Back to work (temporarily)

A first glance at our calendar when we arrived home from Cameroon mid afternoon on Friday 25th told us that we were due to go on a five day road trip around Andalucía starting early the following Monday morning. However neither of us could face more travelling just yet so we opted for staying at home for the week to get a few things done. Sevilla and the Alhambra will still be there in a few weeks time and by then we might even have got over the disappointment of Arsenal blowing the Carling Cup Final.

The house resembled an office last week with the principal task being to build a website for my Dad - something completely new. While in Cameroon we both got slightly frustrated with slow progress on Dad's community health website and I rashly offered to build him a better one. This one is focused on his other main area of work, the provision of medical education in Africa. Dad has been acting as a consultant for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which has been funding a study on quality of medical schools in Sub-Saharan Africa and is currently in Johannesburg attending a conference on the subject.  He has many ideas and wants to use the website to progress the debate on getting quality standards in place.  So we've been sitting over our laptops learning how to build a site from scratch. Fortunately some great tools are available and the output is surprisingly good (if I say so myself).  I have sent the output off to Cameroon for approval and when Dad gets back from South Africa it should be ready to launch.  Meanwhile,  as well as acting as my technology consultant, Su has been building a new site for her coaching business.

A stethoscope over a map of Africa -
the image chosen for the Medical Education website

The challenge is to keep momentum going on the projects we have got involved with in Africa and to continue to contribute remotely from Europe.  As well as the websites, last week also brought an investment programme for upgrading Dad's Conference Centre ahead of two meetings being held there in the next month, which will be important for the reputation of the business.  We have also been looking at options for Dad's development site down by the beach which is to be built on using the new family property company that was established before we left Cameroon.

Having made progress on a few fronts with Dad's projects we called a halt to work on Friday morning and headed for lunch at La Seu in Denia where we raised a glass in remembrance of Mum, who passed away exactly 23 years ago on another Friday morning, back on 4 March 1988.  She always encouraged me to learn about Cameroon so the work we have been doing is very much with her memory in mind.

Cameroon album

We had a great trip to Cameroon.  It was very relaxing apart from the climb to the summit of Mount Cameroon and great to spend some time with Dad and the rest of the family.  Grace and Bisi looked after us superbly and the staff at the house were brilliant as usual - the ever-smiling Mr Zachs and Aya at the house and Valentine and Mbella behind the wheel on Cameroon's challenging roads.

As usual the country delights and frustrates at the same time and as we left people are speculating about whether the revolutions in the north Africa will spread further south and spell the end of the 28-year rule of President Paul Biya.  The Government is nervous and putting out messages saying "why would anyone protest in a country as well run as this?".  Zero out of ten for self-awareness there - the country's potential is not being realised and lack of good leadership is largely responsible.

At the family level we have our issues too.  Dad has envisioned and started many projects but, especially at his age, needs more help than he has been getting recently.  I'm optimistic that we are starting to change that.  Again there is real potential and hopefully over the next year our major property development in Kribi will start and the nearby conference centre business will get on its feet.  We also have work to do on the internet front to get the site for Dad's foundation, Global Health Dialogue, running properly and to help him develop another webpage on the regulation of medical training, which remains an active area for him.  A new farm in the village and the successful reclaim through the courts of our palm tree plantation (ownership claimed by our tenant) are in process too.  Oil exploration is also going on in the village which could change its rural tranquility and have Dad swap his chief's cap for a JR Ewing 10 gallon hat!  It should be an interesting next year before we visit again.

Discretion prevents me commenting on some of the family politics that have been getting in the way of these projects, but suffice to say that life there is never dull.  As my sister Silo said, we need to find a good publisher for the book.  We have added some pictures to the blog entries and here is an album of additional photos of the places and people we met in Cameroon.

Cameroon top 30

The Last Day

As in October we visited our home village in Dibombari for a relative’s funeral which is culturally very important.  With an average life expectancy of just 46 (compared to over 80 in the UK) and huge extended families, funerals come around with stunning regularity.  They are highly visible as they are held outdoors and involve hundreds of people.  The Saturday burial can be preceded by a wake lasting for days and culminating in an all night vigil on the Friday. 

