje since she has a curly tail and no bark. Yes, no bark. We love her for it too!

The Bosses, December 2008

2008-12-12T13:14:00.000-08:00

An Update

2008-12-12T12:49:00.000-08:00

A long time gone

I have time to write a quick note to say that we are alive, well, slightly overworked and a little bit cold. All in all, we are very well, though we miss our friends around the globe dearly and are especially missing you since it is now two years since we left CAR and one year since we left Florida. I don’t think I will ever know a time when I am not leaving someone loved behind.

Darren has finished classes for the semester and has two exams to write before Christmas. He loves his studies and every week sees more and more how he is being equipped for our eventual return overseas. He is picking up lots of hours at the hospital as well as weekend work at MEC. He returns to school in January and is set to graduate in May 2010 along with me.

I continue to work at MEC (Mountain Equipment Coop) in the cycling department while continuing with my online studies. I have completed nine courses so far and have three more to go before I start my year of thesis work. Time has been flying by. We are hoping that next year, when I am finished classes, we will have a little more time to enjoy the beautiful West Coast. For now, we catch ourselves gazing out the window as we long to be outside but papers and assignments keep us chained to our computers. But this we know will also pass...

Spring will be another busy time as I prepare for field work and Darren balances five computer science courses and work at the hospital. I will be leaving for Uganda in mid-April along with the rest of my class for a three week practical course assessing human security in various regions of Uganda. I have gained a lot of knew knowledge in the field of food security and am so thankful that I have been able to take this time out for valuable studies. Following my time in Uganda I will hopefully be meeting up with Darren in Cameroon for a trip to Gamboula, CAR where I hope to start my thesis work. I will either be looking at food security in the Congo or in CAR and will let you know the details as they firm up. We hope Darren will be able to spend at least two weeks in CAR getting reacquainted with friends and helping fix all the computer problems he can in those few weeks. I will stay in CAR until the end of June and return to North America in July to complete research and start the endless task of writing. It is a good thing I love writing.

It is threatening to snow today which makes it feel a lot more like Christmas. Things will be very simple for us as Darren is working straight through Christmas, including the 25^th, at the hospital so it will be very quiet around the house.

As for CAR, the nutrition garden continues to serve the community and outlying areas, as well as a large number of Fulani refugees from the violence up north. The agroforestry program was closed down this September and 10 employees were laid off due to funding shortages from a combination of factors including the truck accident this summer. Eloi, our chauffeur and my dear brother, will be in court this Monday (most likely) and we will see what the outcome will be. Please pray for all parties involved, for an end to government corruption and for a fair trial. Also, as I write this, CAR is involved in an all inclusive political dialogue in an effort to end the violence in the northern regions of the country. Insecurity in the country has affected one quarter of the population and has led to awful levels of infant/child/mother mortality, hunger and rape. I have been studying the situation in more and more detail as part of my studies and it is heartbreaking. I am more convinced than ever to continue my studies and return to CAR as soon as possible.

To follow the situation in CAR go to http://hdptcar.net

Blessings and Peace be on you,

Ange

'Do More Good'

2008-10-21T08:58:00.002-07:00

The quote below nicely sums up why we want to be present in conflict zones, normally the last place on earth anyone would want to be. Maybe this will help clarify why I have chosen the field of human security and peacebuilding.

"By being present in conflict zones, international organisations can protect civilians and help prevent abuses. Although such contributions alone will not bring CAR out of its crisis, they help to create the breathing-space needed to put peace and stability back on the agenda. Indeed, by helping people to meet their most immediate needs, humanitarians are creating a chance for tension to dissipate, people to come together and stability and development to take root" (Lanzer, T., 2008).

Lanzer, T. (2008). 'Do more good' in the Central African Republic. Accessed October 21, 2008 from ReliefWeb: http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/VDUX-7KLSAG?OpenDocument

Mama Maggi

2008-09-22T08:02:00.002-07:00

Our dear mother, aunt and friend Mama Maggi died this morning after a long illness. While she never had any children of her own she has been a mother to many, including me. She was a graceful, gentle women, dedicated to her family, church and patients. Her life brought us blessing and may her death bring us strength and humility.

You know summer is over when...

2008-09-02T17:55:00.001-07:00

The blackberries are ripe!

Back to School

2008-09-02T17:14:00.002-07:00

It has been confirmed from a number of sources that summer is over. I can hardly believe it as I am not really sure summer ever began, but as a scientist, I must believe the facts.

The fact is, our summer started with three weeks of intensive classes at Royal Roads University where I officially jumped into graduate student life (which actually means no life). I officially have five courses behind me and another eight or so to go by next May. My first year will culminate with a three week course in Uganda in early April after which we are let loose to start our thesis work. Even though summer was elusive this year, I have thoroughly enjoyed the classes I have taken so far and that, my friends, is why I haven't written a blog post in more than two months. My class work is so interesting and engaging that all of my creative energy has been used in writing papers. That and the fact that hardly anything worth writing about has occurred since I spend most of my time glued to the computer.

Darren has survived a summer of graveyard shifts and is now awake during day-light hours like the rest of us. I have officially reclaimed the bedroom as my study space now that it isn't used as a day-time sleeping sanctuary. Darren starts classes on Wednesday and along with studying maps, statistics and computers, he will be working two shifts a week at the hospital and a few shifts a week at our local Mountain Equipment Coop (MEC). The very MEC where I have been employed for the past 3 months. Our motto has been and remains, "Why work for different companies when you can work for the same one!". We work in different areas (me in cycling, Darren in backstock) but now we will both be tempted to buy outdoor gear we don't really need at really good prices. Darren also survived a summer of Ultimate with no major injuries and he is looking forward to the Fall season.

For me it is more of the same. I will be spending most of my time between work and study with a short break in October to attend NMSI's triennial conference in Bulgaria and Greece. My roommate during the conference, Jen, came up to visit us this August, during which time I did catch a glimpse of summer and spent a day in the lake and a night in a tree fort.

I suppose I should also mention that I did pass my motorcycle license exam and am now speeding (slightly faster than a scooter) down the roads of Victoria. It is far more fun than driving a car and less energy required than cycling, though I still ride my bike to work most days (too cheap to pay for motorcycle parking).

As for news following the accident, I talked to Clarisse this morning and her brother is able to stand but not walk. There is still one bone that has not healed but standing is good. Really good. Roy is now in Gamboula and the judicial aspects of the accident are in full swing. We are praying for a favorable outcome and for calm hearts and minds for all involved. We are especially praying for a righteous judge (there has got to be at least one in all of CAR) to hear the case. The nutrition centre is swamped with children (mostly refugee children of the Fulani) and the garden continues to help as it can. The nutrition garden is hopefully going to be the subject of my thesis work so stay tuned for more details.

It is also back to school time in CAR and we have sent the first wave of school fees off to our student in the capital. This is his final year of school so we are praying for wisdom and a good work ethic for him. We will be sending funds for the Gamboula kids shortly and anyone interested in helping is invited to email us or send a cheque as per the instructions on the side bar of this page. The peace process in the CAR has stalled (and is slipping backwards) so we are praying for peace in a renewed way.

All for now,
Ange

An update on grad school

2008-06-18T09:49:00.003-07:00

I have survived the three week intensive start to my graduate studies at Royal Roads! It was actually a fantastic three weeks and while the classes are over I am stil in the midst of writing a paper for one of the classes. I am now into the first of my on-line classes, which I will be doing until November, when the next 3 week intensive starts. I thought that people might be interested to know what types of subjects I am studying and what the discussion looks like. As most of you know I have a particular interest in food security and the following brief essay is taken from my latest contribution to the class discussion on development and social policy.

"I am very interested in the topic of food security. One of the main accomplishments from my time in the Central African Republic was establishing a nutrition garden at the main hospital where we lived. The hospital has a nutrition centre where malnourished children are rehabilitated, sometimes treated for other conditions like TB or malaria, and then are sent home. Many of the kids come in too late for treatment and die at the centre, others come and go as food availability back home does not change, and others improve remarkably and continue with relatively healthy lives. The garden was designed to help mothers learn about the variety of foods it is possible to grow in that area, how to grow them and how to prepare them in a way that maximizes their family nutrition and fits in to normal food consumption patterns in the region. The garden has been running for two and half years now and has been very successful. Seeds from the garden are free to any of the mothers when their children are released from the hospital.

How does this relate to food aid? Before the garden, the nutrition centre relied 100% on products donated from the World Food Program (WFP). They would receive corn flour, yellow split peas, sugar, oil and salt. Of these, yellow split pea was the only protein supplement the children received as meat is very expensive and harder and harder to come by in the region. YELLOW SPLIT PEA DOES NOT GROW IN CAR. Even if it did grow, the product received was not plantable as the seeds were split and therefore damaged. Hundreds of mothers came to see this product dumped from China and the saviour of their children's health and they could not provide it for themselves. The garden has been doing trials of other beans that are suitable for the region and we hope to be able to one day replace the reliance on WFP peas with our own home grown beans one day.

What is holding this process back is that the peas from WFP come free, which is very attractive to a hospital that receives very little outside aid and cannot afford to run the centre without it. Using locally produced beans would require paying for them, so for now, the hospital is unable or unwilling to do it. The garden is run on about $150 a month, all from outside aid coming from the US and Canada.

It makes much more sense for the WFP to buy locally produced beans and then distribute those free of charge, if they must, to the various feeding programs that they support. At least then, when someone puts a few uncooked seeds in their pocket, there is a chance that something even more helpful will grow out of it.

To this end, Canada has made some progress. We recently untied our food aid so that rather than maintaining quotas of how much food aid must be in the form of Canadian grown food, aid agencies can ask Canada for cash instead. This is not the case in the US however. Read the following article to get an idea of how dramatically tied US food aid is to US producers and US transport companies. It is very shameful, and yet, they are looking out for their own citizens which is what governments tend to do, is it not?

http://www.worldpress.org/Americas/3139.cfm

As one who has been on the receiving end of food aid and shipping containers full of donated items, I have seen their harmful, rather than helpful, attributes. Take for example, the donation of used clothing in emergencies. While to North Americans it seems like an altogether generous thing to do to send our things over to people who have no things, what we are really doing is relieving ourselves of guilt while destroying local markets. Do we really think that there is nothing whatsoever in the places where our generosity is destined? By sending large amounts of anything, we are putting small businessmen, who earn a living and contribute to their communities, out of business. Why pay for a new dress when you can get one for free from the charity down the road. The amount that is spent in shipping our generosity around the world could be used to buy the same amount or more from local suppliers, thereby boosting the local economy, not creating jealousies by having some people walking around in 'American' flip flops while the unlucky ones are still wearing the 'local' ones, and not setting the aid worker up as provider of free stuff from America.

I know there is another side to this argument too. What do we do with our over-consumption, if we can't give it to 'poor people'? Won't we un-naturally boost an economy only to have it fall when we leave? By raising the demand for local food won't we skew the price and upset local production and consumption patterns?"

A student again

2008-05-19T21:37:00.002-07:00

I barely have time to write as I have officially started classes today and accomplishing 3 courses in 3 weeks gives you barely enough time to breath. I freaked out last night, questioned my motives, abilities and general sanity and was somewhat relieved to find that a few other students were thinking the same thing. Graduate studies are a far cry from undergrad work I did 10 years ago. However, Darren assures me that I can do it, and I trust his judgement! I am excited to be learning something practical and to try and make sense of the chaotic and insecure world around us. In my effort to do so I will not be writing for the next 3 weeks but hopefully will be able to catch you all up on my studies when there is room to breath.

Darren, on the other hand has a great IT job in the health region for Vancouver Island, is working at a farm down the road as well and totally cleaned up our house today. I am so spoiled. Wonder what he's cooking for dinner tomorrow?

Me and my mom

2008-04-21T11:28:00.003-07:00

In light of my last post which was filled with sadness, I thought it appropriate to share this photo of me and my mom. We went on a little adventure some weeks ago looking for a final resting spot for my grandma, who passed away while I was in the CAR this January. I thank God for my mom, and all the women who have mothered me through the journey.

My one hundredth post

2008-04-21T10:56:00.004-07:00

This is post number 100. I wish it could be filled with all manner of good news, but I just got off the phone with Clarisse and it is not all good. Mama Maggie, the aunt who so wonderfully raised Clarisse, is sick and in hospital. She has not been well for the past 2 years or so, so this is no surprise, but it is heart wrenching to hear the pain in Clarisse's voice and to not be able to comfort her in person. Maggie has raised many, many children, most of whom are orphans or unwanted, and though barren, has been a mother many times over. She worked as a mid-wife and then in the hospital pharmacy until illness forced
her to retire. She lives right next door to Clarisse but was taken to the hospital Tuesday when she became too weak to eat and stopped sleeping.

What strikes me is that Tuesday I was burdened with a deep sadness all day. As soon as I got in the car to leave work I started to cry. I cried the entire way home, and into the evening. I was mourning not being in CAR, but it went deeper. Into Wednesday I couldn't get Maggie and others off my mind, but was again burdened by this deep sadness. All I could do was pray, and weep. Now I know why. By Thursday Maggie was beginning to eat and this weekend she could sit up for short periods. I pray she will continue to strengthen and I thank God that even while I am not there and have little communication with Clarisse, my spirit still knows what is going on and I am still able to help.

I also heard last week that Chrysler's oldest brother was killed in a motorcycle accident. Chrysler and his family had not seen his brother for quite a long time as he had been serving in the military in the troubled Birao region of the CAR. I spoke to Chrysler last Monday and gave my condolences to him and his family. He urged me to pray for his family, especially for his mother, and for his brother's widow who is nearly 8 months pregnant.

Death and the possibility of death hang in the air in the CAR all the time. It is not until it gets close to you that you feel the full weight of its burden on your shoulders. I have never felt such sorrow or such joy before I knew the CAR.

On a more joy-filled note, we heard from Calvin this week and he has received good marks on his second semester exams. We were a little worried when his first semester marks came back and he was very behind. However, with the thought of having to leave school and go it alone looming over his head, he really buckled down and has brought his grades up significantly and we are so proud of him. He may just make it afterall.

(Me and Calvin this January in Berberati)

Ignored or Unknown?

2008-04-08T07:52:00.003-07:00

I read an interview with Tony Lanzer, the head of the UN Human Rights Commission in the C.A.R. recently. When asked why the CAR has been ignored for so long, his response reminded me that even while we are here in North America, we have an important job to do on behalf of the people of the Central African Republic. He says:

"You can't ignore something unless you know it exists. In spite of its name, nobody knows where the Central African Republic is. Very few people know it is a country and even fewer have time to worry about it. Also, it is surrounded by bigger, more complex countries... Until we inform people of why CAR matters, it never will."

