See you later Bamenda!

I can’t believe I am leaving Bamenda tomorrow morning. Excited to travel a bit here and see a different part of the country but it has been an emotional week of getting ready to leave.

Our last 3 days at SAJOCAH were amazing. Despite all the initial frustrations with adapting the wheelchair the experience and what I learnt at SAJOCAH has been priceless and so great. I think I am still processing my time there and can’t fully put into words what the SAJOCAH experience has taught me but overall I think it has been a balance of personal and professional growth and really I can’t ask for much more from a placement experience and the Cameroon experience has really been so much more than a placement!

On our final day at placement we walked into the devotion hall where everyone meets in the morning to a round of applause. Part of this applause was saying goodbye to us and wishing us a safe journey home, but a big part of that applause was for our friends and family at home. Part of the donations for SAJOCAH that you so graciously sent here with us ended up purchasing a 3000 litre water reserve tank for them. You, and I don’t think even I will ever fully know how much that means to them. Sr. Judith spoke that morning about how when they asked all of the people currently at SAJOCAH which is more important to them – light or water – the unanimous answer was they would sit in the dark if only there was consistent water. Well up until Wednesday there was not consistent water. Whenever the power goes out, and sometimes even when it isn’t, the water stops. This means no drinking water, no cooking water, no cleaning water. It’s hard to imagine a health care facility at home without water. We experienced this for a few days at SAJOCAH and when there is no water the children with visual impairments that board at SAJOCAH along with the caregivers of the clients/patients there have to trek for a bit down the bumpy, rocky, dirt road to get water and then carry it back. We never saw the exact location of where they get the water but Sr. Petra says it is not safe and she is always worried about people and the children that go down being injured. Now with the 3000 litre water reserve tank they won’t have to do this anymore. Now rain water will collect (up to 3000 litres of it) which will happen often now that rainy season has begun and they will have water – always! SO THANK YOU! And thank you for allowing me to be the courier of such a great gift to the friends and family I have made here in Cameroon.  Let me tell you the tears started as soon as we walked in the door to hear them clapping. They also sang a thank you version of “If you’re happy and you know it” which we of course joined in with since we have so much to thank them for! Afterwards everyone walked to the on-property site of where the reserve tank was that Promise the engineer had spent all holiday Monday and Tuesday building a proper stand for it and positioning it securely. With all his hard work Promise presented the tank to Sara and I (to you!) and then we presented it to SAJOCAH! And the tears were of course still flowing – such an overwhelming experience of emotions and it was not even 9am yet. The remainder of the donations for SAJOCAH will be going towards supplies and resources needed for Sam and Promise to continue wheelchair adaptations that are so needed here. So for the remainder of the day we continued some work with the clients, ate a wonderful lunch with Sylvain, Karlien and Promise, gave a workshop on safe positioning and handling techniques for the mothers of the children there, met with Sr. Petra for a feedback session, to talk about our overall SAJOCAH experience and pass off our treatment plans so parts of them can hopefully be continued, and then said our goodbyes. All were perfect endings to a great day. But probably the best ending was when Sr. Judith said goodbye to me. She told me that I am now a part of the SAJOCAH family, and that they are a part of me – she could not have said it any better.

Yesterday Sara ran an art therapy workshop at the BCCSDR that I heard (and know) went really well! She has worked so hard on it the entire time we have been here and I hope she is as proud of herself as I am of her since I know she was pretty nervous leading up to it. Unfortunately I did not attend but Sara understood. Instead I finally got the opportunity to go and watch a goalball game. Well let me tell you goalball is an intense, physically and sensory demanding sport. The game I watched was played by people with visual impairments, but because everyone regardless of level of vision is blindfolded it is played around the world by anyone. The actual goalball is an almost nerfball like material that doesn’t bounce a lot but has bells inside of it. The object of the game is to roll the ball across the court into the other team’s net. Probably the biggest part of the game is defending your goal which requires some serious hearing skill so that you know what direction the ball is coming from, as well as how close it is to you so that you can get low to the ground to block it. This means sometimes diving to the sides so you are lying down to get as large of an area covered as possible. Spectators much stay silent during the play so that players can hear the ball, but so that they can also hear their teammates so they know where each other are and what their strategy is. That is a really rough spectators description of the game and I have read quite a bit about goalball during my stay here but I thought the spectators view was better than an instructional guide. I then had a nice lunch with Ruth and came back to the centre to finish up my draft proposal of a workshop program on inclusive sport. This was my big project for the centre and it took me a really long time to figure out exactly what the structure of such a program would or could  look like but I finally figured it out. So my proposal to the centre is regarding a travelling educational workshop to schools and mainstream sporting organizations in the Northwest Region of Cameroon about Inclusive Sport – what inclusion means, why it is important (and necessary), what inclusion in sport specifically means, and how sports and physical activities can become inclusive – might have taken me awhile to pull it all together but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and I look forward to hearing some feedback from Mr. Julius today. As a side part to this project I also put together a brief resource manual on Inclusion and Inclusive sport that can help guide the workshops, as well as be kept at the centre for organizations to refer to in the future. On behalf of the centre I also need to say a big THANK YOU here as well. The donations that went to the centre have been able to put together Sara’s art workshop as well as purchase a new laptop computer for the centre which was definitely needed as in the words of Mr. Julius – “all of the centres laptops are from WWII” and do not work what so ever. Running a Coordinating Centre for Research and Disability studies is pretty hard to do without a computer so they are extremely grateful that they will be able to continue effectively and efficiently making a difference in the lives of people with disabilities in the NWR, as well as in the community at large. The remainder of the BCCSDR donations will be going towards continued programming like follow-up workshops to Sara’s art therapy one, as well as an integrated kids camp they run a few times a year for children with and without disabilities.

So that brings us to today – our last official day in Bamenda. I’m looking forward to sitting down with Julius to go over our time here, having a nice dinner out (we think) and then going to Dallas Cabaret to finally experience some Cameroonian nightlife. Then we are up early tomorrow morning to take the bus to Limbe!