Dad went for the Friday wake-keeping while we followed the next morning just in time for the advertised 11am start. Being Africa we needn’t have rushed as we sat baking under a canopy, waiting for things to begin.  We saw the body of Ngondedi, the deceased, on display in the coffin.  She had been beautifully made up and dressed in white wedding-type dress.  The cost of this, the service, the flowers, the hiring of the tents, chairs, choir, and the provision of food and drinks for the guests is astronomical.  But people save all their lives for this Last Day – sadly instead of saving for health insurance that might delay it a good while.  The emphasis on having such a funeral plays a part in Africa’s many problems and seen through western eyes this expense looks absurd.  But this isn’t the west.

At precisely midday two men dressed in black smocks approached slowly but purposefully down the dusty street.  Being (high) noon it had the feel of a spaghetti western but of course they were the pastors clutching bibles.  Once they had performed a blessing, the now closed coffin was brought outside.  Then there were a number of tributes, including one by my Dad who spoke at some length (not unheard of) in the Douala language.  When I asked him later what he had said, he just said it was “the usual stuff”.  Some of the other speakers drew spontaneous outbursts of crying and wailing from the choir and from groups of women in their clan uniforms.  By 1pm we were very hot and the service adjourned to the church.  We skipped that bit and returned to our family house where Suzanne had a nap on the veranda and I had a chat for an hour with my uncle Emanuel under a tree just a few feet from where my grandparents (his parents) are buried. 

Soon Dad and Grace and my uncle Isac returned from church and took us to the VIP section of funeral reception (we may all be equal in death but while we are alive we’ll have a dedicated table, the best food and a plentiful supply of booze, thank you very much).  Some very good Douala food was washed down with a surprisingly drinkable carton of Spanish red wine.  Isac looked relaxed in Dad’s company having been worried earlier this week when the national TV channel ran a documentary about Dad’s life, which he assumed was an obituary!

My grandparents' graves next to the house in Dibombari

For many, funerals are the main reason to go back to the ancestral village. Because of that and because our house there is full of pictures of those no longer with us, such as Grandma, a visit to Dibombari always brings back memories for me.  Whatever the future holds for such rural villages we can be sure it will continue to fill the well of nostalgia.

Nasom

The Cameroon trip (or at least the first one of the year) is over and its time to say nasom (thanks in the local Douala language) for a great trip that has meant an awful lot to me. Having lived here (and I mean lived rather than visited, or come on holiday) for over a month I feel more at home than I ever have in Cameroon before and I've learned a lot. The chance to be with Dad has been fantastic and we have worked well together, having made progress on several fronts: the web-site, the ongoing management of the Global Health Dialogue foundation and conference centre and the future of the family property in Cameroon.  There is more to do in all these areas between now and when I return in the new year.

At Bisi's flat in Douala

I've also been able to spend some time with Bisi, my elder sister who I only met for the first time five years ago, and we have also got on really well. Over the last few weeks I've seen all my seven remaining brothers and sisters except one, seen many more relatives while visiting the family village and had the chance to catch up with friends in Douala, including those in the PwC office who took me out and gave me some good tax advice.

Zaks takes a short pause from work

Everyone has made me very welcome but I would like to say nasom especially to Grace (Dad's wife) for looking after me for most of my time here, Bisi for putting me up in Douala and Mr Zaks who works here at the house in Buea doing a variety of jobs and who is always smiling. He also has an uncanny ability to predict the rather volatile weather of Mount Cameroon.  For example, if it is sunny at dawn and it is either a Tuesday or Saturday it will rain later.

Nasom too, of course, to my colleagues at PwC London for supporting me in coming here and to Suzanne for agreeing to do without me for all this time. In 23 years together we have never before been apart for more than a week and even then only twice. I've missed her enormously but we have spoken once or twice a day by phone or skype. Indeed the ability to see each other on a skype video call has caused great excitement and now everyone here is learning to use it. A real highlight of the trip was seeing my 12 year old nephew Carl, who lives here, manage to get through to his mother in the USA by video call. I will never forget the look on her face - it was a beautiful moment.

But time to go home. The end of trip has also featured a terrible emotional low with the sad news last sunday of the sudden death from a stroke of one of our friends, Rob. We are all so shocked to lose such a great guy so early in life and our thoughts are with Kate and their three young children. We will always remember Rob especially for making us laugh - from his impression of the Sphinx on the floor of an Indian restaurant on my stag night and the Braveheart performance at Eugene's wedding, to his poetry and the blow-up crocodile races in our pool in Spain. So nasom to Rob for all those memories.

