I spent 3 months volunteering for RUDEC. For the first part of my stay, I facilitated the building of a community water tap for a village with limited running water. For the second part of my stay, I developed a Community Health Education Initiative to promote improved hygiene practices and health. My time in Belo was both very rewarding and tremendous fun.

Belo, with its wonderful community and its gorgeous landscape, is the optimal location for a volunteer to pursue and fulfill his or her objectives.

About the Region and Kom People

Cameroon is an incredibly diverse country, in the ways of both its inhabitants and landscapes. I was located in the Anglophone Northwest region, which is predominantly Christian. The village in which I worked, Belo, was situated in the mountainous arena of the Kom people. The surrounding mountains comfortably nestle its inhabitants, their homes, farms, and livelihoods in a valley of tiny villages connected by an expansive network of hilly dirt pathways. The Kom people are a welcoming, merry group, with the woman being particularly gracious and high-spirited. To an outside observer, it seems that the tireless Kom woman single-handedly carries the weight of her family's survival on her back, providing one hundred percent of the childcare, washing, cooking, cleaning, and sustenance through laborious farm work. Men without jobs will laze around their compounds and order the children around like personal servants – those with jobs will spend their income on boozing and perhaps the occasional school fee, if the family is particularly wealthy. Of course I am over-exaggerating – I've heard there are plenty of good, hard-working Kom men, in addition to the development leaches. It's just that you won't actually encounter those men, because they are supposedly off somewhere working. One must suspend disbelief to accept their shadowy existence.

The villages are cozy, with scattered compounds of mud brick homes with thatched roofs and an occasional concrete-and-tin-roof dwelling. Many compounds near to the center of the villages, a crossing of roads informally entitled Three Corners, have electricity and some have running water. As one retreats further up into the mountains, compounds grow less developed and seemingly more poverty-stricken.

Children are as plentiful as palms and will never fail to throw you an excited, friendly greeting of “hello ubangna!” - “hello white one!” Knowing a few fundamental words of the local language is a must if you plan to tread comfortably in circles of locals, especially the elderly and the unschooled who might not speak a word of English; it is easy to learn the basics quickly.

About the Organization

RUDEC's organizational structure consists primarily of Joshua Chiamba, with a slightly scattered but benevolent vision, and his small army of ever-rotating volunteers. Chiamba runs several consistent programs, the largest being his orphan-sponsoring project. RUDEC sponsors 52 orphans in the surrounding area, siphoning funds from online donors to the children's school and medical fees. RUDEC also runs a small after-school program in which its sponsored orphans and any other interested child, can obtain extra tutoring. Most of the other projects that RUDEC runs are the short-term work of temporary volunteers.

The way RUDEC runs business starkly contrasts the order of the Cameroonian government and most of the other organizations around Cameroon – Chiamba is consistently and firmly committed to anti-corruption and transparency for both his volunteers and the online donors. Chiamba cannot be moved to lie or fib to a single human, especially if he is dealing with their money. The best example of this is in the orphan project – many successful orphan projects tell their donors that the money they donate monthly goes to one particular orphan. Some of these larger projects even fake “letters” from the “orphans” and provide donors with a generic picture of a hungry-looking child. Instead, the donor's money is distributed as necessary amongst a large pool of children – the most organizationally efficient method to sponsor orphans, but not the most appealing for donors. Chiamba, on the other hand, is extraordinarily careful in making sure that each donor's money goes directly to his or her sponsored child. He is committed to building legitimate relationships between child and sponsor, even though it costs him additional administration time.
Chiamba's unwillingness to take advantage of people will both frustrate you, from a business prospective, and make you endlessly grateful (because, after all, you did not pay the meaningless “administration fee” so often sought out from volunteers by most NGOs). While I was with RUDEC, I spent my time both working on the water project and on developing a community health education initiative.

About Being a Volunteer in Belo

There can be no town more perfectly designed for the satisfaction of an international volunteer than Belo. The beauty of the surrounding mountains and neatly ordered petite farms will stun you day after day. The Kom people of Cameroon are overly-welcoming and very grateful of your presence in their community. They are familiar with foreigners so will never gawk at your strange behavior; but the place is not so touristy that you will face price discrimination. In fact, there is next to no tourism in Cameroon, possibly due to the pains and expenses you must endure to obtain a visa, and most of the foreigners you meet are volunteering. This fosters the development of close relations between any and all long-term volunteers currently residing in country. You won't find yourself short of friend or a place to stay when visiting other regions throughout Cameroon.

The number of volunteers is disproportionately large in Belo. There is an incredibly lively volunteer community in Belo, probably hosting 7-12 volunteers on average. These come from the PeaceCorps, VSO, or on their own accord and work with RUDEC or another NGO in Belo, BERUDEP. The other volunteers in Belo were an added bonus to my stay – I learned a lot from each one of them and had people to bounce ideas off of.

In addition to spending time with volunteers, it was incredibly easy to become close friends with young locals, most of whom speak English comfortably.