Meiganga - toujours le village de mon oncle

It has been a while since I have blogged so I have a few stories that aren’t so current but that I would really like to share with you all. To start with, I want to share my experiences of traveling up to Meiganga, the village in which my Uncle Dean served as a Peace Corps Volunteer nearly 40 years ago. My best friend from Peace Corps training, Claire Hutchinson, was posted to the very same town in which he had served. I knew I had to find time to make it up to visit her and hopefully an opportunity to carry out a project together. So this past summer we began planning and organizing a girl’s empowerment camp and scheduled it to take place over a 3 day weekend in November. The day I was getting ready to depart Manjo and begin the 3 day journey I received some terrible news, my Uncle Dean had suddenly passed away. The journey took on even more meaning than it had before, I knew his spirit would be traveling along with me and I decided to dedicate my time in Meiganga to honoring him and to serve with the energy and enthusiasm that he carried through life. Below is a short article I wrote for our Cameroon volunteer newsletter about the camp.
As Peace Corps Volunteers who work with youth in a variety of different capacities and from vastly differing backgrounds, many of us have found that Cameroonian youth are given few opportunities for critical analysis, self-reflection or creative expression. Gender inequalities create an even greater gap for the young women in our communities as most are forced to spend any free time they may have focusing on domestic work. These responsibilities often inhibit young women from looking past their current situation and dreaming of where their heart wants to lead them. This past November, myself, Claire Hutchinson and Allison Sander (community health pcv) put on a girl’s empowerment camp in their post of Meiganga situated in the Adamaoua Region near the border of the Central African Republic.
The camp consisted of 14 young women who had received scholarships from A2Empowerment, an NGO started by a former PCV and her friend in the states. The girls represent each of the educational institutions in Meiganga from the local women’s centers to the lycee classique(classical high school) as well as the lycee technique(technical high school). These young women between the ages of 15-21, many of whom are orphans, live within critical poverty and yet continue daily to try to improve their own lives and seek to better their future as well as those of their siblings or children by continuing their own education. The focus of the camp was to provide these girls with an environment that permitted them to concentrate on their own individual future and to reflect on important health topics. We covered such topics as HIV/AIDS, STIs and STDs, gender relationships and decision making. The camp included a panel discussion in which successful women from the community came to share their life stories and to encourage the young women to continue to positively construct a positive life for themselves and their families. After the 3 activity filled days the girls organized a soiree culturelle in which they shared a few sketches, songs and dances they had created together. Amazingly, we witnessing an evident growth in the girls’ confidence level from the first day they walked into the women’s center to the day they left the soiree with their camp certificates in hand. Each of these young women has a powerful life story, a story that includes a past marked with struggle but each of them posses’ tremendous inner courage and strength. Through the camp we hoped to empower these young women to recognize the strength and courage that exists within them and to allow those qualities to shine as they continue to create their own paths through life.

Camp photo!


Myself and one of our campers with her daughter


Myself, Allison and Claire


Les Soeurs Lumieres