When I decided to come away for the year it was because I believed that you don't get too many second chances in life. For all the reasons above I'm so glad I did it.

Nasom.

Kribi - Cameroon in a Nutshell

I went down to Kribi for a couple of days with Dad and my cousin Lobe to have a look at the Global Health Dialogue Conference Centre that my Dad built and which was inaugurated two years ago on the occasion of his 80th birthday.

The International Dialogue Centre

While there we also inspected a development site at Bebamwe just to the north of the town that he owns and which we are considering developing into a complex of apartments to meet the demand primarily from the ex-pats arriving here.

Kribi beach

There is no doubt that the Kribi area in the south of Cameroon on the Atlantic coast offers real opportunities. It has beautiful white sand beaches and is surrounded on all other sides by lush tropical rain forest inhabited by pygmies and wildlife that, in many places like Bebamwe, extends to the beach itself. In addition it is the second busiest port after Douala and a new deep water port is being constructed as part of huge planned infrastructure developments. These developments include an aluminium plant to exploit the nearby bauxite reserves and a new power plant to add to the already operational gas pipeline from Chad that runs the length of the country to come out into the sea here. International banks and contractors are looking at Kribi with great interest and the beaches, abundant fresh seafood and national park rain forests offer good touristic opportunities.

But all is not well in paradise. There are already signs of pollution on the beaches, the electricity went off during the day for an average of five hours while we were there and for an area that promises high quality new infrastructure, the main road through the town is an embarrassment with its huge pot-holes. One might also ask how the huge developments that are planned are going to operate if the town can’t even provide electricity to meet current needs during the day? Power cuts are common enough here when the peak load occurs after dark but failing to power the town at 4pm in the afternoon in broad daylight on a sunny day really isn’t good enough.

The latest World Bank report says that Cameroon has great potential but significant challenges. Nowhere is this summed up better than Kribi where the harsh reality of poor planning and/or implementation is getting in the way of realising that potential. But if you like drinking beer and eating barbecued fish on the beach then its absolutely fine!

Dibombari - Ancestral Home

My family village is in Dibombari, an administrative region for around 50,000 people around 30k to the north of Douala and 7k along an un-tarred road with incredible ruts and potholes that is impassable at times in the wet season. The area contains a number of small rural villages of which ours, Bwataka, is one. Dad is the chief of Bwataka, as the nominated person from the “ruling” clan, which is known as Bona Lobe (sons of Lobe, the founder of the clan). This is a kind of sub-chieftancy to the main chief of the area, which in turn is part of a larger grouping of Douala speaking peoples known as Pongo. The various chiefs meet regularly to discuss matters of importance to the villages (one current topic being the recent discovery of oil!).

Dad - the Chief of Bwataka

The clan is believed to have originated from the Congo area but migrated here by sea a couple of centuries ago in search of new land and possibly to escape disease. They settled as part of the wave of people that now form the Douala tribal group here and my forefathers have been here ever since. The original Lobe (which is also my Dad’s name) was my great-great-great-grandfather. Surnames do not exist traditionally and identity is passed on orally, such that I was taught at a young age that I am Mukala, son of Lobe, son of Money, son of Ekosso, son of Ngube, son of Lobe. My Dad created the family surname, Monekosso, by combining the names of his father and grandfather and now most of the family uses it. On this trip while researching the family tree I now know three more generations of ancestors going back to a man called Pongo, for whom the local area was named.



Typical village view: across the street from our house


Bwataka remains the spiritual home of the family, despite the death of my Grandma four years ago at the age of 99. Like many African villages there is a Christian church but traditional healing and witchcraft are taken very seriously. Today we visited for a funeral - a very important cultural event for which people save for years. They are occasions when huge extended families come together and I sat under a tree with my older sisters Bisi and Tiki, watching the service and meeting large numbers of relatives, all of whom are incredibly welcoming to me.

Bwataka village cloth from which traditional clothing is made

The village has been a very special to me since Suzanne and I first came here just after my Mum died 22 years ago - half a lifetime ago now. There is sadness too because over the years many of the family have died including my brother Ngube, Grandma (also called Suzanne) and uncles George and Adolphus (the latter born in 1939 and named after Hitler, as my Grandfather was a big fan of the Germans who ran Cameroon before World War I!). But their memories live on in the pictures in the house and the graves that sit outside. Of my immediate relatives only my uncle Emmanuel remains at the age of nearly 70 and, as is customary, I presented him with a bottle of whisky.

