I lost a loved one

He was a brother, a brother-in-law, a son, and a friend, but Ngwa Rene Che died a painful death last Thursday 1^st November after fighting tooth and nail to wave off the cold hands of death to no avail. The fallout of the 22-year-old’s death has hit the family and friends as hard as the news of his mother’s death barely four months earlier. As a foster father, I’m broken and felt a father’s worst pain. I can’t tell you how much I miss Rene already.

Rene Che, died just before 9 p.m. Thursday November 1^st 2012 in the comfort of her aunt’s Ndamukong street residence. He was the sixth of eight children whose been living with me for the past seven years.

He travelled to Bamenda on Wednesday 31^st to seek medical attention at the Mbingo Baptist hospital after all medical options in Yaounde were apparently failing. He was gone for some 24 hrs. in the company of his elder brother Albert when a disastrous phone call got my wife (his eldest sister) and the rest of the family screaming.

I first noticed Rene’s pain during his mother’s funeral four months earlier in Bamenda. Once back in Yaounde, we embarked on medical attention. He was on and off with it, mostly complaining of pains around his arms, waist and legs.

Two weeks ago, he was admitted for 10 days at the Yaounde General hospital wherein he was transfused up to four pints of blood. Barely a week after he left hospital, he took ill again and that’s when we decided he travelled to Bamenda for further treatment.

Rene as I knew him was a young man of very few words.  If at all he had to talk, he was soft spoken and a straight-to-the-point kind of person. He was bored by monotony and idleness such that vising friends or strolling around was one of his best past-times.

Having buried two loved ones in the same family in four months (five in five years), I think that some of our actions and our mistakes as humans don’t always justify or define who we are. Rene was a great guy and everyone can vouch for that.

While some of the doctors who attended to him thought he had some form of still’s disease, it was not confirmed whether his death was a direct retaliation with still’s disease or the complex relationship between stills disease and chronic anemia. We’ve had no account of the burning heat he had been subjected to of recent nor the connection between rain drops and his illness that seemed to calm him down each time they fell on his aching body.

It does not fix or justify or explain what happened or actually lead to his death. Even if it was, no one should in any way have to suffer such a tragedy. I’m sure we’ve all made mistakes, and if he’s made his it’s not a reason for things to have gone the way they did. As family, we are learning to focus on who he was as a person.

Rene was always well-liked within and beyond his family. Everybody wanted to stay with Rene. He was a friend with everybody and I am particularly satisfied with the time I spent with him. He was proactive, preemptive and dedicated to the tasks he performed.

While the family waits to learn more about his most seemingly untimely death, I will be grateful the day that the doctors will actually be able to tell me what went wrong with my son.

As a family, we chose to believe that the living God we all serve has a plan for all of us. We move on knowing that he is now resting at God’s bosom and we are going on bended knees to seek more God’s unceasing grace and to fight the shabby battle the devil seems to have waged against our beloved family.

Rene, may the Good Lord that brought you into this world, watch over your as you take up new responsibilities in his everlasting kingdom.

We love you.

Recurrent Abuse of Women - Follow-up

My dear friends, its very dangerous and if not pathetic when you are lost between mediocrity and stupidity. My second visit to the Police station was greeted with heavy insults from Mr. Tendo who insisted on ridiculing himself. Guess what? I kept calm until the police commissioner in charge called us in to take our statements a second time, something I already found strange. Knowing how gifted our system is at blowing little issues into frenzies, I did go along with my lawyer in case they stated trouble.

I recounted the whole story again, giving details of how I intervened in the whole setup to safe the life of woman. What did the complainer have to say? With nothing concrete to say, he said that my attitude that day only confirmed the fears he had nursed earlier on being that I might have a secrete affair with his wife. He wondered aloud why a man would opt to get involved in such risky situations without an interest to protect. This as he explained made him the more frustrated and furious. He questioned why I had to break into their privacy.