So it isn't so much that CAR has been ignored, it is that nobody really knows that is exists. CAR matters, not only in political terms but more so because of the four million people who call it home, who are suffering from lack of clean water, sufficient food and constant insecurity. The people of CAR matter.

Job Search, take 3

2008-03-27T11:32:00.002-07:00

I have finally settled on a job that starts Monday. I know you are all holding your breath to see how long it will last, but I am really looking forward to it. I quit the local garden centre I have been working at this week. It wasn't a bad job at all, and although the pay was not the best, it is a nice distance by bike and the staff are very friendly. One lady in particular was especially friendly and I would have liked to have stayed if not just to work along side her. However, I was hired with the understanding that is was a temporary job to get them through the busy season and that as soon as I found something more permanent I would be leaving. They may not have banked on it only taking a week to find something permanent but that is how it goes. I love working outdoors but will have to go to the thrift store to get some more work clothes. As I write this post it is snowing. Yes, snowing! The hillside outside the house is covered with Spring daffodils and yet we are still in Canada and winter has not had its last word yet. Hopefully this is it.

So the newest job is also at a Garden Centre, way out in Sidney, a good 35 minutes drive so no biking for me. It pays slightly more an hour than my last job, but has a more ECHO-feel about it. They are quite picky about who they hire and they operate very much like a family owned business, with the employees making up the family. They are more of a specialty place and focus on rare and unusual varieties of plants, including a number of native species. While they do mostly retail sales, they also supply to landscapers and do a fair bit of their own propagation. Last week, the day after my interview, I spent 4 hours grafting dogwood and Japanese maple as a special project for the owner. I think this was the hook. I have never been pursued for employment as I have by this nursery.

As I said in an earlier post, the circumstances around this job are equally as 'designed' as the last one. During the two days I was working for the golf course, I ordered plants for a project there from Russell nursery. A few days after quitting the nursery owner called me to find out if I had received the plants they delivered. I then told him that I am sure they received them but that I was no longer working there so wasn't sure. He asked me why I quit as he knew I had only just started. After explaining my life to him he invited me out for an interview that afternoon. The rest is the history of job number three.

I officially start job number three on Monday and will be spending the week dividing bamboo. As we were talking about nursery propagation techniques last week in my interview we hit on the subject of bamboo and I asked him what he used to do their divisions. The tools they use are far from easy so I suggested using a reciprocating saw. He jumped on the idea and so next week I start a new job with a new pair of work gloves, multiple layers of clothing including long-johns and a brand new reciprocating saw, hopefully in pink. (Do they even come in pink?)

The other beautiful thing about the job is that they close down the week before Christmas until the end of January. So I guess I will get to go to C.A.R. for Christmas after all. God is good!

Helping the Cause

2008-03-27T10:36:00.002-07:00

I found an old note yesterday written by a friend who gave funds for Gamboula school kids and it said "Happy to help the cause". The note got me thinkng about what is the cause? The cause is helping the suffering, the hungry, widows and orphans. But it is so much more than a cause. The cause is real people, with real feelings of sorrow, hopelessness and joy. With our highly digitalized age of e-mail and cell phones it seems that we can stay far more connected than ever before but also be so disconnected at the same time. I hadn't realized it until the last few weeks of living in Canada. For the last six years I have been living a highly relational life. On the ECHO farm when you want to talk to someone or find out how someone is you walk over to their house, or stop and chat on the way to work or out by the pond fishing for supper. In Gamboula there are no phones or e-mail. You walk down to your friends house to see how they are. There is no phoning first to see if it is a good time or not. The face to face encounter keeps us real, keeps us humble, keeps us involved. When you look into the eyes of your friends it is much harder to forget their humanness.

I started a new job last week (I quit yesterday as I found something more permanent). I have been working at a local garden centre this week and in the get to know your colleague encounters I always mention where I have lived the last 5 or 6 years. There are three general reactions. The first reaction is the 'that's nice, but I have no idea what you are really talking about and let's not talk about it again', the second reaction is 'oh my god, I could never live there and weren't you scared for your life all the time!' and the third is ' that is so interesting, please tell me more'. I totally understand the first reaction as most people have absolutely no frame of reference for what I am talking about, or feel some kind of guilt for one reason or another. The second reaction makes me laugh because it is the same reaction members of my family have had and it is usually from a seriously misinformed individual. However, it also makes me very sad when I realize that people with the reaction of 'oh my god I could never live there' have not ever thought that people just like themselves actually do live there. The 'cause' is seeing that real people, born with the same potential as ourselves live in the places where we would never want to live. They are PEOPLE whose race does not preclude them from feeling pain, suffering, hopelessness and fear just as we would if we were dropped into the same situation. Recognizing the reality of life in other places, even in the back alleys of the places we call home, is uncomfortable, challenging and propels us into action.

Let yourself know the reality and be propelled into action.

Thank-you to the people (you know who you are) who in your recognition of the human spirit have taken a keen interest in the people with whom we work and love. Your interest, questions and kindness keep my memories alive, keep me accountable to the faith I profess and remind me that we are not alone in helping the cause.

Job Search, take 2

2008-03-18T20:28:00.004-07:00

If I ever had fears that I wouldn't find a job in Victoria, they have now been formally set aside. Now my only worry is which job do I accept. Not such a bad problem to have I suppose.

Why am I even talking about jobs, you may ask? Don't I already have a great one at a golf course? I did, but now I don't. I quit at lunch time on day two. While I know this is totally out of character for me, I did it and I feel sooo much better for having done so. It ends up that while I can weed and mow with the best of them, there was a whole lot more landscape design and actual knowledge about the plants required than I was prepared for. Doing the golf course job well and doing my masters at the same time seemed next to impossible or at least panic attack provoking. Had I been looking for a career position in horticulture this would have been an awesome position. However, I am not looking for a new career. I already have one that I am quite happy with and have taken a short break from in order to enhance by way of further study. Which leaves me wondering, what next?

I have applied for several different jobs, most at local nurseries (which still leaves me with the problem of not actually knowing much about local plant species, this not being the tropics) who pay very little and are kind enough to inform me before the interview even starts that I am highly over-qualified for the position and "Oh, by the way, what are your salary expectations?" To which I respond, "LOW". I am a realist and I realize that in this field none of us are out to get rich, and if we are then we are seriously misled! I just need to pay the rent and have time to study. So for now, I am working at a local garden centre until I find a more suitable job. I have been offered an equally low paying job at another garden centre, however, it appears to be more promising, is full time and they won't let me go at the end of the busy season. In fact, they may even send me on a cruise. If I do take this job I will tell you all about the serendipitous circumstances of getting it. Oddly enough, it is all tied into the golf course.

I talked to Clarisse on Saturday and she is well. I do miss her and I long to be back in Central Africa where I feel so much more at home. I feel rather lost here and wish I had people down the street to drop in on. We have been spoiled for the last 6 years but I believe it is possible to find that again, we just have to look in the right places. Maybe spoiled is the wrong word. Maybe it is just that we have lived what life can be and so we long for that again.

I will stop babbling. Our life isn't that dull I suppose. We do live with 10 llamas after all!

I took all my braids out just to look 'normal' for the golf course job, only to quit two days later. I did wash it before I started so, no!, I did not go to work looking like this. Despite the volume, I did lose quite a bit of hair in the process.

During Roy's visit last week we spent an evening doing tourist duty and Roy found an RCMP to have his picture taken with.

Another Stop on the Journey

2008-03-11T15:06:00.003-07:00

We are at another stop on the journey, and this one has us back in Victoria, where we were both privileged to grow up. Darren is attending the University of Victoria and is completing a double major in computer science and geography. This will give him what he needs to work in 'Geoinformatics', which is well beyond what I can explain and given what I saw of his math homework, it is way beyond most of the people that I know.

Darren rides to and from school everyday and is doing at least 20km a day, so he is in great shape. Roy and I went to watch him play ultimate the other night and as luck would have it they were short players so both Roy and I had to jump in, saving the team and giving them their second win (just like Vancouver days). Actually, I don't think I did much more than take up space on the field, but that must count for something! Darren is busy most evenings with homework and studying so I am looking forward to starting my courses in May so I won't be pestering Darren with, "I'm bored" statements all the time. Actually, I have plenty of my own things to work on and books to read.

I start a new job tomorrow in the least likely of places. Okay, maybe not THE least likely place, since I am not working in a mall, a fancy office building, or serving in a restaurant, but I am working at Canada's oldest golf course! Yes, I have been hired as the head horticulturalist at a members only golf club in Victoria. Why did they hire me, you may ask. I don't know. But the superintendent is a very nice man, who is very flexible, so I can work in this position all through my schooling, taking the time off I need for my residency periods (3 weeks in May, November and April), the hours are flexible and the setting is the gorgeous Victoria seaside.

What is quite cool is the way I got the job. No, it's not what you are thinking. I didn't bribe them, or use some other method picked up from my time overseas. The week we arrived in Victoria back in December we were introduced to a lady at church who had a suite for rent. The suite is 750 sq. ft. attached to their house and is on a 5 acre llama farm. Yep, those large, camel like creatures that don't make a sound but spit if they don't like you! There are ten of them and they are quite fun to stare at through the bedroom window. Anyway, so when we went to go look at the suite, we knew we wanted it right away. It backs up onto a large park and a golf course under construction. Though it feels quite rural we are only minutes from Langford, the town where I grew up and a fast growing suburb of Victoria. Even at that, we are still only ten minutes drive from Victoria. Our landlady, who I'll call Sue, was telling us about the former tenant, a fellow horticulturalist, and she thought maybe her job was vacant. So she put me together with her former tenant, we talked and the day before I left for CAR I applied for her job. Sue agreed to hold the suite for us until I got back in mid-February, (God bless Sue), which was amazing since it is very hard to find a place to rent here, and the price is much lower than what others are finding here.

While I was in CAR, the golf course guy, let's call him Steve, called Darren wanting to interview me. He agreed for me to call him from CAR and I had my first interview with him from on top of a hill behind our house in Gamboula in order to get good reception. He asked me to call him when I returned to Canada so I did, had another interview out at the course, and I start work tomorrow as the head horticulturalist. Granted I haven't worked in the temperate zone for 6 years, haven't used power tools for a while, don't remember the names of plants or the seasons (yes, we have four seasons here), I am willing to put my best foot forward. As a good friend reminded me today, just take everyday as a day to do your best, work your hardest and find someone to bless. In no time at all, the journey will have you somewhere else and someone will be all the better for your time in Victoria. Maybe that someone will even be me!

Our new home. We are above the garage.

Final thoughts on leaving...

2008-02-28T20:33:00.003-08:00

Sunday afternoon we spent visiting Clarisse’s family, including her parents who moved back to Gamboula this January after retiring from the pastorate. In the evening the kids performed a concert for us with songs and bible verses they had each memorized. After the children’s concert we girls sang songs of parting and then headed outside for music and dancing with all the Nguebe teenagers. Half of Clarisse’s family, including her mom and dad and 4 siblings all live on the same concession. On any given day there are some 35 Nguebe’s in one place. We had a great time just laughing and egging each other on. We escorted Vicki back to the house for a good night’s sleep and I returned to Clarisse’s house to spend the night there. We stayed outside under a full moon until nearly 1:00am, dancing, listening to music and ended with a time of prayer with some of the older kids, Eloi and Clarisse. We piled into her bed and then sat up talking for another long while with Nadege before finally falling asleep. We were up at 4:30 Monday morning in order to get the last minute things packed and to be ready for the truck that was leaving at 6:00am sharp. Our parting was filled with sobbing, clinging to one another until the last minute. It was a parting of sweet sorrow as leaving Clarisse meant coming back to Darren.
I have said it before and I think it is worth repeating. Living and working in the CAR is no great physical sacrifice for Darren or I. On the contrary, we love living and working in the CAR. Despite the daily irritations, the constant threat of bandits, and the relative financial insecurity that comes with living in Central Africa, we love it. I love the people, I love travelling around visiting new people, picking up new languages, constantly being challenged. Where the real sacrifice comes in are the wounds to the heart. Even when you think the wounds have healed, the scars remain and scars remain tender for a long time. It’s not just the wounds from being disappointed by people and the church, nor from the pain and sorrow that are in your face every day (like 1 year old twins that weigh 3 kg each), but even more so for me right now are the wounds from having to say good-bye. Leaving one family behind for another. I don’ think it ever gets easy, and if it ever did I think it would be a bad thing. This is the sacrifice we make, this is taking up our cross and following Him, this is allowing ourselves to love and be loved—it involves risking being wounded, knowing that the scars will always remain tender.
The struggle is learning to be content in all things, (read: in all the places that we work and live), yet living with the longing to be near those that we love. Don’t mistake me by thinking it is only Clarisse that I feel torn leaving, as there are others who I love dearly and enjoy my time and conversations with. She is, however, my sister and friend.
Okay, more thoughts to come later.

Clarisse and I-Yaya and Gambe

Dr. WANE Emmanuel and his new computer.

Mr. Bangui! Calvin, our student in Bangui who is finishing grade 11 this year with hopes of graduating high school next year. Thanks to help from our donors, Calvin is able to attend private school this year while public school students are locked out of their schoola because their teachers haven't been paid in months. It is a tragedy.

Martino. That is his name and he is the baby I had the privilege of witnessing enter the world.

Trip Summary-Part Two

2008-02-28T20:25:00.002-08:00

Baby Angela. This is Medard and Julienne's one year old who was born just weeks after we left in December 2006. What a cutie!

Chrysler and I giving advice to one of the cooperative members. I am sure he is telling him to clear around his trees and put mulch around them. We must have said the same thing to at least 20 villages in the course of all our travels.

Nadege and I (or is that a white Central African?) teaching a group of women about tree planting. Nadege is an excellent teacher and with a bit more practice will be on her way to teaching women all over the South West.

Vicki and I encouraging a women's group to keep up their hard work.

CAR Trip Summary-Part One

2008-02-28T20:08:00.002-08:00

FYI: I am safely back in Victoria, setting up home for what will be an interesting and hopefully fulfilling 2+ years in the great white North. I apologize for neglecting my blog while we have been gone but we had difficulty accessing the internet so here is my feeble attempt at catching up. I think the next series of posts will be random stories and attempts at describing the last 7 weeks.
Overall, our time in CAR was excellent. Despite the chaos around us, a coup attempt in Chad, violence in Kenya and now unrest in Cameroon, CAR is still behind but I see reason for hope. Maybe not on the country level, but at least on the local level, change is slowly taking place and it is encouraging. The nutrition garden is doing better than I expected and looks better than I had hoped. There is a lot of hard work going on and Nadege is giving good leadership in the garden. She has kept records for the past year of what food goes to the nutrition centre daily as well as keeping daily work records. I have a hard time doing that. The nursery looks good despite a severe dry season and a nursery manager who is very new to the job. The new ‘Chef de Centre’, Benoit, is a very upright man who is giving good leadership to the project and his staff. Despite the usual complaints about the head of the project, the guys are very thankful for the spiritual direction that Benoit gives them. Each morning starts with prayer and devotions, led by Benoit and there are obvious signs of the impact in their lives. This was especially evident in the lives of Chrysler and Eloi, our travelling partners.