Uncle Emmanuel and me

Many of the younger generations have drifted away to the cities - hence the family tree project - but it was good to see so many out in force today.

Web-site launched!

My first challenge from a work-perspective here has been to get the web-site live for Global Health Dialogue. The web-site is the vehicle for my Dad’s vision to spread good practice in community health around through a network of experts, local practitioners and community groups. I'm pleased to say that he was able to announce the launch while in South Africa to speak at a global conference on medical education standards. He has been working as an adviser to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on quality control for medical teaching around the continent and took the opportunity to introduce the web-site at the conference.

It has been quite an experience working with Dad and his team and some local young web designers to develop the functionality and manage the content we already have so that we are ready to start building the network. The site http://www.globalhealthdialogue.org/ is now live despite the difficulties of working with limited band-width connections, power cuts and ageing technology.

Some things are true everywhere though and I arrived to find a gap between the technology people who know little about health and the health people who know little about technology and web-sites. The plan was therefore to insert me (who knows little about health or technology!) to bridge the gap. The site is far from perfect but I think its a good start. Have a look and see what you think! The more difficult job of actually running a network and building a dialogue which can influence health outcomes on the ground begins now.

Global Health Dialogue

My Dad is a former minister of health here in Cameroon and also was regional director for the UN World Health Organisation for the whole of Africa for 10 years.  Now nearly 82 he is still travelling to speak at conferences and doing consultancy work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in relation to the quality of medical training in Africa.  He is shortly off to South Africa to speak at a conference and next month has another engagement in Uganda.

Father and son

Since leaving government a few years ago he has been running Global Health Dialogue to promote good practice in community health.  Until recently the work was based on production of regular newsletters in paper form but the aim now is to move into the digital age and start to spread ideas and build a community health network internationally that can share experiences.  We are in the process of working on a website to be launched shortly and this will be a vehicle for making available Dad's leading thinking in this area.
Cameroon has a number of health challenges, although it is one of the better-off and politically stable of African countries.  HIV/AIDS has taken its toll here and life expectancy at birth remains less than 46 years compared to around 80 years in the UK.  The world bank says that the only one of the Millenium Development Goals that Cameroon will achieve by 2015 is universal primary school education, which by implication means that targets for infant mortality and maternal health will not be met.  As I write this Cameroon is experiencing a significant Cholera epidemic in the north of the country which is beginning to spread south.  Local  community groups that we are in contact with don't have access to good information on what to do to prevent cholera and treat the disease if it arrives so GHD has a role to play in this sort of urgent situation, as well as in promoting change that will lead to longer term human development through improved health.  Micro insurance to buy health services is another current area that we are looking at.

One might argue that none of this sort of intervention should be necessary as it is the role of government but things aren't that simple here.  Despite years of international aid very little of it seems to trickle down to the population such that exactly 50 years after independence there has been no progress in many key areas of public health.  The idea now is to use the internet to foster communication between communities so that good practice spreads at grass roots level.

Moving mountains - to Mount Cameroon

One of the major reasons for the timing of my sabbatical was to have the chance to spend some time with my Dad over in Cameroon, central Africa.  Someone accurately described my week at home in Spain as "decompression".  It was good to have a buffer zone between two hectic weeks finalising work in London and coming to Cameroon where the pace of life is rather different (sometimes very little pace at all!).  So I've swapped the view of our beloved Segaria (see previous post) for my Dad's place in a town called Buea on the slopes of the regions largest mountain, Mount Fako or Mount Cameroon as it is internationally known. 

Dad's house in Buea

Behind the house on a clear morning one can see almost to the summit which is 4,100 above sea level and looking out downwards the view is of the estuaries of the Mongo and Wouri rivers.

The summit of Mt Cameroon

Both are spectacular on a clear day, which there aren't many of at this time of year - being the end of the rainy season.  It has been surprisingly cold (not by UK standards) and I've had a sweater on every day for the first week and the house can often be surrounded in clouds.  However it is great to be here and to have the opportunity to spend some time with Dad and other family and friends.  As well as finding some time to relax I will be helping him develop his organisation, Global Health Dialogue, which promotes good practice in community health around Africa in particular.