Stories from the Field

Bokito Rural: When resistance is changed into commitment

Bokito Rural is a village located 200 km North West of Yaounde, the capital of the Republic of Cameroon. This village is under the administrative Division of Mbam and Inoubou in the Center Province of the country. It is one of the lucky villages in the country, with most of the roads tarred except for about one kilometre. When entering this village, you will not miss the locally constructed bridge which was repaired by the youth of the village, who collect fees from every vehicle crossing the bridge. Just after the bridge is the chief's compound, looking clean like most of the compounds in the village. The village is small. It is made up of three quarters, namely Niolomo, Doubodo and Ossombi.

People from Bokito are called the Yambassa people. This is a tribe that is considered to be hard working. This can be seen by the variety of cash and food crops they grow. An indigenous Cameroonian will not starve in Bokito Rural because there is enough to choose from: yams, maize, cocoyams, plantains, ndole, and almost all fruits that keep a person healthy and provide some income. Both men and women are engaged in food cropping, though not to the same extent.

When it comes to major income generating activities, Bokito is not very much different from many other Cameroonian village communities where is believed that the man is the breadwinner of the family. Cocoa farming, which is a very good source of income, is basically owned by the men. The women and children provide free labour to clean and harvest the cocoa, and only the man knows the market price and how the money is spent.

The people may be hard working but their ability is limited. While they have fertile land with which life seems satisfactory to them, they will not let a stranger or potential donor come and go without complaining about the lack of a school for their children, the dirty water they are drinking, and the absence of electricity, which can be found just 500 metres away. Though physically very near, electricity is still a far-fetched dream for them as they are still struggling with the basic necessity of life - potable water. The only infrastructure they are proud of is a church with a pastor who is very important to them, and who acts as their primary adviser and source of historical facts about the development of the village. His old age and education in those early days of colonization probably gave him this position.

Nobela, the mystical water source

If there is anything the Yambassa people of Bokito remember about their water sources, it is the mystical Nobela Source. This is a natural water source believed to be the reason behind the settlement in this place by their ancestors. No matter how prolonged the dry season may be, all other sources will dry up but not Nobela.

You may be thinking of a very large stream too voluminous to dry up, simply because of a prolonged dry season. This is not the case with Nobela. Rather, it is a small pond that will not reach to your knees if you step in it. It does not flow. The people come with small bowls they use to scoop the water and fill their large containers. As they say, no matter how many people come to collect water, nobody will return without water and Nobela will not dry up.

Like any standing water in a pond, it becomes dirty after many users have been there. Everybody knows this and everybody needs clean water. As a strategy to get clean water, some people go there at night and also as early as 5 a.m., when most of the dirt from the peak period (in the evening between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.) has settled down. The water is equally clean during the day but at this time the users are on their fields. Small children are the only ones able to fetch water during such periods but Nobela is not the right source for children during the day except when you do not value the life of your child.

I would not be surprised if you wonder why children are not allowed to use such a small water source in the afternoons. Just as we value water, so do the animals in the bush. The villagers tell stories of animals going there to drink from that same source because it seems to be the only source in the vicinity during harsh dry seasons. They narrate stories of encounters with snakes and other animals, even including lions. Some courageous people go there and climb on a big tree just to watch these unwanted users. Hunters take this as an opportunity to hunt. They either set traps or hide and wait to shoot the animals. You can now understand why children are not allowed to fetch water from this source in the afternoon.

Nobela is not the only natural source of water at Bokito Rural. There are three more and the quality is the same - polluted yet the people still drink it. The quality of water had kept some of the elite from coming home. As the villagers said: “Many of our elite do not come to the village because they cannot stand the quality of the water we have. Some do come but they buy as much bottled water as possible including bathing water. Some come and get infectious diseases and their children, who are not used to the water, die. In some cases, the deaths are attributed to witchcraft, which stops them from coming to the village again. Unfortunately for them, they still have to come because home is home. No matter what the problems in your village, you still need to come there. Therefore, the solution is not to run away.” If these people were wrong, the elite of the village who now enjoy city life would not have been coming back to the village. Some attempted to stay away but could not because of traditional rites they need to perform.