My travellingpartner, Miss Vicki

Most of our time was spent travelling around the South-West of CAR visiting cooperatives that were formed during our time in CAR. I had been to visit most of the gardens and cooperatives in 2006 so this was a good follow-up to compare how things were going. While many gardens were disappointing in their upkeep there were a few outstanding gardens and despite the harsh dry season, fruit was being harvested. Bayanga was most impressive and we definitely saw the fruit of our labour as well as that of the other missionaries that had spread fruit trees around the pygmy villages. Not only did we see trees fruiting, we saw people walking down the road carrying large jackfruits, peels on the side of the road and fruits for sale. What a joy!

Passionfruit from a coop member in Boukere--delicious!

When we weren’t travelling Vicki spent time working in the nutrition garden or with Ann in the medical depot. I spent many hours meeting with the project staff, helping plan work for 2008, dealing with worker issues and encouraging the Chef to keep up the good work. In the afternoons we visited gardens and fish ponds and even spent one afternoon in a fish pond, pulling out lily pad plants that choke out fish in the pond. We must have spent near 3 hours in the water without a thought for what else might be in there with us. It wasn’t until I got home and told Darren what we did that he asked how many leeches attacked us. LEECHES! Good thing I didn’t think of leeches or I may never have gone in the water in the first place. Yikes! Vicki goes to bed quite early so I spent many evenings with Clarisse, and we even had a couple of sleep over’s. We had a good time catching up, sharing times of laughter, crying and prayer.

Me and Anna, a year older, but still tiny as ever and still my baby!

Leaving was very hard, made even more difficult by the fact that I did not get as much quality time with Clarisse as I had hoped given the amount of travelling we chose to do. The weekend before we left I did all my packing and had all the project staff over for lunch. We had a great time eating, laughing, and trying not to cry as we said our farewell formalities. We ended our time with a slide show on my laptop of photos from ECHO and family Christmas photos. It was a special time for all of us.

Farewell lunch with the project staff.

Giving Birth

2008-02-07T14:00:00.000-08:00

The whole idea of giving birth has always been both miraculous and frightening to me. How a child is conceived, develops and then is forced out into the world is so amazing that while I have never really wanted to do it myself, I have wanted to watch the birth of a baby. Not just any baby though. It seemed much too impersonal to wander into the Gamboula Hospital to watch just any woman give birth and then to walk out like it was just another day. I have wanted to watch one of my sisters give birth. I have six of them here, plus 6 in-laws, but every time they have gone into labour, either I haven't been here or it has been the middle of the night and despite my pleas for them to wake me, they haven't.

At the last minute on Saturday night I decided against spending 5 days in Cameroon, given that our time here was drawing short and I haven't had much time with Clarisse at all. You don't want to make your Yaya mad at you, that is for sure. So we didn't go to Cameroon which turned out to be great since on Monday night, Blandine, my sister in-law and mother to Anna ad the twins, went into labour. One of Clarisse's kids came up to tell me that she was in the hospital, so I rushed down only to sit and wait 2 hours for the event to happen.

It was pretty incredible. I am not sure that Canadian mothers-to-be would have liked the set up so much as everyone gives birth in the same room and no men allowed. There is one mid-wife and however many naked women on tables as are in labour at the time. Blandine went in first and while she was having contractions a second lady came in and was out in 20 minutes leaving Blandine to wonder when it was her turn. Once Blandine started pushing a second lady came in; then it was a bit of a race. I was called into the room once they saw the head. I would describe it all for you but I am sure no one really wants to read what it looks like. The cord was wrapped around the head and the baby wasn't in a good position but you can't exactly send it back in to try again, so they pulled it on out. Poor Blandine didn't at all look relieved to have delivered. She was too nervous waiting to see if a second one was coming. Once she realized there was only one she was much relieved.

Clarisse was the one to take the baby and wipe him down, weigh him, measure him and swaddle him up. At this point HE was handed over to me while Blandine got washed up and helped to her room. I have never held a 5 minute old baby and while he wasn't exactly cute, he was pretty miraculous looking and I guarantee I will never forget that little guy as long as I live. I am not sure how to thank Blandine for allowing me to see her in her God-given glory but maybe the smile on my face was enough.

Vicki and I are otherwise fine, in good health and we are very busy. I think if I knew that Darren was on his way here in the next month or so I would be perfectly happy just carrying on. However, I know I have to leave again, and it pains me. I thought it would be easier to leave this time around, but I don't think it will be. I think it will be the same, awful tearing that it was when we left a year ago. I guess some things never get any easier.

Home and Away

2008-01-21T21:23:00.000-08:00

Can you be home and away at the same time? Yes! I feel at home in Gamboula and yet I feel away. This is the nature of life here. And I guess I am okay with that.

As a quick aside, this may be my only post until we return to Berberati on the 17th of February on our way home. We are the only ones out here in Gamboula as of tomorrow so we will not have any way to send email. Darren phones me regulary to remind me how many days I have left and to check on how we are. We leave for Bayanga tomorrow and will spend a week checking on the work there.

We returned home safe yesterday afternoon after three long but good days out in the village. However, we returned to the news that Phillipe, the assistant director of the nursing school, had just died. He has been sick for the past year and had just started TB meds last week. What a shock to the hospital. Our trip went well and it was nice to hang out with Chrysler and Eloi. Sosso was Sosso, the group there existing of just 3 members and they were of course scrambling to find a place for us to stay. We ended up at some kind of hotel place, but with no water and Eloi wanted us to bar ourselves into our room as we all felt a little less than 100
percent secure in the town.

Mbiali has grown some since we were last there, and they have managed to build a new school/church next to the pastor's house. He also built a passage (guest house) except it doesn't have any beds. He said he was expecting us to stay the night there but I am not sure what he was thinking since there was nothing to sleep on. We stayed in Bamba but with the concession that we attend church in Mbiali. The trees look great and the Jackfruits are starting to give the first male flowers. Our evening in Bamba was spent talking about the Baka in Mbiali, the church there and all sorts of things to do with development and how best to do it. The hardest thing was seeing that they really do suffer, the children's bellies are full of worms; they are malnourished but not knowing what to do about it. And also knowing that it would be very easy to start something amongst them and feel like you were doing good when in reality you were destroying the last bit of dignity they had left instead of building them up for the future. It was a very difficult time, but I am so thankful for Chrysler and Eloi and their advice.

As I write this I can hear the guys in the wood shop putting together Phillipe's coffin and mourning cries coming from the hospital. Death must be so unbearable for those it leaves behind.

We ate birthday cookies the night we were in Sosso, after we finished our supper at a local restaurant. Tomorrow we will celebrate with a good lunch of couscous, falafel and hummus before we pack up for another week on the road to Bayanga. As I travel I am learning more and more about the culture here, especially from Eloi, and am having to make choices regarding what role I will play in society here. So the question is, who am I? Thankfully, both he and Chrysler have resigned to calling me just plain old Angela.

Feasting on Goat

2008-01-12T06:56:00.000-08:00

In all honesty I must admit that I have had a rocky start to my glorious trip back to Central Africa. After 5 nights without any sleep I began to think the strangest thoughts and was afraid that if I never slept again that I would literally go insane. Kim went down to the Berberati hospital to fetch me some Valium in a last ditch attempt at sleep and I was mentally preparing for an early return home. Amazingly, after a half night’s sleep in the village at Remy’s house, I started to feel a little more like myself and have slept every night since, more or less. After my fifth sleepless night I had Darren, Vicki and our hosts wondering what on earth was going on with me. I was hopelessly missing Darren (and still am) but now feel like I can make it to the end of our time here without leaving early.

Vicki is a great person to travel with. She is very easy going, loves people, and has lived in far more primitive conditions than we have here. She is also very forgiving so in my worst moments she shines and she is an incredible friend.

Monday we were treated to a great goat feast at the home of Remy in honour of my ‘home coming’. All the family from around Berberati came to greet us and they were so overjoyed by our presence it is hard to describe in words. I am sure that over the years many short-termers have come and gone with promises that they would be back to visit soon, that they would one day return to work here, but were never heard or seen from again. It was an honour to be so loved and respected by such a wonderful family.

Yesterday we walked around Berberati with Stephane and Riro, our friends from Gamboula and both terrific musicians. We were paraded around town like the golden monkeys from the zoo which isn’t so unusual when half the kids in town haven’t ever seen a white person before. Last night we had a pizza night with the ICDI folks and a lovely Italian nun from the local hospital in Berberati who has lived here 34 years. She is someone who ought to write a book. We even had 4 kinds of ice cream for dessert. You would hardly believe we were in Central Africa. We will be in for a shock when we get to Gamboula where we will be eating beans for the next 5 weeks. Aside from eating in the village, I will be a fully fledged vegetarian for the next 5 weeks.

As much as I am happy to be here, I am also absolutely, terribly missing Darren. It makes it hard to be objective about certain things, and easier to see other things. I don’t want to write it here because I will likely change my mind over the next few weeks.

Tomorrow we have a very busy day. We will be eating lunch with Elise and then will be attending a concert at the Catholic Cultural Centre, where our friends will be performing. Then we are the invited guests at their house for supper, which we hope will be rather speedy as we will be taking off for Gamboula that evening and I know there will be a welcoming party waiting for us down there. I know there will be lots to do there and I know time will go by quickly but when I see that we have 40 days here left, I am not sure if that is a small amount or a large amount at this point. I‘ll let you know when I’m down to 30.

Feasting on Fruit

2008-01-07T07:46:00.001-08:00

Written January 5, 2008

As I write this letter Vicki and Paul are outside on the porch sampling two different Jackfruits they just picked off the CTC trees. It is 9:15pm and we just came back from pizza night with Paul and Sheryl and the kids. What a treat.

I have had terrible insomnia the last two nights and so haven’t actually had a nights sleep since Tuesday. I lay down to sleep and my heart rate goes up, my head starts spinning with all kinds of random thoughts and I count the hours on my watch until morning. I feel for anyone who lives like this all the time. So, after a quick trip downtown with Vicki to buy a few supplies, we ran into Sheryl at the store and came back to CTC with her cab and were invited for the pizza night. I am not sure why I can stay up all night worrying about stuff when God proves himself over and over that he is in control and has our best in mind.

Vicki had a nice surprise in the shower this morning. As she bent over to rinse her hair in the freezing cold water she saw a very giant centipede curled up in the corner of a very small shower. I heard her muffled shrieks and while she wrapped a towel around her self I came to the rescue with the dustpan and whisked it away and chucked it into the yard below. Welcome to Africa. Actually, Vicki is the hardiest soul I know so it is a joy to be here with her.

I still miss Darren like crazy, and that may be the source of my insomnia. I am praying for a good nights sleep tonight and maybe once we make it to more familiar territory in Berberati I will sleep like a baby.

Better go pack our bags and be on the road. We have an early start tomorrow and have to be at the airfield at 6:30 for our weigh in (no, not the biggest loser Africa Edition, but close). We will arrive in Berberati at 11:00 for my home coming and hopefully a chance to get on Skype with Darren.

This is not an easy trip. As much as I want to be here, I also long to be with Darren. I love being with Vicki so am praying that my double vision will not hinder my effectiveness in any way. This is a good lesson though. Next time, take Darren with you!

Yaounde

2008-01-04T02:14:00.000-08:00

Vicki and I have arrived safe and sound in Yaounde. We were met by our good friend Benoit and ferried direct to the guesthouse where we are staying until Sunday. I really don't like Yaounde. It is a big city (which I am adverse to in the best of countries) and I look forward to getting to CAR as soon as possible. I admire the folks who live and work here. It would not be my first choice that is for sure.

I ventured out early this morning looking for sugar and milk and some phone credit. Had to give Darren a call. Hearing his reassuring voice gives me courage for the journey. Vicki is well and had a good nights sleep which is more than I can say for myself. I think I slept one hour. Can't wait for a siesta today. We have internet today and then again on Sunday.

My sango is coming back quickly as I have been visiting with Benoit and his family. Maybe tomorrow we will venture into town a little. Got to get my courage up for that.

Ange

On the Road to CAR-I am human after all

2008-01-04T02:12:00.000-08:00

So leaving is hard. Really hard. I am in the Victoria Airport already having said good bye to Darren and I am still fighting back the tears. We have been together for 15 years and it doesn’t get any easier to be away from each other, it just gets harder. I admit that I was feeling mighty cocky the last 6 months as planning for this trip was underway. Oh, I’ll be fine, 7 weeks is nothing. At this moment I know I will be fine but it isn’t nothing. I was wrong and I’m sorry for ever thinking it was easy.

Someone once describe ‘leaving’ to me before. He said that when we have a strong relationship with someone it is as if the two had really joined and become one. Like two different yarns that were knit together. He said that this is what God intended when he said that the two should become one, that we are knit together. When you separate, even for a time, it means separating out the two and it causes tears in the fabric. It hurts. And it should. It was designed that way. I felt this way when I left my faithful friends in Gamboula and I feel this way now, leaving my most faithful friend and companion.

I am not sure why I am blogging these thoughts. Maybe just to remind you and myself that I am human, that we are supposed to feel and that if it didn’t hurt, something would be wrong. Really wrong.

Just found these cool pics....

2007-12-16T10:14:00.000-08:00

I just found these pictures of Darren, Aaron and Derek's camping trip this Spring in Central Florida. Thught you might enjoy seeing the goofy side of Darren. He says everyone has to grow old but not everyone has to grow up!

ECHO's from the year gone by

2007-12-16T09:59:00.001-08:00

Darren and Danny reach for the disk during our farewell Ultimate game at ECHO. The interns put on a great party, spear-headed by Danny. Darren was honoured by a rousing game of Ultimate after which we had a wonderful meal of all things 'Farm', including tilapia, home ground corn muffins, tangerine juice and salad.

What a great year with such a great group of women (and men). Each one of these precious women is preparing to serve God by giving their lives and talents to live amongst the poor, helping them grow and learn and about nutritious food for their families. What a privilege to be able to contribute some of my knowledge and experiences to their lives.

Oh Canada!

2007-12-15T12:27:00.000-08:00

We are back home on the range after a week long move from Fort Myers to Victoria. We spent a wonderful couple of days in Seattle visiting long time friends, speaking at their church and shopping. REI is one of our favorite places to visit, and though we usually always leave with no more than a water bottle, this time around we had a gift certificate. Thanks to ECHO, Darren is now outfitted with a bike helmet and waterproof shoes. Though we would rather be in Central Africa, Victoria isn't a bad place to be, given the ample opportunities for cycling, climbing and backpacking. Trick now is finding time between all the other things we have to do to really enjoy living here.

