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.
