Sorry for not writing for so long, but Internet access (along with electricity and running water) is a rare indulgence in Mamfe. There are only three computers with Internet access in town and service is incredibly slow on the few days there is power. However, know that I am still writing entries which will be posted when I'm back in Buea and will catch you up on my adventures. For now, here's a few highlights:
*I helped delivery a baby at a rural health center (no water, no lights, no paved roads) and now the baby is named Zara Egbe (Egbe after the two nurses who really did the delivery.)
*I took a two-hour, 3-person-on-a-bike motorcycle ride through a road (i.e. muddy roller coaster) that most Cameroonians won't dare travel on in the rainy season. Upon my arrival back in Mamfe the other volunteers commented that I was so muddy that my clothes and skin were the same color.
*I've become an expert on the quality of bushmeats, i.e. game that is killed in the area forests, such as porcupine, antelope, monkey and giant rat. My love of local food, willingness to eat anything, and my freakish tolerance for spiciness has won me a lot of fans.
*I've visited about 20 health centers and the crazinest clinician I've met was a doctor who was so scapel-happy that he did surgeries on 6% of his patients and averaged 10 a day. He claimed appendicitis was the 2nd most common illness he saw- no other provider put that in their top 10. Even worse, he kept all the organs and tumors he removed stuffed in buckets of formaldahyde under the bed in his little surgery room, and proudly showed them off to me.
*Two days ago I conducted amatuer dentistry on myself to removed my metal retainer on my lower teeth, which had come loose and was poking me. My mini- Swiss Army knife's knife and nail file have never been so handy.
*I caused sheer pandamonium in one village where, inexplicably, people became convinced that I was an albino. Children ran away from me or ran after me screaming "Al-be-no! Al-be-no!" all afternoon, even while I conducted interviews. The village elders seemed to agree with the children's assessment.
That's a bit for now, but I promise to write more soon. I'm leaving Mamfe in about 3 weeks, so I'll be coming back to the modern world then. So til that time, know that I'm alive and well (and getting fat on the copious amounts of white bread people make me eat) and enjoying Cameroon.
The escapades and musings of a five foot tall, twenty-something, accident-prone, magnet-for-misadventure pixie working in public health in the developing world. Brazil, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Cameroon, Kenya, South Africa, Senegal, Bangladesh, India, Ethiopia, Uganda, Mozambique, Zanzibar and Rwanda down; the rest of the world to go.
Zara Round the World by Zara Ahmed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at zararoundtheworld.blogspot.com.
This publication was supported under a cooperative agreement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) through the Association of Schools of Public Health (ASPH) Grant Number 5U36CD300430. The contents of this article are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of CDC or ASPH.
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