We had a good meeting with the folks at the Evangelical Free Church of Canada Mission and are encouraged by the simplicity of their offices and staff.

This weekend we are up visiting my dad and step-mom, playing in their 5 acres with our dog, Koko, and enjoying being surrounded by mountains, woods and rain. Darren is busy getting our bikes put together so we can spend the next two weeks riding. We head for Skookum bed and breakfast the middle of next week where we will be house sitting over Christmas. It will be a great place to hide out from the busyness of Christmas, the traffic, and the many places to visit. I am also trying to wrap my head around the fact that I am leaving for CAR soon. Unbelievable. Lots to think about and so much to do, but in all honesty, the short days and rain have me wanting to just curl up by the fire and read a book.

Thanksgiving Day Kayaking

2007-12-06T05:40:00.001-08:00

In the deep South

2007-10-23T15:38:00.000-07:00

One would think that since we live in the most southern US state that we are already in the deep south, but no. Something culturally strange takes place as you cross from Georgia into Florida, where all of a sudden, the deep south becomes a cultural melting pot of the rest of the US, as brought here by the ever abundant snowbirds and northern transplants. So to truly experience the deep south, we actually have to go north into Georgia.

We drove to Athens, GA last week to deliver 4 large foot lockers of bare-rooted fruit trees to a friends place, whose parents were going to visit their brother who is an agroforester in Madagascar. Sound complicated? It's not really. Our neighbours in Gamboula, Luke and Leanne, live in Athens, and Luke's brother is a tree guy in Madagascar. So we drove the trees to L and L's place, as Luke's parents are heading over there and will be delivering them. We had a great weekend with our friends, and were able to debrief with them about our two years in Gamboula. What a treat to sit down and dream together about the future possibilities of working together in Gamboula.

After leaving their house we stopped off at REI in Atlanta; Darren successfully navigating the 6 lane freeway while I shouted directions over the noise of ECHO's old blue Ford van (the doors don't seal). We were like kids in a candy store; looking at all the camping and biking equipment made moving to Victoria this winter not look so bad. Southern Florida is hardly known for its biking/backpacking possibilities.

After picking up 200 potted grape vines we headed into the deep south, into cotton and peanut country, where we were privileged to spend the night at a cozy cabin in the woods. One of my wonderful volunteers at ECHO lent us the keys to their cabin for the night so we could taste a little piece of heaven (southern style) and rest up for the trip back to ECHO. Shortly after finishing supper, the neighbours dropped by (a 70 year old cotton farmer and his wife) and we chatted about what folks in the country like to chat about. (If you don't know what folks in the country chat about then you better get yourself down to the country for a spell). After a long conversation about his family that had recently passed on, we changed the subject and talked about peanuts. This led to an invitation to drive to over to their house to pick up bags of green, boiled, then frozen peanuts. I guess all you have to do is pop them in a pot of boiling water until they thaw and presto!, you've got yourself some boiled peanuts. Yummm. If you don't know what I am talking about, you are missing out. There are more than two ways to eat a peanut.

After picking up our peanuts, touring the locals real estate, and hearing about the grandyoungins, we headed back to the cabin for a peaceful nights sleep. I would go north to the south anytime!

A Weekend in the Hills

2007-06-23T17:16:00.000-07:00

We had a great weekend in May hanging out with our old ECHO chums Jeff and Laura. Thanks to a generous gift from one of our friends, we enjoyed a great weekend in North Carolina catching trout, swimming and taking in the Brevard White Squirrel Festival. While you may wonder if this is some kind of strange mountain joke, I can assure you that white squirrels do exist, having escaped a circus train they promptly took up residence in Brevard, NC. We enjoyed outdoor blue grass music, were introduced to a great band call Sol Driven Train and had fun with each other.

Catching up with old friends is always a good thing!

Back to Blogging

2007-05-06T17:08:00.001-07:00

After too long a hiatus from writing, I feel refreshed and in need of some writing time.

I spoke with Clarisse yesterday for a good ten minutes, plus the 4 times I had to call her back because the connection kept cutting off.  She is well along with all of the family.  Her brother, who now works for a diamond company in Bania, has access to the Internet via a satellite down link and so we have been able to write back and forth.  I recently gave him Clarisse's cell phone number (our old phone) and in the last four weeks he has been consistently calling Clarisse to find out how the family is.  Unbelievable really.  For the last five or more years he has been virtually inaccessible because of distance and no means of communication.  Now that Clarisse has a phone they can be instantly  (well, as long as they are in range of a cell tower) connected.

Clarisse said the gardens look great, the rains are steady and everything is growing well.  I wish I were there.  I have not remembered a more deeply sad time in my life.  I am glad to be at ECHO, for if I had to be any place in North America it would be here.  However, my heart longs to be in CAR, involved in the deep relationships that we have there, daily submerged in the sometimes messy lives of struggling people. I have yet to develop those kinds of relationships here. Maybe I just haven't gone out looking for them. Maybe I am too busy being sad.

Well, more on sadness later. Apparently sadness can mean becoming more like Jesus. We will see.

warm and cozy in Florida?

2007-02-02T04:21:00.000-08:00

While we complained bitterly our last few days in
Victoria about cold weather, snow and never seeing the
sun, we spent Monday night on the ECHO farm driving
around in a golf cart checking thermometers. Our
first few days here had us in tank-tops and jeans, but
this week was sweaters and touques. While we can
hardly complain it makes me laugh at how adaptable my
body is. While in Gamboula 65F was absolutely
freezing, requiring all the warm clothes I could
muster. Being in Victoria made 32F seem downright
unlivable and though once I was all bundled up a walk
was a pleasant enough outdoor activity. Now that we
are Florida 50F is back to being a 'must have fleece'
event. It is nice to know how flexible God has made
our human bodies, but now that I have made this
observation, could someone please turn up the heat?

bossbugs@yahoo.ca

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Home on the Range

2006-12-12T15:56:00.000-08:00

Saturday night at midnight we made our arrival into North America with one bag and a dog. The other three bags were some where between Washington DC and Victoria. We were greeted with much excitement and joy by our families and were covered up in warm clothes before leaving the airport for exposure to the cold Canadian air. We slept in after having been traveling for 36 hours straight and started Sunday morning with a chill in the air.

We spent a good amount of time Sunday sorting through clothes that had been in boxes for three years or more only to find that Darren's wardrobe was significantly well stocked compared to mine! Sunday evening we had a nice dinner with my mom and the Bosses and were able to catch-up a bit over a really good club-house sandwich and French fries.

Monday morning mom and I went shopping so I could find same pants in order to prevent death by exposure on my part. Monday afternoon was more essentials shopping with my dad and step-mom and then dinner with them and my sister. Mmmm, pizza. So we have eaten well in the last two days, are slowly acclimatizing and realizing how much work we have to do in the next month. We are scheduled to fly to Florida on the 16th of January to start our year of work in Florida. I am trying to not be critical at all that I see but Christmas is definitely a hard time to not think back to the poverty we just left in light of all the excess around us here. I need to keep reminding myself that we are in a different culture and because of that, we need to be just as sensitive and tolerant as we were in the Central African culture. There is no difference.

Anyway, I plan on writing more when I have time to think and be still for more than a few minutes. Our dog, Koko, has adjusted well and everybody loves her so she is doing better than we are.

Well, better go....Later

Tearful Goodbyes

2006-12-07T00:57:00.000-08:00

After a very difficult week of good-byes, we have arrived in
Yaoundé with our dog Koko in tow, awaiting our flight to
Canada on Friday. It is hard to say where home is now.
When we first set out for CAR one of our main motivations
was to learn the ropes of agricultural missions, to help out
Roy Danforth and to seek further direction for our future
careers. I dont think it ever occurred to me that I
would want to stay in CAR, nor have my heart captured by the
people of Gamboula.

On the contrary, if I could have found some way to hang on I
would have. I have never felt such heart break in my life
that I can remember. Leaving Canada or ECHO did not feel
like this. I am so thankful for our two years in CAR and I
am looking forward to going back. There is no shortage of
need for missionaries and development practitioners in CAR
and if God allows, I intend to be among those meeting the
need.

Our last week was busy with packing although, I have to
admit that I had very little to do with packing down the
house. Darren, bless his heart, saw how much I was grieving
at having to leave behind such good family and friends that
he gave me the week to do what I needed to do and he took
care of nearly everything else. I have such an awesome
husband. We had a party at Clarisses house with all the
Nguebe family in the Gamboula area as well as her sister who
arrived from Bangui after an 8 year absence right in time
for our party. We fed 54 Nguebes, and that was only half
the family. Not unlike what a Coupe family reunion would be
like. Next we had a party with our ladies bible study, each
one bringing something to share around the table. Thursday
was a big day at our house as I got my hair braided by
Nadege and Clarisse. It took a total of nearly seven hours
but I am so happy with it and am determined to keep it in
until mid December. Friday, December first is the biggest
national holiday in CAR. The big thing to do on the first
is to be in the parade. Leonard, Nadege and I made uniforms
for all the workers with their names hand embroidered onto
their shirts and complete with ECHO hats. We loaded up the
agroforestry golf cart into the back of the truck and I
drove it at the head of our team in the parade. We got all
kinds of cheers as people were especially enthralled to see
Roy and Darren marching with the workers doing all kinds of
crazy stuff as they tried to march to the beat of the drums.
After the parade festivities were over I headed back down
town with Clarisse and a few other agro workers to take in
some of the fun. Darren went back to the house to pack
before he and Roy headed back to the Mayors party. I
hung out with Clarisse until nearly 10:30 that night. We
had a lot of fun but it was also very sad at the same time.
We saw all kinds of people we knew from church absolutely
drunk in the name of the holiday. It seems as though all
the people who would normally never do such a thing
transformed into some one else. Clarisse and I ended the
night in tears on our knees praying for our friends to
remain faithful to their convictions and that no one would
be injured. There were a number of motorbike-taxi accidents
because of excessive speed and drunk driving.

Saturday, we were honoured by the agroforestry staff at a
going away/Christmas party at our house. The wives of many
of the workers prepared goat, beef and greens (just for me)
and we gathered, wives included!, on our veranda for a
feast. We were so encouraged by the presence of all our
staff and their willingness to have their wives eat with us
(not a normal thing). I specifically asked if they would
mind inviting their wives as I know many of them and wanted
to say good-bye to them as well. Chrysler, one of the two
head guys who I have travelled a lot with and given lots of
counsel too, made such a nice speech and read a beautiful
prayer from Colossians that he asked me to pray on behalf of
the workers. When it came time to pray I couldnt hold
out any longer and the tears started to flow. I think I
really surprised the guys. I have a reputation of being
pretty tough so I think it was good for them to see my more
vulnerable side. Even Chrysler had tears in his eyes.
Sunday night after a nice meal and Sunday service with the
missionaries I headed down to Clarisses house. To my
surprise, all the Nguebe siblings from Gamboula had gathered
there to wait for me. Clarisse, Nadege, Severene, Eloi,
Berenice, Regi (a cousin), Hortence (Mathews wife
visiting from Berberati), and a few of the older kids had
gathered in the living room. I arrived around 9:00pm
prepared to stay up all night. Once I got settled in my
spot and the laughing subsided, Eloi brought out a new
cassette player and a blank cassette. They had devised a
plan to record the group of us singing songs onto the
cassette for me to bring back to Canada so I can be reminded
of them. By 12:30 am we had filled up both sides of the
cassette, laughed at each other a lot and had a really good
time breaking up our sadness. I eventually crawled
into bed at 1:00am only to be up at 4:30am filled with the
dread of sadness I knew would come that day.

Monday morning I was up early finishing up all the things I
had neglected to do the week before. After running around
all morning, saying various good-byes it was time to think
about leaving for the airport. We had a lunch date with Roy
and Aleta but I couldnt think about food at all. Instead
I took off for the Garden of Eden to have a good cry that
had been building up all morning. By the time I got out of
the garden there were people waiting for me at the garden
entrance to say their goodbyes, Nadege, Mama Maggie, both in
tears in no time. Once we had everything all packed up the
agroforestry staff said they ALL wanted to accompany me down
to the airport. We loaded everyone up in the agroforestry
truck, nearly 20 people, and took our funeral like drive
down the airport. I sat in the front with Eloi, my big
brother, on one side driving, and Clarisse, my big sister,
on the other side. Clarisse and I cried nearly the whole
way there and poor Eloi was doing all he could to hold it
all together. The plane was a little late so we tried to
lighten the mood some sitting under the hot sun. Once the
plane arrived and the guys got to refuelling, different
staff pulled me aside to say their personal goodbyes, their
thanks for various things and my last words of counsel.
There was also a lot of just staring at one another, words
exchanged without being spoken. When it was time to get in
and go the guys formed a long receiving line towards the
plane (African style) and we filed along it giving hugs and
shaking hands. Once the plane started up so did I, the
sound of my tears drowned out by the noise of the engine.
It was so painful to see all my dear friends, men and women
alike left standing there, eyes welling up with silent
tears.

So here we are in Yaoundé, waiting for our flight back to
Victoria tomorrow. If not for the continuing education that
is really going to be very helpful for our return back to
CAR, I am not sure I would have left just yet. Change is a
part of life, I know, but it doesnt always have to be
easy. I realise even more so now in my departure, that what
I contributed to Gamboula was far more than just planting a
few trees and establishing productive gardens. These things
are good, but the real work happened in the relationships,
the lives I influenced, the hearts that changed. One of my
workers wives came to me on Sunday to thank me for working
so closely with her husband. She said before I came there
was no peace in their house. He would be away with other
women for days at a time, only to come back drunk, rough her
up and leave again. Now, after these last two years, peace
has returned, he sleeps at home, he no longer hits her and
things are slowly improving. Love is starting to appear in
their home. She says it is because of my counselling her
husband and the example of Darren and Is marriage. What
an honour to be a part of transforming lives. And what an
honour it will be to one day soon return to CAR to be used
by God to transform more lives in his name.

I will write again on Monday when we are home and give you a
glimpse of reverse culture shock and all the things that
makes us look like a couple of people who just left the
jungle for the big city!

Rainy Days

2006-11-12T03:55:00.000-08:00

I just got back form my 5:00am morning walk and the rain has started falling again. It has been a very wet 'end' to the dry season and some say it is the final anger of the rain at having to give way to the dry season. Whatever it is, it makes for some muddy days in the garden. Maybe it is just here to help acclimatize me to what we will be returning to in Victoria for Christmas. There has been a lot of activity since I last wrote, hence the lateness in this letter.