Why would someone abandon his village? According to the elite, they are disappointed with the villagers who are accused of witchcraft, disorganization, and not committed to development. They cannot see how a water supply project, which was installed in the village through their influence, should be allowed to crumble and the village development committee (VDC) created to collapse. Unfortunately, they do not have another home. The village is their home and will always remain their home because their culture doesn't permit any son or daughter to be buried outside the village.

Should the village people really be blamed? Are they as bad as the elite believe? How was the water supply project established? And, can the PAR team make a difference? These are some of the challenging questions we had in mind when working with the community from Bokito Rural.

The initial community meeting

Can you imagine yourself confident that you want to help some people, only to be rejected by the same people? This was our experience in Bokito Rural during the first encounter with the community members about the PAR project. You need to have patience, understanding and courage to continue. Then the end result can be completely different.

After making the contacts with those who matter in the village, such as the chief and the president of the village development committee (VDC), the PAR team in the company of the sub-director of CD in Yaounde, the divisional chief and one staff of CD Bafia, met with the Yambassa people of Bokito Rural to present the PAR project.

The meeting was well attended by women, men and children. Everybody was waiting to hear the good news about their abandoned project. We explained the objectives of the project and the villagers were all attentive and expecting to hear more. Only when we ended and asked for questions did we realize that people were expecting more than what we presented.

An internal elite, who is a councillor in the Bokito Rural Council, put up his hand and stood up. He said, “I am very sorry that you may have some good intentions but we are tired of hearing about the issue of water all the time. The population you have here could have been doubled if we had been talking about something else. The people are totally discouraged when it comes to water because many of your friends have been here, said the same things, and year in year out we still do not have water up to today. So I am afraid that you might have wasted your time.” The rest of the community members immediately clapped. We could now see a wide gap between those we met before and the community. Still in a confused state, the divisional chief of CD in Bafia stood up and retorted, trying to condemn the people, but the PAR team intervened and stopped him.

Looking around we found that everybody had banana trees behind their houses, which indicates the importance of this tree. We asked them, “If you are given a bunch of ripened bananas or suckers, which will you prefer?” The majority went for the suckers. “Why?” They gave reasons such as that suckers would provide more bananas and can be spread by distributing them. That was when we made the analogy to the objective of PAR, which is to teach them how to solve their problems and not to provide solutions. This relaxed them and allowed us to continue. The sub-director of CD added the Chinese saying, “When you give someone a fish, you feed him for a day but when you teach him how to fish, you feed him for life.”

Learning experiences

The community was requested to provide six persons with whom we could work. Before they could elect anybody, there were already six volunteers. They became our local research group (LRG), which continued the activities the following day. While planning for the following day, one of the LRG members, Mr. Botoko Joseph, swore that nothing would take place in the village before 2 p.m. The CD chief immediately responded condemning them for being ungrateful for somebody coming from far. We accepted the villagers’ time and promised to meet after 2 p.m. The CD chief could not understand our behaviour to accept almost anything from the villagers. We were not surprised by his reaction because that is the way most people have been working with communities.

These same people who told us that nothing would take place before 2 p.m. because everybody would be on their fields, were the very first people who requested to start at 10 a.m. after the first day of the training workshop. Eventually, some of the sessions started as early as 8 a.m., and on no occasion did the PAR team arrive at a meeting venue before other people. Instead of expecting things from us, these people now were offering us almost anything they could afford, which is their own way of saying thank you so much. The LRG members sacrificed a lot of time for the project. One interesting moment was when they had to participate in a workshop in another village. Information sent to them never arrived and when we got there to collect them, they were already at the market. When we explained what happened they immediately abandoned the market and hurried home to pick a few things so that we could move immediately. This was when we saw how committed these people were to the project. Generally, villagers would hardly sacrifice their market days like that.