What privacy I could not tell when the entire neighborhood, three blocks from me was shaken by the woman’s violent cries and of course I did have an interest in the matter, that of making sure women don’t undergo undeserved suffering from irresponsible men like him. I noted with kin interest the manner in which the investigator was administering his (call it) questionnaire. The man in his statement admitted that he was too violent during the fight for no just reason.

I suggested that we should go and meet the wife who returned to hospital to get her own part of the story. The Commissioner accepted but warning me not to dictate the pace of the investigation and that he was capable of thinking. We met an all bandaged woman when we got to the hospital an hour later. Unfortunately for Mr. Tendo, his wife was pregnant. The Doctor said that the chances the baby would survive were almost zero but that they would do their best.

On my part, I was already wondering the type of pregnancy that could survive such brutality. We were again told at the end of such a tiresome day at the Police to come back in three days probably the time it will take the police to put two and two together.

I visited the woman in hospital again on my way back from the police station taking along some groceries and a get-well-soon bouquet of flowers. In tears, she told me she would file-in for a divorce. I told her it might not be the best solution but that she needed to make peace and talk it out with her husband when the tension boils down probably in the presence of a counselor. I told her that my lawyer would take the case further if she accepted. The truth was that I was ready to support him to any level.

On my way home, I reflected on the steps that the Police was willing to take given such levels of inhuman treatment of others. We just have to wait and see what happened during my next visit to the Police station. Just hang on….

Recurrent Abuse of Women

It was a Cameroonian musician who sang in pidgin English “between man and woman, no put your mob de…’ meaning that you should not voice an opinion in what concerns a husband and wife. How can I accept such a counsel when it has to do with a matter of life and death? I was served with convocation that requested me to report a police station for a matter of grave importance concerning me. Entering the Commissioner’s office I was greeted by a swollen faced Sophina, her angry husband bundled himself at a Conner of the office, looking at me with murderous eyes as I came in. I knew immediately what the matter was.

It all started when I heard Sophina my neighbor’s wife shouting at the top of her voice and disturbing the neighborhood, I could not help but get to the scene to know what the matter was especially as she sounded as if all the devils in hell were on her. Sophina was engaged in a deadly fight with her husband, plates, spoons and other household utensils were flying from one Conner of the house to the other. I went into action and separated them not without receiving a good dosage of the blows from both ends. The woman was bleeding on most parts of her body; there was blood all over her face that soiled my shirt bringing its short lifespan to a rapid end.

The husband – Mr Tendo while breathing like an athlete suffering from asthma was swearing in the grip of other neighbors who had come in that he was going to rip off my throat when he gets hold of me. Despising such a bully, and with the help of the other neighbors, I rushed the wife to hospital. She was hospitalized for two good days. The story went that the fight erupted when Sophina caught her husband red-handed in their matrimonial bed committing adultery- he was actually in bed with another woman.

Come to think of it, this man boldly served me with convocation from the Police. It was funny to note his desperate efforts to have me detained simply because I prevented him from killing his own wife. I settled down to face a beefy Commissioner of Police who was elated to receive me in his office at such a short notice. This was not the first time I witnessed such inhuman acts inflicted on a woman in my area. Some time back, a man had the wife seriously beaten almost to pulp all because she visited her elder brother without his consent. Another man got the wife beaten just because she accepted a gift of 25,000 FCFA ($50.00) from a high school mate (male).

I gave a statement and at the end of such a boring hearing, I went home determined to burry this recurrent cases of domestic violence against women by such belligerent husbands swarming my neighborhood to a final rest. I was asked to comeback three days later for a continuation of the case. 

I will keep you posted with all developments relating to this case as we move along.

Domestic Violence, From Theory to Practice

It was a crispy Friday afternoon in Yaounde, I was resource person to a three days seminar on domestic violence, and my presentation was entitled “Mitigating domestic violence, filling the gabs with genuine love” talking to a cross-section of women and men from development NGOs, I passed on my message, capacitating them to stand up and fight domestic violence stating from their respective homes and then expanding to the communities in which they found themselves.