We had two great weeks with Phil Hudson, President of NMSI, Angela Nelson, former ECHO intern and on staff with NMSI, and Twila Schofeld, an illustrator with NMSI. The girls had lots of projects to work on in Gamboula and we had a lot of opportunity to talk with Phil, gain valuable insights into our ministry as well as having the opportunity to dream about what the possibilities are for the future. It was a very encouraging visit and we will have fun stories to share with them in the future.

Since their departure I left for a week with Chrysler, the main seminar teacher for Agroforesterie, Eloi, our new agri chauffeur and one of my older Nguebe brothers, and Romeo, one of the agri labourers. We left on a Monday with the plan to visit 6 agroforesterie cooperatives in the Southern region. The truck is only a two seater so Chrysler and Romeo rode in the back while I sat in the cab with Eloi. I know Eloi pretty well and I have travelled with Chrysler before but out in the villages I am not known as 'me' really. The cooperatives know me, or about me, but most everyone still has pre-conceived ideas about what a white girl can and can't do, where she can sleep and what she can eat. It has been my goal to slowly if not forcefully break down some of these stereotypes, not for all white girls in general necessarily (I know some who would not sleep where I have) but for myself and the guys with whom I work. It is hard to be the real me, when you are shrouded with stereotypes of who you should be. Chrysler said he likes to travel with me because it gives him a kick when he gets back to Gamboula and people ask him what I ate, where I slept, did I use the outhouse? He loves to see their reaction when he says that I did everything the same as their own wife would have done! I had an especially hard time in Sosso-Nakombo, as we had arrived shortly after a bandit attack some 30km away. It was far enough away for my feeling of safety but not for everyone else's. When they saw I was with the agri team they sprung into action to find me a comfortable place to sleep. Thus, I was swiftly delivered to two wonderful nuns at the local Catholic mission where I was locked in for the night along with our truck. I must say, after two very cold nights of fitful sleep, I had a wonderful sleep in the mission house, with running water and warm blankets (yes, I get very cold here as well). It weighed on my conscience though. What makes my life that much more valuable that I am safely tucked away in a comfortable house and my colleagues are sleeping on the floor somewhere. Don't get me wrong, I understand all the cultural nuances, but it still bothered me. At that moment I counted their lives more valuable as each of them has a wife and children to look after and I don't.

The purpose of our trip was to meet with each cooperative and to visit as many tree gardens as possible. In Sosso, we walked more than 8km, through some beautiful rainforest and savannah in order to look at 4 tree gardens. It was a long walk but most satisfying. At one point we had to take off our shoes and walk through 100m of water up to our knees. I had to fight to get to go on this walk as the village coop members didn't think I could walk that far or through such conditions. It was Chrysler who finally convinced them I would be fine, after a hard glare from me. The whole transaction was in Gbaya so I am not sure what all got said but I heard enough to know there was some doubt as to my hardiness.

Five days later we were back in Gamboula and I have been working closely with Medard and Chrysler to get them settled in their jobs before we leave. Chrysler is now responsible for writing reports so I have been advising him on how to do this. It has been a learning opportunity for me as well so I am thankful for the chance to work with the two of them. They have really grown in their abilities and in the respect the other workers and missionaries have for them. We had to let go two employees this last week and that has been difficult but essential for the continuation of the agroforestery ministry.

With only three weeks left we are busy getting things prepared for those taking up the slack behind us. I am leaving the nutrition project in capable hands but we have a few details yet to iron out. As I am not known for my patience when it comes to packing up and leaving, I am going to go on one more trip with the agri team next Sunday through Saturday. That leaves me with only two weeks here to work and get organized/packed. I will be heading up north to give a seminar to a women's cooperative (finally) and then will continue on with Chrysler and Eloi on their visits with 6 agroforestery cooperatives in the region. Darren will be busy in Gamboula getting computers sorted out, backed up and ready to turn over to the hospital.

I will be leaving here having accomplished and learned more than I first imagined. I am excited to write about my up-coming trip as well as the various parties we will be attending. Between Clarisse and I the tears are already flowing but I am determined to come back for a visit next January to do a control on the various projects while Roy is away on furlough.

From the heart of Africa, Angela

The In-law

2006-10-03T23:55:00.000-07:00

Last week we found ourselves in Berberati again, helping ICDI's Agriculture project get off the ground. Elise, Clarisse's sister, is the cook of one of the missionary families with ICDI. We typically are not invited to eat with the missionaries for the evening meal and I usually end up visiting with Elise and her family in the evening and Darren generally spends time fixing people's computers or eating out with Roy at some schwiya stand (grilled beef). This particular week, however, Darren agreed to come with me and visit the family. Clarisse has three siblings in Berberati: Remy, the oldest of the twelve and also the head of personnel at ICDI, Mattieu, the second oldest son, who splits his time between Berberati and his diamond mines in Nola, and Elise. Typically, I start by visiting Remy's house as it is closest to the mission. From there, someone in the family, usually Calvin, the youngest (20), leads me on to Elise's house and from Elise's, Mattieu's. I generally make it home by 9:00.

In past visits I have typically eaten with Elise and it is whatever the family happens to be having. I am included as part of the family, as if I was Elise's own sister, with a little extra special treatment (for instance, she wouldn't serve me water from the village, only from the mission). We may only eat gozo and greens in a sauce, or gozo and caterpillars, as we did three weeks ago, big fresh ones! Yum. Earlier on the day in question, Elise was telling me about how Central Africans relate to their in-laws. Essentially, you are expected to respect your in-laws above your own family. Anything they ask of you, you do without question. Thus, it was an extra special treat when we arrived at Elise's for supper to find that she had gone beyond the normal in order to show respect for her brother in-law, Darren. We were served gozo, meat, greens and sauce and she had prepared donuts and tea for dessert. Darren was quite honoured after I explained the significance to him.

I have known for a while that Darren is respected by Clarisse's family. Only Clarisse and Elise ever call Darren by his name. Most everyone else calls him Monsieur Darren out of respect. I am called Angela by everyone, except by the children who call me by the appropriate title of Omba (Aunt) Ma Kete or Ma Kota (little mother or big mother) depending on the case. The other big honour we received this week was by Remy, who introduced me to his friends as his younger sister, then went on to give proof of this relationship. Given that I am his Gambe (younger sister) this makes Darren his Beau Frere (brother in-law). So rather than use Darren's name, he only calls Darren 'Beau', in the true Central African custom. I am thankful and honoured beyond words to be part of this family and I am torn at having to say good-bye. However, I know my position in the family and according to custom, when I return I will be accorded the same place in the family.

Clarisse's aunt, Mama Maggi, has been very ill for sometime without knowing the cause of her illness. She is a kind hearted woman who was left by her husband when she could not conceive children. She is a mid-wife and a pharmacist and has raised Clarisse and many other children, most of whom are orphans. She left two weeks ago to visit her family and mother in nearby Cameroon, but fell gravely ill. Clarisse was worried sick and wanted her to return to Gamboula but her uncle refused to send her back. After her two weeks of sick time from her job at the hospital were up we decided to take drastic measures and I rented the hospital ambulance to go and bring back Mama. Needless to say, the family was not happy to see us, and they were mad that Clarisse had brought the 'white lady with her' to force their hand into agreeing to let Mama Maggi come home with us. Though it wasn't at all a friendly visit, we returned safely without too much border trouble with Mama. She has undergone tests all day at the hospital and it is suspected that she has gastric tuberculosis. Please pray with us for healing for this dear woman.

We have made some very important changes in the personnel of the agroforestry program, especially following Constant's accident. He is on a two-year probation in which any incident, even the pettiest argument, could land him back in jail indefinitely. We have removed him as the head of the program (a position he probably never should have had) and have put him in charge of the nursery. Chrysler is now in charge of communications, conducting follow-up with the agroforestry groups and giving seminars. Medard remains accountant and head of personnel and we are in search of a new head of the centre. I have been very busy working with both Chrysler and Medard, coming up with report sheets, job descriptions and the like. We are trying to put together a workable system that will help them do their jobs efficiently and that will facilitate reporting to Roy when he is out of the country. It has been good to work with these two men, to strategize and empower them in their gifting. I can't think of a more satisfying job!

Our friends and president of NMSI arrive this Saturday for nearly two weeks of work and travel. Time is running short but we are trying to make the best of it, to leave work here in a good position to continue on in our absence.

All things are possible...

2006-09-25T13:24:00.000-07:00

...including the reparation of a lightning damaged satellite phone in the heart of Africa. With huge thanks to Jim Hocking, director of the NGO ICDI, who graciously agreed to take our phone with him to Bangui, he knew just the place to take it, and presto!, we have a working sat phone again. All this and it only cost us the equivalent of $25. He said that as soon as the guy heard what happened to the phone he knew just what part was busted, and amazingly of all, he had the piece needed and the right type of screw driver to take it apart. This proves many people wrong from around here who thought it impossible that Central Africans could fix a thing such as this, but in my thinking, where else in the world could you fix a satellite phone. They are more common here than many other places due to the fact that other modes of communication are nearly non-existent and there are probably a lot of dumb ex-pats out here who leave their phones plugged in during a thunderstorm, when every one else knows better not to.

We are both well, though I must admit that time is passing far too quickly for me. Each day that passes it seems that my relationships with my colleagues grow stronger, and the bond between Clarisse and I and her family grows deeper. There now resides a constant ache in my heart at the thought of our inevitable departure and I find myself wanting to spend more and more time away from the mission, visiting with family or chatting and planning work with my colleagues. Last Saturday afternoon, Clarisse, Eloi (her older brother, a chauffeur) and I rented a motorbike and took it with all three of us on it to Kentzou, Cameroon to visit her mom and dad and Clarisse and Eloi's kids who are there at school. I felt like the creamy filling of an Oreo cookie, sandwiched between two chocolate cookies. It was a great visit, Eloi is a good driver, and the military checkpoints were a breeze to pass through once I told them I was a missionary in Gamboula. They normally ask for money but once I got to talking with them they let us alone. I think they were all stunned to see me on a motor bike with two Central Africans and it made their day enough that they didn't ask for anything more.

Tomorrow we are heading for Berberati again to help Josh and ICDI with their new demonstration farm. We are planning on fencing it in over the next three days so that goats will not enter the trial plots and eat up all the beans they have already planted. I hope to write more in depth once I get back. I have plenty of thoughts to share as I reflect back over our time here, and look ahead at what is to come. Writing helps me sort it all out.

Hapata!

The road home

2006-09-13T11:35:00.000-07:00

It is with true sadness and a heavy heart that we come to the time of speaking about our return home. All good things must come to their end, or at least find themselves amongst change. Our original commitment to the work here and to our donors was to spend two years in Central Africa. We will be returning home just shy of our two years in order to be present for the ninetieth birthday of Darren's grandmother in Victoria. Thus we will be leaving Gamboula in early December and we will be spending Christmas with our families in Victoria. It is a rare treat for us to spend Christmas with our families, and as our lives take us on ever far-reaching paths we imagine being home will become ever more rare.

When we first decided to come to Gamboula it was with the expressed interest of learning as much as we could about agricultural development and missions from those who have been doing it successfully for a long period of time. We have not been disappointed. In fact we have learned more than I thought possible and have been given the opportunity to try out our own ideas, to express our opinions and to ask a lot of questions. I could not have imagined a better place to try out our wings, so to speak. Far from just sitting back and soaking in all that is around us, we have strived to really 'do something' while we have been here and as we have discovered more deeply each of our spiritual gifts, we have seen ourselves plunged into all manner of work. Darren has found a real desire to help missionaries and nationals with their technology needs which is evidenced by the time he spends giving computer lessons and fixing computers. Some days our house has looked more like the back room of an outdated Future Shop! He has managed to restore 10 year old laptops back to working order with no help from the Internet. I have seen more and more where my interests lie and where my gifts are best utilized. I still love to work with fruit trees but even more, I love to work with people working with fruit trees. My heart is for the relationships built while working with people in the area of food security. I have enjoyed getting to know each of our workers, knowing their stories, meeting their wives and children, helping them work out different things in their lives, praying with and for them and generally helping them excel in their area of service to the Lord. I can find no better satisfaction. It is true that many days I return home from work saddened by the stories told, grieved over the sin in people's lives and other days overjoyed with the victory achieved in other's lives. Without the help of my dear husband and my dear friend Clarisse, I might not be so quick to love my job, as their listening ears have helped me process a lot of what falls on my ears during the day. I enjoy managing people and projects and look forward to what happens next.

So, what does happen next? Given all that we have discovered about ourselves here, we can undeniably say that we see ourselves in a long term career of service in foreign lands. However, before this becomes reality, we both feel that a little more preparation remains. While we are both committed to life long learning, Darren has a little more left in the university realm of things. So here is the plan (subject to change, of course).

December - Return to Victoria for time with friends and family around the Christmas tree.

January - We will be returning to Fort Myers, Florida where we will debrief with our mission, NMSI, and then Darren will start an IT (Information Technology) apprenticeship at ECHO while I help manage the Tropical Fruit nursery at ECHO.

August - Darren returns to British Columbia to start classes at either UVIC or UBC towards a degree in Computer Science.

December - I return to Victoria after finishing up at ECHO and attending their annual conference. This is when I start job hunting like crazy to support my student husband!

I am also planning on doing my MA degree at Royal Roads University via distant education, starting either May 2007 or May 2008. It is a program called Human Security and Peacebuilding and is designed for those with previous work experience in insecure countries. It is a two year program and includes a six-month internship overseas, which I would like to find a placement for in Central Africa. This little plan takes us to about 2010 at which point we will be seeking opportunities to return to a career overseas.

This e-mail is for the curious. A more formal letter will be sent out to all our donors in October. The nutrition garden at the Gamboula hospital has been an incredible success and I do not want to see such an important and successful work fall apart due to lack of funding. Two or three hundred dollars a month would put the project in good shape and due to my flexible school schedule, I would like to be able to return to CAR once a year for follow-up visits and to consult on the work here in Gamboula as well as with ICDI in Berberati, possibly leading short teams from NMSI. All this is to say that we still have need of our donors and the work here will go on even in our temporary, if not elongated, absence. Our hearts have been so captured by this land that to leave without a thought of returning is nearly impossible for me.

We welcome your questions, your comments and your prayers. Even the best laid plans are doomed to fail if they are not the plans of our Father.

On a totally different subject, please put to prayer a meeting we will be having tomorrow with all of the Agroforesterie staff and the elders and pastor of our church. We will be discussing problems that have surfaced between staff following the truck accident. There is a lot of finger pointing going on to do with voodoo and such and there is no unity between the head of the program and the staff. We all need wisdom and patience going into a meeting like this, especially when it comes to accusations of voodoo which is so unreal to us and so very real to our African counterparts.

Lightning sucks when it strikes you!