The rapid change of mentality in the community was something everybody noticed. The CD chief now discovered why we were accepting almost anything. Mr. Ghamogha said that things may never be the same again when working with this community and cautioned his staff to be wise. Upon his return to Yaounde he immediately wrote to his minister requesting all CD field staff to be trained on the approach. The minister then wrote to PAID-WA, which promised the training for after the research had ended.

Many hands make work light

The PAR approach is not only participatory - involving community members - but also needs the support of agencies whose role should be well defined. You may soon find many people wanting to be part of it. Often some do not correctly interpret the objectives and have expectations that could be far out of place.

The process as we carried it out in Bokito Rural involved agencies, local village groups, and interested individuals. They all play an important role. Other parties involved were the Department of Community Development in Bafia and the CD Head Office in Yaounde.

The Department of CD has its headquarters in Yaounde, where the different departments in charge of planning and monitoring are located. They supervise the provincial services that control the divisional services.

As an entry point to many community water supply projects, we had to enter Bokito Rural through the CD head office, where we met with an elite and the sub-director who accompanied us. He was just interested in seeing what we were going to do, and how it would be different from what they had been doing in the villages. When we met the divisional chief of CD at Bafia, the divisional capital, he briefed us on the project and sent an engineer who worked on it to lead us into the village.

During this first day, the director from Yaounde got very interested and was always with us on all our trips. Sometimes we sent information to the village through him. At times he went there himself or telephoned his divisional chief to act on his behalf. This vital role in ensuring our activities was very important, as the village had no telephone and it was difficult for us to contact them. They could come to Bafia and phone but we could not get to them.

The local research group

The LRG established during the first encounter with the entire community soon became an important group in the village. They had gone ahead and made themselves into an association called ACHELBOR. The reason for the forming the association was to make sure that rules were created and members would respect the rules, otherwise people would attend one day and the next time they would not. They wanted only very committed members.

The group reorganized and made the only lady member among them the president. The former group leader became the secretary. Rules and regulations were developed to discipline themselves. In this way, they began to perform many activities in the village. Meetings were being held frequently to discuss the techniques and tools discussed with the PAR team, and even to apply some. The transect walk on the system was organized and carried out. They held meetings with the community and discussed activities. One of the activities was the clearing of the system pipeline so that the group could have easy access. The number of people that showed up was high and the whole distribution network abandoned many years ago was cleaned.

Working with your own people is not easy. They told us about other people trying to sabotage their work by saying that the group was not going to make any changes and that they meet and eat and are not doing anything for the village. At one point in time they were even called researchers for food. As the female president told us, they were not discouraged because the results of their work could not be seen immediately.

Another commonly used tool was household visits and discussions. The LRG explained to us that it yielded very good results. A meeting was to take place though attendance at previous ones had been low. They discussed how to improve the attendance and one option they came up with was to tell the chief to impose. After thinking about the issue of discussion and participation, they changed their mind and instead planned household visits. They formed two groups of two persons each and divided the village. They then went from house to house and discussed the importance of water, the PAR project and the rumours that were circulating about them. On the day of the meeting, almost the entire village came out and that was when the villagers discussed how behind their village was in development. It was in that meeting that they requested ACHELBOR to help organize a general assembly that would include the elite.

ACHELBOR took the challenge and organized the meeting and new members were elected into the bureau. Since ACHELBOR organized the meeting successfully, the people then trusted them and elected most of them into the bureau. This led to the death of ACHELBOR. Now it is the village development committee (VDC) that handles the activities of the PAR project.

Contact

In Cameroon, the Participatory Action Research was undertaken by PAID-WA (Pan African Institute for Development – West Africa) in Buea, Cameroon. The project is now being managed by Water and Sanitation Management Consultants (WSMC). For questions and remarks, please contact Andrew Tayong of WSMC.