My audience was attentive, imbibing all I had to say and asking questions where necessary. At the close of the day, I went home satisfied, knowing that I had imparted knowledge that would be replicated in different communities latter on and that my objective would have been on the way to realization. This constituted my reflections as I drove home that day counting the day as a blessed Friday.

The next Sunday morning, I was on my way back church, so happy to have listened to an eloquent pastor preach as if he had attended my lesson the Friday before. A dynamic Pastor, he handled the sermon so well, bringing out Biblical explanations of why domestic violence should not be condoned in the Christian community. Had I known (always Mr. Late) earlier on that this was going to be his theme; I would have invited my seminarians to come for filed work.

Reflecting over this as I slammed on the horn of my car inviting an ever sleepy security guard to open the gate, I noticed from my driver’s mirror that a woman was descending behind me. The gates were flunked open and I drove into the yard. I had barely settled down over a glass of orange juice when the guard came in to announce that a woman wanted to see me. Well I almost shouted on him for accepting visitors at such an hour given that I had earlier on given firm instructions that I don’t entertain visitors on Sundays immediately after Church service. He insisted that the woman was in pain and crying. This told me something way up and so I thus gave instructions for the woman to be shown in right away.

As unbelievable as it turned out to be, the woman was one of my seminarian the previous Friday, she actually tailed me all the way to my house. Her face was swollen and she had all the brushes one can imagine all over her body. She told me that she was on her way back from the hospital and decided to stop by to have a chat with me and to seek my advice on what options to take.

She recounted a pathetic story about a fight she was engaged in with her husband the previous day, in fact just a day after the seminar. She told me the fight erupted during a dispute over some money (her money for that matter) she had used to pay the child’s school fees without the husband’s consent. She told me that her reason for not informing her husband about her intensions was because she knew he would have collected the money and that would have been it while the child stayed on out of school for fees.

I did a few phone calls, calling a friend who’s a senior commissioner of police and another, a social welfare worker. When they arrived, she recounted her story and I told my friends to deal accordingly with the husband if it turns out that he had no justification (which I was sure he hadn’t) to put the wife under such pains.

I pleaded with my friends to make good use of the law to teach such a nasty husband that gone are the days when men still torture their wives physically for what ever reason. This happened barely a month after I handled my tenth case of domestic violence. I was more than determined to use the case at hand to sound a lasting warning to perpetual perpetrators of domestic violence against women that we are in an epoch in which such barbarism must end.

Receiving Stations Revisited

AS we are born into this world, our lives quickly become a gigantic episodic stage play such that at any one time, we play or assume a particular role. How successful we sail through the hurdles of life thus depends on how well we can play our roles along the line. For example, in a given learning process, there is the role of a speaker and that of the listener. You are either playing the role of the speaker or that of the learner. In school, you are either the teacher or a student, back at home; you are the father, mother or the child. You are either writing or reading what somebody wrote. You are a reader reading this article because I’ve been the writer. Role-playing is thus an integral part of human existence. A great teacher whom I admire – Thomas Emerson wrote, “It takes two to speak the truth, one to speak and the other to listen.” Orderly speaking and listening are indispensable components of any profitable conversation but then in speaking and listening, it takes what communicators will term a broadcasting station and a receiving station (emitter vs receptor). If there is going to be any progress or profitability in the communication process, it will be hinged on how well each of these terminals plays their assigned roles.

A broadcasting station that emits the wrong messages or the right messages in the wrong way is as good as no broadcasting station at all. It could rather constitute a danger to the growth of the receiving stations. In the same way, a wonderful broadcasting station with a good methodology, communication strategy and enriching messages would just be as good as a medical doctor in the cockpit of a jet bomber if there is no receiving station turned to the right channel to receive the information.