2006-08-31T09:48:00.000-07:00

I have always been fascinated by lightning. It was a rare thing for us growing up in Victoria and so was always exciting when a stormy night came along with thunder and lightning. We would stay up at night just to listen to it, cuddled up on the floor in the living room, me, mom and Sarah. When we moved to Florida it was commonplace for everyone else, but it still caught my attention. I would sit in our screened in porch and watch the lightning light up the distance. Not being all that familiar with lightning I hadn't yet earned a healthy respect for it until we heard reports of farm workers dying from lightning strikes nearby. I was once caught out in a storm on the farm and had to take shelter for an hour with my rabbits in their hut for fear of being struck on my way home. Lightning is a truly amazing thing, all that energy all balled up and then thrown out of the heavens in one distinct, frightening path of light that can destroy things instantly. Like satellite phones for example.

We have our share of lightning here in the Central African tropics and this being rainy season we see it every week. It never ceases to amaze me, and I listen for it the same way we used to listen for the train whistle everyday when we were kids, when we would run out to meet the nightly train passing by our house. After receiving warnings from Roy about the destruction lightning can cause inside homes here, travelling through electrical lines, we quickly learned that when a storm is approaching we need unplug everything, computers, radios and phones, including the phone antenna, which sits on the roof of our house. Last night we heard a storm far off in the distance and we went to bed before it snuck up on us in Gamboula. We woke up to a loud CRACK and instantly Darren jumped out of bed to unplug everything, but too late. The lightning struck the short-wave radio antenna in a building 50 metres from our house. The energy was so great to have travelled through the electrical circuitry of the station tripping circuits at the hospital and agroforesterie and travelling up into our satellite phone. Darren knew instantly that our thousand dollar piece of marvellous technology had taken a direct hit and we mourned the loss all night in a fitful sleep. It isn't completely dead as it will still make phone calls but some part of it is damaged to the point that it will no longer make data calls, in other words, send e-mail, nor will it charge the battery on AC power. Fortunately we have wonderfully generous neighbours who are willing to let us use their phone system and we are trying to get our phone credit transferred to their number. We will try sending the phone back to the states for repairs but have little hope it will make it back here before our term is over.

While I remain fascinated by lightning, even as I sit here this afternoon typing in the middle of a rain storm, I can now hear the anger in the voice of the thunder calling out its vengeance on unsuspecting citizens of earth who may be unlucky enough to meet the wrath of its force. It is otherwise an amazing and beautiful thing, but it really sucks when it strikes you!

'Pretty much not guilty'

2006-08-25T01:52:00.000-07:00

It is one those cloudy, cool days more typical of Victoria in the Fall then Central Africa in the summer, not that I am complaining. In fact, I have received so many e-mails lately that I have been praying for a rainy afternoon that would jail me in the house in order to sit down and write, a cup of tea at my side. We have had lots of guests the last few days including the return of Dr. Tim and Ann, missionaries from the USA. They are back from furlough for a three (?) year term at the hospital here. We have been providing them their first week's worth of meals to help them get settled. We have had other missionary visitors from villages in CAR show up this week as well so Darren and I have been eating far too well the last few days. Funny how you always eat better when there are guests! We also celebrated Clarisse's thirty-sixth birthday yesterday with a big, yummy chocolate cake. Just because I had to remind her of her own birthday doesn't mean it wasn't a special day, but on the whole, birthdays go by completely un-noticed, for those who even know their birth date. However, we could not let the day go by without some mention of it and some tasty treat. She was rather lucky actually as, for those who want to celebrate their birthday, it is up to the celebrant to fix their own food for their party and do their own clean-up. Her sister's kids are already having kids so this makes her a grandmother at the age of thirty-six. Amazing really when I have friends who are only beginning to have their own kids at the age of thirty-six.

In the on-going saga of the search for justice, Constant's trial is now over and the verdict of 'pretty much not guilty' was handed down this past Monday. While he is technically not guilty, they couldn't quite say this as his vehicle was involved in an accident and as accidents can never just be accidents someone living must be at fault. To this end, he was released from custody and is back in Gamboula but remains on probation for two years. This means that he cannot get into any trouble of any kind for two years otherwise they are able to send him back to jail or something, we are not sure what. As far as the project is concerned, he will not be allowed to drive any of our vehicles for that two year period, lest we get into further trouble with another accident. The judge also said that the families of the deceased are free to sue our insurance company for loss of life of a loved one, even though the accident wasn't Constant's fault. Since the other vehicle wasn't carrying insurance I guess they have to have the ability to sue someone. The other stipulation is that if the families don't succeed in suing the insurance company they are then allowed to sue Constant and the EEB church directly. My interpretation of the ruling then is that it pretty much wasn't Constant's fault.

While he is back in Gamboula he is not yet back at work. Roy would like the family to meet with the pastor first to try and work out the accusations of black magic that are coming from Constant's family, which happen to be all over the place. We can hardly have him come back to work when he still thinks that two of our workers cursed him into having his accident. Somehow I don't think there would be a lot of love floating around between the workers. Since Constant is the head it would also make it difficult for those under him to respect him. Please continue to pray for a spiritual resolution to the problems of the heart that are going on here. Things to do with magic are so much beyond our experience and our understanding but they are very real for those we work with. Help us to be able to communicate freedom and truth from the darkness that so entangles the lives of those we love here.

Be on the look out for my next blog detailing the plan for the rest of our lives. Well, perhaps not the rest of our lives but at least the road we'll be travelling on for the next 12 months or so.

Still on the war path for truth and justice,

Angela

Catching Up

2006-08-13T11:14:00.000-07:00

Having safely arrived back in Gamboula last week, we have had the last week to settle back into work and our somewhat hectic but wonderful routine. We were welcomed back with both good and bad news regarding life here but I suppose that shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. The good news is that Calvin, whom we and others back home having been helping with school fees, passed his exams and now holds his BPC, a kind of diploma that opens doors to college, nursing school and other government related jobs. He is now continuing on with school and we, and hopefully others (hint, hint) will pitch in to help make his goals a reality. He is last of twelve children so you can imagine that he doesn't get any help from family in regards to school as all of his brothers and sisters have married and have families of their own. In fact, one of his older sisters gave birth this morning and I have just returned from visiting them in the hospital. What a precious sight to see a brand new baby. Speaking of babies, we were also greeted with the news that our friend Reufen and his wife are proud parents of a baby girl that they have named Angela, after me. I am feeling quite honoured and the baby is beautiful with lots of curly black hair. Precious!

In other news, the saga of Constant continues. He has been 'released' from prison but is being kept at the president of the tribunal's house. Technically he is still in jail but he has really become the presidents house boy and chauffeur while he awaits a trial that has been post-poned twice. The police reports say that Constant is not at fault, but now, one of the family members of one of the deceased has come forward to sue Constant, stating that the accident was his fault because prior to the accident he had had a fight with a women and that caused the accident. Hmm? Sounds suspect to me. Roy has brought in a lawyer twice who has come all the way from the capital in Bangui, only to have them post-pone the proceedings, ONCE THEY HAVE SEEN the lawyer. They really just want Roy to give up and pay them all off and call it a done deal, which Roy will not do. Of course. We have not been given a new date and it looks as if this may never end. Perhaps once the president gets tired of having Constant around he will finally put an end to the cherade but in the meantime it is a game of waiting. It is about as corrupt a system as you could imagine. Every day his family has to bring him food to eat so imagine how anxious they are to get this over with.

We received a letter from Constant the other day and he is also quite discouraged. He accused three employees of ours of putting a curse on him so that either the trial won't happen or he will die in prison. No one can accept that the system is corrupt, instead, there must be some evil spiritual reason behind it all. Arrgh! Everything in baby steps. Upon our return from Bayanga I found that my friends younger brother was also in jail. He was imprisoned under false charges and they refused to give him a proper trial or let him argue his case. They only wanted money which they knew he had a bit of because they waited to arrest him until after he got paid for helping build a house locally. After seven days in squalor the family managed to negotiate down his 'fine' and he was released much to our relief. He was sick and hungry but happy to be home with his wife, kids and family. Everybody in the village knew he was falsely charged but no one could do a thing about it. Don't they call that a police state.

It has been cool here for days but no real rain fall. This afternoon there has been a lot of thunder but no rain. Monday and Tuesday are holidays so we will be able to work around the house and in the gardens with relative peace. I also put together a report this week of the Women and Children Gardening for Health Program and since January we have given away 19 machetes and vegetable seeds to mothers with infants in the hospital nutrition centre. These women represent nearly 190 hours of labour that they put into the nutrition garden. Of these 19 women, 8 were Fulani and 11 were Gbaya villagers. Since January only two women have outright refused to work and the rest have been very happy to help out, harvest food for their kids and receive a machete and seeds at the end of their stay. The hospital staff are more than pleased with the program, and frankly, so am I.

We have three visitors coming out this October, the president of our mission, NMSI, and two US staff. We are looking forward to their visit immensely as hopefully this will open up more doors for people to come and work here in the future. The local evangelist that we worked with in Bayanga was adamant that more people come out to help him in his work in the area of development-agriculture, health, small business, what ever would be a help to the Aka pygmies that he works with. I fully agree with the needs he sees.

Speaking of needs, anyone wanting to help put some wonderful (no bias here) kids through school this year, as little as twenty dollars will put a child through school for the year. Any size donations can be sent via NMSI (in the United States) or CCWM (in Canada) marked 'Bosses-special projects' and we will direct the funds specifically to pay for school fees and supplies. If you have any questions please contact us through NMSI. (www.nms-intl.org)

Have a great week, Angela

Tree-vangelists

2006-08-01T03:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday marked our first real day of work in Bayanga since our arrival last week. Our time to rest is over and work has begun. We rented a VCR, television and generator from the neighbourhood 'movie theatre' and set it up in the village of Yandoumbe, a couple kilometres up the road from where we are staying. The residents of Yandoumbe have motivation issues when it comes to farming, as most residents prefer to work as temporaries in villagers gardens, getting paid just a little manioc each day, rather than work in their gardens and take home as much or as little manioc as their family would need each week. Because it is hard to find a time to speak to everyone in the village at once, what better way than to show an outdoor film and gather the masses. Once darkness hit we started with a twenty minute film in Sango that was produced in Bayanga introducing the work of the mission in Bayanga and the various activities they do. i am not sure if everything in the film was understood by the mostly Aka speakers but it served our purposes of drawing a crowd of nearly 200. During 'intermission' I, speaking through my Aka interpreter Jean Pierre, gave a demonstration and speech of why they should have their own gardens instead of working in everybody else's. My visual aids consisted of a small bowl and a really large one, making the point that for their efforts in someone else's garden they are only rewarded with a small bowl of manioc, not quite enough for the whole family for one day. But when you have your own garden, you can have enough to fill the large bowl which is plenty for your family for several days, meaning you don't have to go to your garden everyday even. After a rather animated and convincing (if I do say so myself) speech we settled down to watch the second tape which was mostly Aka pygmies singing that was filmed during a pygmy church conference in the town of Liboko. Just as I had heard about enough of the video, God did as well and we packed up just in time for a big rain storm to scatter everyone back to their homes.

While I am not sure how well I would do preaching to the masses, I sure did enjoy encouraging folks with my tree-vangelistic campaign. Speaking of preaching though, this morning at seven the local evangelist knocked on our door and asked if one of us wouldn't mind preaching at church this morning. Darren, not one for public speaking kindly deferred to his wife and she, I, quickly prepared a sermon for delivery at eight thirty that same morning. Me and my rapid fire mind found it a little difficult to preach through a translator (into the Aka language) as while your words are being translated you have to not lose your train of thought, but otherwise it went well. It made me even more grateful for the time I spent with YWAM eight and a half years ago, when no-warning sermons were par for the course. Every event in life has its purpose.

Tomorrow morning we get up real early to head for Bomanzoko and Lindjombo to check in on the people and their trees. I am sure that as I write someone down there is munching on a Jackfruit...

Firsts...

2006-07-27T04:42:00.000-07:00

Just before leaving for Bayanga I had a terrible first--my first real grey hair. It was long and wiry and for one short moment I thought, oh know, so this is what it feels like to really know you are getting older. I am six months from turning thirty and while I know it isn't that old, I was still shocked to be shocked at finding my first grey hair. I am pretty much over it so no worries.

Our other first occurred yesterday on our trip to two outlying pygmy villages. We got our truck stuck in a nice, big mud hole. It took 30 minutes, Darren at the wheel, two Aka pygmies digging with their hands, and me taking pictures to get us unstuck. Okay, so me taking pictures probably had nothing to do with getting us out but the photos are impressive. Once you have been up to the door handle in one mud hole I suppose all the rest don't seem that bad but I would rather not find out.

So now that we have been stressed enough to get grey hairs, been stuck in a mud hole, eaten monkey and caterpillars, travelled on local transport (motorbikes sitting three people and the jungle-bus), slept in mud houses, and acquired a second language, we are well on our way to becoming 'real' missionaries, the kind that can either entice others or scare them away completely from becoming missionaries themselves.

What a fun job we have!!!!

Interesting Places, Interesting People

2006-07-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

I want you all to meet Jean Pierre. He is a pygmy man from the town of Yandoumbe, a village 3 kilometres up the road from the Centre De Formation, our home in Bayanga each summer. He is originally from a forest village in Cameroon but came here six years ago where he met and married his wife and is now the father of 4 children. They say there is a sickness in Yandoumbe that causes people not to farm and its primary cause is unknown. Some say its laziness, others say it's an aversion to becoming 'permanent', but whatever the cause, Jean Pierre is immune. Having learned from his father long ago that life without fields is no life at all, he has been farming here since he arrived. Every morning in Bayanga between five and six in the morning you will see streams of women coming down from Yandoumbe heading to the manioc fields of the Bilo (otherwise known as thr typical village African). These pygmy women will work from six in the morning until two or three in the afternoon and in return will receive a small bowl of manioc flour insufficient for the needs of a single family in a day. Why would one want to farm for someone else for a little bit everyday when you could easily farm for yourself and gain as much as you wanted? This we are unsure of and it is this that we are working towards changing the ideas of these pygmies but it is a slow process. This Saturday night we will be showing a film in Yandoumbe about the work of the Centre De Formation in order to gather together a large crowd of people. Before showing the film Jean Pierre, Capita and I will do our best at evangelizing the people of Yandoumbe about gardens. Why farm for others when you can farm for yourself and reap all the benefits. Jean Pierre will be our chief witness to what self reliance means. He and his wife are not in the garden everyday, and their fields aren't the prettiest looking, but they also find the time to hunt and fish and to carry on with more traditional activities that also go a long way in providing for his family.

We sat down for a planning meeting with Jean Pierre, Capita and Bernadine this morning and as with most meetings here, it included a lot of story telling. Jean Pierre told us about when he first got here he met Louis, an American that has been living among the pygmies for twenty years now. He saw how Louis would give away money or food or soap to people without getting anything in return and immediately he told his wife that no way were they going to take things from that white guy. He saw how dependent they could become and instead they put all their efforts into making their fields which is a pretty difficult task in the rainforest. After having cut down all of the rather awesomely large trees in your field you then have the task of turning over the soil containing all of those trees' roots. However, they are healthier and better off than most of their neighbours and for Darren and I, his family is a rare treat to work with. Should you ever visit Jean Pierre's garden, you will find fruit trees planted here and there and if you walk to the end of his field, there underneath the trees at the edge of the rainforest is a fruit tree nursery containing the best of the best; Jackfruit, Mango, Avocado etc.

This is the short story of Jean Pierre and we are priviledge to work with him and will be travelling with him all next week as we evangelize the masses about the importance of gardening. Pray for us and our message. After all, God was the first farmer on this earth!

Taking evil to court

2006-07-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

The following true story I am about to relay to you comes only thanks to my mother who said that people are interested in knowing all about what goes on in the lives of the people we work with. While this story may cause you to think the whole continent is crazy, if not just C.A.R., my only hope is that it challenges your world view, and that you may begin to see things amongst the unseen.

Let me introduce you to a few people first. I have changed the names of most everyone in case for some reason someone gets a hold of the cow involved. (Will explain later.) Christy is a young, vibrant midwife at the mission hospital. She is widowed with 4 children and she is an active member of the church and the choir. Her Dad is a retired pastor, her brother Rick works for agri and her sister Janet is the head of the women's bible school. About three months ago Christy went, well, crazy. At first her family thought she was only praying and prophesying but after two days of not eating or sleeping she began to say all kinds of crazy things, pointing out sin in the lives of many of the nurses in our hospital and church, including the pastor and the top people at the hospital. She claimed that the hospital was killing people through the nurses use of black magic. The pastors at the church went and prayed for her, the doctor tried to get her to go to the hospital, but nothing was helping her. In fact she just got worse and worse. She refused to have anything to do with modern medicine or the hospital, she stopped eating, talking and was nearly always awake, never sleeping at night. After a week she confessed that her sickness was the result of black magic performed on her by the accountant and head lab technician of the hospital but of course there is no way to prove this. The two hospital guys both deny having anything to do with black magic. One is an elder and the other is a deacon in our church here.

Two weeks passed and Christy just got worse and worse so to help solve matters, they called in a village doctor to perform his own magic on her using village medicine. For the last three months they have been performing this medicine on her, which involves washing her body with the right kinds of herbs everyday. They say her sickness isn't all that uncommon and has been seen up north. They call it the cow sickness because when she first got sick she stripped all her clothes off and wanted to run into the bushes and eat grass. They said she was acting like a cow. Now it is 3 months later and she is showing little improvement. They have moved her to another city where she is still receiving very expensive treatment from a witch doctor which is eating up three peoples salaries each month. They are all very afraid she will die. But it isn't quite like you think. It isn't the physical symptoms that may eventually kill her. What they believe is that the person who sold her to the original black magician has put her soul in that of a cow somewhere in Nigeria. Should the cow in Nigeria die, then so too will Christy.

If this in itself isn't sad enough, not two weeks after she first got sick, the father, a retired pastor, let's not forget, went down to the local police station and put in a request to sue the two hospital staff members because they caused her illness by selling her to a black magician. I know this may sound crazy, and no this isn't a remake of the Salem witch trials, but it is possible to be charged with causing illness or deaths by means of black magic, sorcery or witch craft, whatever you want to call it. I have no idea how such cases are judged since to my knowledge, the hospital does not give out death certificates saying "Cause of death: witch craft". It remains as one more example of how everything here has more than just a physical cause. You don't just die of a heart attack here, there always has to be some underlying cause.

I can't truly say what is wrong with Christy. Maybe she just snapped, maybe she is possessed by evil spritis, maybe her soul is in a cow, or maybe she just thinks it is and fear itself has driven her mad. I can't say but I wish I could. I remain a physical evidence kind of person though the longer I am here the more my worldview continues to shift and challenge me.

One more quick example. My friend Elise recently moved away from Gamboula. Her husband took a second wife after having some 15 affairs and Elise left him and took her children with her. Technically, she isn't allowed to leave with her kids but she is frightened for their safety so they are with her. (She has 10.) Only 2 days after she left town her ex-husband had a bad motorbike accident, breaking his femur and doing incredible damage to his leg. After only 3 weeks in the hospital he left and headed for a small village in order to seek village medicine (which, by the way, after 4 months, is not working and he may never be able to walk again because of his stupidity). He has since filed charges against Elise and Clarisse for 'causing' his accident by magical means to prevent him from following after Elise. While it would have been a good use of magic the charges are false and how on earth do you prove that in a court of law. Could you imagine a black magic episode of CSI? Anyway, as long as her ex is hobbled, Elise is safe, though the military have come to warn her about the court case twice since she has moved. They won't proceed with the case until he can travel and the way he is going that won't be for a while.

You may think I am anti-village medicine but I am not. However, there are some things that work and some that don't and in the case of a broken femur I think traction and a hospital bed are better than herbs and rubs. I am also deeply concerned about women's rights and I am sure you will here more about this from me later.

Ange

Life turns upside down

2006-07-02T13:32:00.000-07:00

What is a reality in every big city weekly, is a rarity here in Central Africa. Yesterday we were hit with the sad news that Constant, the head African of our agroforestry program was involved in a head on collision in a village south of here. Constant was driving the centre's landcruiser truck while the other was a car. They were both approaching the top of a blind hill from opposite directions at high speeds when they hit and two people in the car were killed along with a three year old boy who was riding in the back of the agri-truck. To make things even worse, the two dead are the secretary of the province of Berberati and the vice-Mayor of Berberati, who also happens to be the younger brother of a recent presidential candidate and minister in the government. There are four other people seriously injured and in our mission hospital, including a pregnant woman. We are all in a state of shock and we are unsure as to what the final outcome of this tragedy will be. Constant is generally a good driver, if not a little fast, but I know he must be beside himself right now knowing that his vehicle was involved in the deaths of three people.

Not unlike the United States, lawsuits are common here and we are bracing for what could be an expensive battle with the families of these very important men. One of the men has left behind four wives and numerous children. The judicial system is very corrupt and we are hoping for the best but won't be surprised by the worst. What this means for our programs here we are unsure. Our work here will be unaffected but we are concerned about the mission as a whole. We are asking for prayer from all our readers. Please pray for Constant and for his family. He is in protective custody as it is likely that if he is free family members of the dead men may try to harm or kill him. Pray also for the impending court cases and for Roy who will likely be involved in much of the details as he is Constant's boss and the vehicle was a work vehicle. Pray that we would have a positive attitude as we handle the fallout from this tragedy and that we respond appropriately and with love.

Thank-you, Angela

The day I ate my genetic cousin.

2006-06-09T11:22:00.000-07:00

Sounds kind of gross, but ask any scientist and they will tell you that monkeys are our genetic cousins, and even though I swore to my mother that I would never eat one, when it's the only thing on the table and you are the honoured guest of a Baka pygmy you have relatively little choice. Okay, so we returned to Bamba last Sunday to plant trees with the Baka pygmies we met a few weeks earlier. The same town where I got in trouble for taking the picture of a monkey. I guess it isn't so bad if you eat one, only if you take it's picture! We arrived Sunday night at the Baka village to find that in the two weeks since we had been there they had put up a house for us to stay in and they had high hopes that we had come to be 'their white people'. This, I learned, meant that they were hoping we had come to live with them, to give them jobs, to provide food and clothes and school for them until the end of eternity, just like the Catholics are doing over in Cameroon. I was immediately sadden by their request and though I could understand their desire for such a plan it also seemed to me like just another form of enslavement. We suggested, that instead of us employing them, they employ themselves. Why garden for me, I asked them, when you could garden for yourselves and then you would be the owner of both the garden and all that was in it. No, no, no. That wasn't a good idea at all they said.

The Baka pygmies are a people between cultures fighting to find a place in both; not a very easy thing to do. They have a natural fear of cities and the Bantu people in them and they are often taken advantage of. However, if they could get over that fear, they would make nice profits selling their own produce in the town of Bamba, along with the sale of bush-meat. One of the many problems is that even though they are currently selling meat in the Bamba market, they generally take that money and buy alcohol and cigarettes, not giving a thought to what they will eat next week. Working within a culture like this is very difficult and progress is very slow. There is a fine balance between helping out and causing dependency and I only know one or two missionaries who have succeeded at it. We have very little time left in CAR this time around so we are doing what we can. We planted 40 fruit trees in their village and started a small nursery with them. We also bought them 25 high quality oil palm trees that produce high amounts of the red palm oil that is high in Vitamin A. There is a severe shortage of oil palm in that area and it would make a good commercial product for the Baka. After spending the night on the floor of the mud house they constructed for us we spent the day eating fruit and planting trees before going back to Bamba, the mill town, where we spent the night in the church's guest room. Tuesday morning we went to visit another family of Baka on the West side of Bamba and were pleasantly surprised to see 2 simple mud houses surrounded by flowers planted all around and trees from the Bamba seminar. We again ate fruit and planted trees and visited in their garden that has a very rich and productive soil. They are very keen on planting a tree garden and are starting work on it tomorrow. Then we sat down and ate a meal of gozo and monkey. It is a very dark meat and tasted a lot like, well, meat. I am not a connoisseur of meat so that isn't saying much coming from me. I can't say I would want to eat it again but I was proud of myself for having tried it and feel initiated into the ranks of a 'real missionary'. Darren said it was pretty good tasting if not a bit oily, but he too wouldn't be bothered if he didn't eat it again!

On the garden side of things, everything is growing well with the rains in the nutrition garden. We are harvesting the Mung beans now, the first of the 17 plus varieties we have planted in the nutrition garden. From quite a small plot we have already harvested 3.765 kg and we will be picking one or two more times yet. It is turning out to be a very desirable bean for this area as it only took two months from planting to first harvest and total time from start to finish will only be 2 and a half months. It seems to tolerate wet and dry conditions and the bean itself requires very little cooking time which is essential here as everything is cooked over open fire. We are clearing space in the garden right now in order to plant a larger crop of mung beans to build up the number of seeds we have for distribution to all of the agroforestery cooperatives. We will also be giving a large amount to the nutrition centre to cook for the children there. The mung bean seeds are one of the 17 varieties of beans we brought back from Kenya last October for trials in the nutrition garden. It is very satisfying to find something that works here so quickly. We are also looking at replicating a red cow pea from Congo that I gave out to a group of women last Spring 2005, and received favourable reports about.

The nutrition garden is becoming quite a model of variety on a small piece of land. We have 5 different starch/root crops growing, beans, vegetables, bananas and peanuts on one hectare of land. In a year and half there will be lots of food available for the nutrition centre in terms of the root crops and bananas and this summer we will be able to give them a lot of beans. Things are happening and I am glad to be able to share the excitement with you all.

Till next time, Angela

Mail update

2006-05-24T09:48:00.000-07:00

Dear friends, I hope you read this quickly and then continue on the next blog I sent out this morning about the monkey...

Just a note to inform anyone out there who has a mailing address for us that is Yaounde, Cameroon. Please do not continue to use this address for mail. We found out TODAY that we are not supposed to recieve mail at this address. Why no one told us this before I do not know. If you want to know how to mail stuff to us please send us an e-mail to bossbugs@yahoo.ca.

Thanks for your help, Angela

Ask the monkey first....

2006-05-24T07:50:00.000-07:00

...before you take its picture. Well, maybe not the monkey so much as the monkey's owner. So the story goes something like this. I was recently in the village of Bamba, about 2 hours south of Gamboula, with Noel and Chrysler, the agroforesterie seminar teachers, and Josefine, a short-term Swedish missionary. Bamba is a town of about 3000 people on the edge of the rainforest and the town itself is almost solely supported by a large sawmill and the trade in smoked bush meat. We went down for 3 days (Darren stayed behind to work in Eden), and it was on day two of our visit that Josefine and I received our first Convocation in CAR. Not conviction, but convocation. This is like a summons to an government official's office when you have done something wrong.

Okay, so Josefine, Noel and I were haplessly wandering around Bamba Thursday afternoon around 5:00 when I spotted a monkey tied up outside someone's house. I asked Noel if he thought it was alright for Joesfine to take its picture and since we couldn't find anyone around to ask, he said no problem. So, without getting too close, Josefine snapped a picture on her digital camera and we were on our way. Friday afternoon we returned to Bamba after having planted trees in a nearby Baka pygmy village, only to hear that we had been summoned to the office of the Eau et Foret authority. These are the government guys in charge of water and forests and anything that happens to live in them. Actually we had been summoned that morning but we failed to receive their notice until the afternoon. Noel and the Evangelist we were staying with promptly went down to the office to ask forgiveness of the head guy for missing our 'appointment' and they were told what our grievous errors had been.

According to Mr. Eau et Foret, our first fault was that we did not ask the monkey's owner for permission to take the monkey's picture. I told the guys that since the owner wasn't around we should have asked the monkey if it was alright instead. So, yeah, I guess we were at fault. Our second, even larger fault, was that neither of us has the proper authorising papers to take pictures of any and all things in Central Africa. This was a new rule to me and all our immediate reactions was, oh, so the guy wants money!

Saturday morning at 8:00, under a heavy canopy of a rainforest downpour, we made our way on foot to the office of the eau et foret, and wouldn't you know but it was the same house as the monkey's. We entered the head guys office with our peace offering in tow (a lovely little fruit tree) and we proceeded to be chastised for our grievous error in photo etiquette. If I hadn't had been shivering with cold I might well have had to suck on a lemon to keep a ridiculous and inappropriate smile off of my face. The whole thing seemed so funny to me. I asked forgiveness for our sins and told him that we couldn't find anyone to ask permission and we had no idea it was the office of the eau et foret since they neglected to put a sign out front of the office. You can bet when I go back to Bamba next week there will be a sign up! I also told him how hard it is to be new in a country and to not know all the rules, especially when such rules do not exist in our own countries (Canada and Sweden). I even offered to erase the monkey's picture but he refused. We chatted him up for another 45 minutes until I concluded that perhaps the rule he mentioned does not apply to Joesfine and I since we technically are not tourists but rather residents and that we had already paid a hefty price for that very privilege. After giving him our tree offering we left without paying a dime.

Needless to say, Friday and Saturday we continued to joke about the monkey and the officer and I am not sure I have laughed that hard in a very long time. I was thankful that I contained myself enough not to say anything stupid to the eau et foret officer and that my Sango proved better than that of the officer, who grew up in Cameroon. I was more Central African than he was at that moment.