Receiving the right information is as important as acting upon the information to realize positive results other wise the learning process would have no meaning. Good information received should be able to set into motion the right internal transformational mechanisms that will lead to the right actions and modalities of attaining desirable results otherwise, it becomes another species of seeds falling on rocky grounds as Jesus’ parable of the Sower tells Christians.

Spanning the last two decades the world over, we lived in another Noah’s era with a gigantic flood enveloping us. Unlike that of Noah’s time, it’s been most devastating. HIV and AIDS is that flood I am talking about. The statistics we’ve seen and continue to see are frightening, according to global estimates by UNAIDS, 40 million people were living with HIV/AIDS at the end of 2001 while 33.3 million still live with it at the end of 2009 the world over following the November 2010 updates. Of this number, as much as 20.3 million in 2001 and 22.5 million in 2009 were found in Sub-Saharan Africa alone. 2.2 million in 2001 and 1.8 million in 2009 were newly infected with HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa. These figures indicate a drop but mask the local realities in terms of loss of dear ones.

Statistics as such confirm to us that the answer to any question demanding whether a cure is around the horizon remains a firm no. The drops noticed in the statistics credit the availability of antiretroviral programs ongoing. We would have loved to think that a cure is possible now or may be we keep dreaming of a future vaccine that will render AIDS history. Whatever our state of minds, the truth remains that HIV rages on. It has already devastated Africa. It's on a rampage in Eastern Europe, and it got out of control in parts of China and India. Asia as a whole is the only region apart from Sub-Saharan Africa today with more people living with HIV/AIDS than any other region on earth.

The HIV ‘rains’ are extremely heavy and so the AIDS floods are sweeping through all the corridors of the earth already. Despite the heavy presents of antiretrovirals and education programs, I maintain the fear that that before we have time to build a Noah-like ark, everything would have been watched away. Even if we did, there might not be the available pair of humans to inhabit the ark, as all would have been bed ridden by AIDS.

Being able to construct an accommodating ark and getting inside in time would depend on how much we have tuned our receiving stations to capture the instructions and messages from broadcasting stations. Noah succeeded to get all that was needed in his ark because he had tuned his receiving station to God’s broadcasting station. He was there to receive every bit of information and instruction that God gave him and most importantly, he was ready to act upon this information to produce the ark. That explains why he survived the devastating flood.

How many of us today have turned our receiving stations to the numerous stations broadcasting information on preventing HIV/AIDS? How many of us have that burning desire to assume the role of readers, listeners or students to learn what this mysterious disease is all about? We find ourselves fighting and enemy we don even know. It’s been over two decades in the laboratory and we are the more confused on the true nature of the HIV. Our receiving stations especially in the third world are tuned to other issues; we worry over politics, economics, militarism and false democracy. We cling to and hang around power; we worry over territorial boundaries while giving little attention to the fundamental aspects of our lives – health. Corruption, structural adjustment programs and poverty reduction strategy papers blind our visions and rob us of the little energy left that could have been focused on fighting this deadly disease.

It’s time we recognize that HIV/AIDS knows no boundaries. It infiltrates into the most secret sectors of countries and governments, it mingles within politics, obliterates power, aggravates the repercussions of war and crosses national and international boundaries unnoticed irrespective of what the frontier guards might think – why not HIV requires no passport or visa.

This therefore means that the ball can not remain only in the cot of Medics and opinion leaders. National governments and international organizations would just have their time and their work. They have to keep on conceiving, refining and publishing new strategies. More importantly, they need to broadcast the information. A greater part of the work lies in the hands of individual. People need to tune their receiving stations to receiving and accepting the right information. While the broadcasting stations have a responsibility to send out the right information capable of initiation the right action patterns, the receiving stations need to use this information gained to enact behavioral changes. Knowledge gained that is not put into effective use is useless.

When we listen to an obituary over the radio concerning a loved one, we scarcely question the authenticity of the announcement or the background of the announcer; we are carried away by grief and take them for their word, we belief in the power of the printed word. Is this the same scenario when an HIV/AIDS educator or resource person talks to us about the disease? I am afraid in most of the cases; it’s the other way round. We start questioning their moral authority, their educational background and justification. We find all excuses to disbelieve them especially when the picture presented clashes with our static mental stereotypes about the disease.

Situations have come up where in people question their HIV test results given to them by renowned medical doctors even when they know they had been involved in risky activities. Before going for the test, some had painted mental pictures about the test such that pre and post-test counseling could not wash away thus the reasons for their bewilderment when things turn the other way round. Going in for a test means coming to terms with the fact that the results would end up either positive or negative Facts don’t change only opinions do. When the results come out negative, you take future precautions and if it turns out positive, you learn how to cope with the situation. This side of it has been lightened up by the availability of antiretroviral drugs today. There is no need at such time to play the I – Can’t –Believe-This game when your results are announced because before the test, you were prepared to receive either of the two.

This is clearly another demonstration of what happens often when receiving stations don’t get the right signals from the broadcasting stations. The underlying truth is that apart from the dangers you might put others into, accepting or rejecting your test results when they turn out positive really will not change the fact that you are hence a living corps playing for time. This is the hard fact whether we like it or not.

With the presence of hundreds of broadcasting stations around the world today, staying clear of the HIV means that in practical terms, you become a receiving station that is tuned to receive the right information being broadcasted. You must act upon this information such that it modifies your behavior. Never say ‘I will act tomorrow’ for that one last sexual intercourse you have planned to have before changing is the one that might infect you with a full dose of the HIV. Should that happen, you know you have signed your own death warrant AIDS.

Receiving Stations are there because there are broadcasting stations, if you are not a receiving station, make sure you are broadcasting. If you are missing in action, then you might just be a sure candidate for the HIV.

OFLIC's Integrated Conservation Project in Bafut Subdivision

The Bunoh village is one of the five small villages that make up the Nchum Village Community in the Bafut Subdivision of the North West Region of Cameroon. Bunoh will hence have its place on the map after a research team from the Organization For Life Care (OFLIC) visited the village for a baseline study. The team was there to commence preliminary studies that could transform the village into a conservation and ecotourism boiling pot.

 

Arriving Bunoh, the team headed by OFLIC’s Executive Projects Director made contact with the community members and its leaders during a briefing session. During the session, the objective of the visit was clearly explained as well as its expected outcome and importance to the community as a whole. The impotence of the community contributing and actively participating in the project was equally explained. At the end of the session, their representatives were selected to join the research team to commence a two days field work that let them to visit the remnant of virgin forest within the community that has served as a sacred forest and its environs.

The laborious field visits took the team through very rough terrain, down steep slopes, across farmlands up steep slopes and along winding streams. In all, the team documented the rich biodiversity content of the demarcated region, wonderful touristic attractions including sacred shrines, magnificent waterfalls and pools.

On a global scale, it was resolved that the location needed an urgent conservation program to safe it from the pressures mounted on it by the community members. A huge chunk of the forest has been cut down for agricultural purposes and for the wood. The once huge population of great apes and other animal and bird species in the forest has been hunted down to near extinction and what is left of it is being chased out of its natural habitat.

The effects of climate change are evident within the forest as the consequence of deforestation has caused many of the streams to dry off.

Conclusively, the OFLIC team agreed with the community members to establish an integrated conservation program for the forest and its biodiversity that will integrate components of biodiversity reintroduction (especially the great apes including gorillas), ecotourism and agroforestry.

The demarcated area covers some 100 hectares that will hence serve as a community protected area. A team was setup to establish all community members who own pieces of land within the demarcated area so they can be reimbursed.

 

OFLIC is currently in the process of elaborating a project, contacting potential partners and fundraising for the project.

We use this forum to invite interested organizations and individuals to support us on this lofty and burdensome journey.

OFLIC's Edutainment programming

Crystal Family Inc.: Edutainment: "Edutainment Comments on OFLIC's Edutainment programming. We will broadcast a couple of episods in order to give you indept information on th..."