In fact, the whole time we spent in Bamba was one of the best times I have had here and was one of those occasions where you think to yourself, how can I possibly leave this place. Chrysler, Noel and I meshed together like we had been friends for a long time and it was one of the first times I have spent with Chrysler where the colour/culture barrier almost seemed non-existent. He didn't call me madam the entire time we were there. While I was happy to be home with Darren it was also a little like the week after coming home from summer camp, all the fun and excitement left behind in exchange for the daily grind. Not that there is much a daily grind feeling here but I think you know what I mean. In fact, it has been an excellent week in terms of work and Monday we had a chance to group ourselves together and plan the weeks work as we were forced inside due to rain.

Darren, Chrysler and I will be returning to Bamba on June 4 to work with two different groups of Baka pygmies who are interested in planting trees, especially improved oil palm. The red oil taken from the fruit of the oil palm is very high in Vitamin A and a rich source of oil. A Baptist evangelist lives and works among one group of Baka and he has started a school for the Baka children using the government curriculum. It is an impressive little school, just poles and a thatch roof but he is a dedicated, if not somewhat discouraged man. He receives next to no salary from the EEB church and is thinking about moving back to his own village where his wife and 12 kids live. I told him that he wasn't an evangelist so much as a missionary and that hard times are part of the course. We are helping him with trees and vegetable seeds but that is about as far as we can go with him. It seems to me that a denomination as old and established as the EEB here in CAR ought to be financing their own missionary campaigns. We shall see.

We are off to Berberati for the day tomorrow to look at our possible future work sight with a Central African NGO. The roads had been fairly calm but there have been two incidences in the last week so we remain cautious and only travel by night. It is a pain but is also just part of the routine of working here.

Better get going and pack for our day away. Remember, always ask the monkey before you take his picture, otherwise you might get in trouble!

The keys to my canoe

2006-05-02T09:55:00.000-07:00

Walking along the streets of Gamboula is a feast for the eyes. From the bright coloured outfits of the women, half-naked children running about, goats and sheep lying across the road and houses in all states of repair. However, if you look really close, you might notice the pineapple top hanging from someone's orange tree or the wad of rolled up leaves sitting above the door of someone's house. A village form of decoration you might think to yourself. But no, actually, this is the lock and key to your house, your protection against thieves stealing your ripening oranges. How can a rolled up wad of leaves possibly protect your garden, your fields, your home or your possessions from thieves? Because the belief is that the curse on those leaves is so strong that anyone stealing will drop dead as a result in no time at all. The point was driven home for Darren the other day when he went fishing with his friend Bruce. When they arrived at the river they came to two canoes sitting side by side. One, belonging to a missionary, was chained and locked to a tree. The other, belonging to Bruce, had a wad leaves sitting on the bow. This, Bruce pointed out, was his lock and key for his canoe, and a fundamental difference between Western and Central African thinking that affects every aspect of how we live and work here. Bruce, a church member, went on to explain that while he himself does not belief in the magic behind the leaves, everyone else does and so that keeps his boat safe which took many hours of hard work to make.

This belief is not just something from the old animist religious ways. In fact it is alive and well in the Christian church. Not so much that Christians here practice using leaves but they remain in the fear of those leaves. You see, while you can put leaves out to protect your things from thievery, the leaves can also be used as a means of thievery. My good friends sister, Anne, is a prime example. Anne is an active member of the Catholic church west of here but she recently came to Gamboula because of bandits in her village. She asked around for a piece of land to farm and was given some to which she promptly set to work clearing and turning over the soil. At about the time she was ready to plant the field, she arrived one day to find the garden littered with wads of leaves--medicine. The result being that she completely abandoned the garden and moved on to a field somewhere else. Why? Because the fear is that if she continue to farm that field harm would come to her and her children. The person to put the leaves in the field was likely the original owner who thought he could profit from someone else's labour, and he was right. The next field that Anne got resulted in the same thing and she is, to this day, without a garden. When I proposed that the church elders go to her garden and pray over it, thereby cleaning it of the evil curse on it, the idea was rejected. They will only come back and put more medicine in it.

Not surprisingly, this kind of thing only happens to Christians and in my view forms a kind of religious persecution here. If she had put a wad of leaves in her new garden at the start, no one would have dared counterattack with their own cursed leaves. Only Christians refrain from using this type of medicine and so they are prime targets for theft of all kinds. I am not a theologian and so have little comment as to what to do about the problem except to write things as I see them. It is however, a frustrating aspect of our work here and affects us as well. We have a lot of thievery problems in the nutrition garden that could easily be solved by hanging leaf wads around our fences. Not that I am suggesting this is what we do! Nor am I genuinely surprised that this is the way Satan is working against the church here. Reading the New Testament it is clear that we are to face trials of many kinds and things that test our faith and convictions. That doesn't mean that I am not angered when it happens in my neighbourhood and against my friends, many of whom work very hard only to have the fruits of their labour stolen from under them. My question is, how do I counsel them?

The other day we had an early morning call from one of the sentries who was unlocking the mission gates. One of the locks was stuffed with leaves and he was asking for bolt cutters to cut it off. Darren told him to just dig the leaves out to which he responded absolutely no way could he do that. When Darren arrived on scene he was informed that it was stuffed with medicine (cursed leaves) and so they couldn't touch it. Darren had to dig every last bit of leaves out of the lock before the sentry would put his key into the lock to unlock it, so powerful was the belief that he would die from touching the leaves. Darren, however, is alive and well and a testimony to the power of God.

I can neither deny nor agree with the power of such medicine. I can say that in many cases, fear can cause illness in and of itself. We have seen it at the hospital here many times where people come in very ill even though medically, there is nothing wrong with them. They are paralysed and diseased by their own fear. Can this be enough to kill someone, or can an evil curse on a pineapple top be enough to kill someone? I suppose if you believe in something strong enough it can do just that. Our witness is that the Holy Spirit is stronger and more powerful than any curse in heaven or on earth, including the death curse on the wad of leaves I picked up and threw away yesterday!

In other news, we are alive and well and working hard. The rainy season has been blessing us with wonderful rain and things are growing like weeds, including the weeds. The bean trial looks great, minus the soy beans which apparently are a favourite of goats. A side effect of our thievery problem in the garden is that people keep stealing the metal wire used to tie the pieces of woven fence matting together. This makes ample opportunity for goats to sneak into the garden where they find a restaurant menu of things for them to eat. The fight against goats is one that we will never win, but small victories would be nice. We plan on being in Bayanga June and July and I will try and be better at sending updates. Until next time, your thoughts are welcome and your prayers appreciated.

Angela

Please note that this address sends and receives e-mail via a satellite phone connection. All e-mails over 25 kb will be returned to sender unopened. Sorry for the inconvenience. For more updates on the Bosses, please log onto http://thebosses.blogspot.com

Questions from a college kid

2006-04-06T11:53:00.000-07:00

I recently wrote this in response to questions from a Christian college
student who is preparing to go to Kenya for a two-week missions trip. These
questions were part of a pre-field assignment. I thought my answers might
be of some small interest to my readers. In other news, we finally had rain
today and our bean field trials are up and growing and will most definitely
appreciate the rain. Because most of the Fulani have fled from our area due
to bandits, it is getting harder and harder to find beef for sale and the
price is increasing. This makes a perfect opportunity to distribute bean
seeds and to really preach the replacement value of beans for meat. Will
let you know how it goes.
The questionnaire:
My name is Angela and my husband Darren and I are missionaries in the
Central African Republic. Where are you working?: We are into the second
year of our two year term here. We live in a small town called Gamboula on
an old mission station first established by Swedish Baptist missionaries
nearly 60 years ago. While the village has no running water or electricity,
the mission station has 24 hour electricity thanks to a small hydro-electric
turbine built on the nearby river. Power is supplied to the 7 missionary
homes, a 125 bed hospital, bible school and nurses housing. We are very
close to the tropical rainforests of Congo and have a short dry season in
the winter months. When we are not here, we are ministering in the Bayanga
region of CAR, in the middle of the rainforest zone on the border with Congo
and Cameroon.
Who are you ministering to?: Through our skills as agriculturalists we
minister to a broad group of people. There are three people groups in CAR.
The Bantu's make up the majority of the population and can be subdivided
into more than 100 tribes and languages. The Fulani are a nomadic cattle
herding people with some Arab origins and are almost 100% Muslim. The third
group are the pygmy peoples who themselves can be split into different
language groups depending on which part of the forest you are in. Through
seminars and one to one teaching and visiting gardens we are able to meet
and have relationships with a variety of people. We also minister to
missionaries in the country helping them start good development projects
with the people to whom they minister. Do you have a targeted group you are
ministering to?: We do not have a specific target group although when we
are able to go south we specifically target the Aka pygmies. Our original
intent was to work specifically with this group but it worked out to the
contrary. How long have you been there?: We have been here 14 months so far.
What is the biggest lesson(s) you have learned in your time in Africa?: We
have learned a lot of lessons and learn something new everyday. I guess you
could say the biggest lesson I have learned is to keep on learning and never
think you 'know it all now'. The other lesson I have learned is that God
really does put you in places, He decides when you leave, how long you stay
and when it is time to go. Sometimes this produces anxiety but He really
does know best. What are your biggest challenges personally and in ministry
in Africa?: Africa is a very challenging place to live and our country in
particular. We are living in one of the bottom 15 countries on earth in
terms of poverty. We are ministering to some of the poorest of the poor and
while we are trying to help, the fact is that most of the people we work
with will always be poor and will always struggle and this is very hard to
come to terms with. We are constantly bombarded with requests for help, for
requests for work, we see needs everyday--they come right to our door. It
has been difficult and will always be difficult to not help everyone, it is
just impossible. Jesus promised us that the poor will always be with us and
so we do what we can. The best thing we can give is hope and encouragement.
The other challenge is learning a new language. We are in a French speaking
country though most of the people only speak Sango, a national tribal
language. I picked up the language inside
of 2 months but for Darren it has taken longer and is sometimes a source of
frustration. Challenges in our ministry are there as well and many stem
from the lack of funds to do the things you really want to do. It forces
you to be more creative, however. For us in particular, we do not have our
own vehicle so this limits where we can go and when. We also have trouble
with bandits that make certain roads unsafe for us to travel on. What is
one thing you would tell me before coming to Africa?: BE FLEXIBLE. I can't
stress it enough and the more flexible you are the less frustrated you will
be. Nothing is at is seems, everything has a spiritual root or a reason why
things are done in a particular way. Nothing ever goes as planned and this
is OKAY, as long as something happens. The key is flexibility. If you go
with the flow you won't have any problems. What can I do to be as effective
as possible during my stay in Africa?: To be as effective as possible,
besides being flexible, remember that you are the outsider. As much as you
don't want to be, you are. Before you even arrive, they will have
assumptions about you and ever so slowly you can break through these
assumptions. Remember that you don't know everything and neither do you
have the answers to everything. You are a learner and the people you will
meet will be happy to teach you things about the themselves as they see you
have an interest in their culture and their way of doing things. One thing
I learned the hard way is not to be too quick to share what things are like
'where you come from'. Often times this can be seen as you asserting that
how you do things is better than how they do them. What are things I could
do that would bless missionaries and national church leaders while in
Kenya?: Things you could do to help missionaries would be to not have too
many expectations upon arrival. Be grateful for everything, even if your
bathroom has cockroaches crawling around and you aren't quite sure what the
pastor served for dinner but you ate it anyway. Flexibility. Also, a
little encouragement goes a long way. Many missionaries are tired, they are
'given' out, they are stretched and are under enormous pressure from the
groups they minister too and from their churches back home. Encouragement
and prayer are wonderful tonics for hurting hearts. This is also a good
thing to do on behalf of the locals you meet. A large part of my job is
encouraging women who have nothing but their gardens, and when I go visit
their gardens, ask questions about what they are doing and praise the work
of their hands they are significantly lifted up. You don't know how far a
kind word can go in cultures where their skills and worth as people are
underappreciated. M and M's are also appreciated! Can you describe for me
what kind of group a missionary loves to have and what kind they hate to
have?: Not having hosted a group before I can only guess but I have been a
short termer and I have heard from missionaries who spent many years hosting
groups. Groups that get the most praise are the groups that are there to
serve, who are willing to do anything to help and don't have an agenda of
their own. Make all attempts to communicate with nationals on your own
before asking for the missionaries assistant in translating. Try to be
happy with your accommodations and food even if it isn't quite what you were
expecting. Above all, the most complaints come when groups are noisy and
disrespectful in public places. Remember that as a group you are a
reflection of the missionary and the missionary will be in that culture a
lot longer than you will be. What is something I can be praying for you
about over the next 6 months? We are in a very busy time of year, doing
lots of travelling, giving seminars on tree planting and gardening, etc.
Please pray that we have safety on the roads, that bandit activity is not a
threat and for good health while we are in many small villages.

The Bosses

thoughts on travel

New videos on CAR-must watch

The Fastest to Die - By Patrick Vinck and Phuong Pham | Foreign Policy

My time in Quebec

How do I show you love?

Time for good-byes

Having children isn’t hard; raising them is the difficult part

On the road of sorrows

The Importance of Earrings

An Update on Thankfulness

The Diplomat

Adoption

In Memorium

Regarding the Uncelebrated Holiday....

An uncelebrated holiday

Paying a debt of gratitude

Surprise

Quick Update from Kenya

Uganda, February 21-27, 2010

On our way to Teso

The Gamboula Nutrition Garden: An overview

World Food Day

More on malnutrition in CAR from MSF

Falling on cows, ultra-marathons and life on a bike

Getting hacked

Under the Gun-video on Northern CAR

IRIN Africa | Great Lakes | Central African Republic | CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Children at edge of survival, says UNICEF | Children Health & Nutrition Conflict | News Item

More disturbing news from CAR

Sharing rebels unwanted

Nearing the end of the journey

Made it in the paper

Goodbye Kansas

Missouri gold mine

On the road

Fulani refugee article

Influx of refugees creates silent emergency in eastern Cameroon

Quick Update

Starting from the Beginning

Family Reunion

The Passing of Mama Maggie

The Journey Home

A Little Solitude

Welcome to Makerere

Jeff and Christine's House

Kampala

Au Revoir

The Beauty of CAR

The Global Village

All wrapped up in cuteness

The Bosses, December 2008

An Update

'Do More Good'

Mama Maggi

You know summer is over when...

Back to School

An update on grad school

More questions than answers

A student again

Me and my mom

My one hundredth post

Ignored or Unknown?

Job Search, take 3

Helping the Cause

Job Search, take 2

Another Stop on the Journey

Final thoughts on leaving...

Trip Summary-Part Two

CAR Trip Summary-Part One

Giving Birth

Home and Away

Feasting on Goat

Feasting on Fruit

Yaounde

On the Road to CAR-I am human after all

Just found these cool pics....

ECHO's from the year gone by

Oh Canada!

Thanksgiving Day Kayaking

In the deep South