Cultural Dimensions
Update: I am now writing this in English and Spanish! Bajen para leerlo en español! In addition, the friendly souris (mouse) and I are no longer on speaking terms after finding him in my luggage. I think my mosquito net at this point is not even for mosquitos but to create a border between my new nemesis.
On another note, you may remember from my last post that I spent my week in Kribi. We stayed at a beautiful hotel where the ocean was our backyard. The hotel had air conditioner and amazing water pressure! It's the little things that make my heart skip a beat here!
Well as mentioned, we met two different Bagyelis communities. The first community had been taken out of the rain forest (their home) by a company just two years ago. They seemed miserable and were having troubles with land ownership. The second group had moved out of the pure rainforest 30 years ago due to competition and complication between their father who was a traditional medicine man and the l medicine man of another group called the Bantus. This second group is now moving away because Kribi's new deep water port needs their land.
A common theme in our questions to the Bagyelis was culture conservation. In contrast, the first group simply asked us to help them get some land that was theirs while the other group did not ask us anything. A friend in our program later that day brought up how privileged it was for us to ask about culture when these peoples biggest worry was just having a stable home. How could they worry about their culture when they did not even have a place to call a permanent home and restart life at their own measures? For the Bagyelis this is a whole new world, they have to learn French (because at most only one person spoke) and even have to learn the sense of citizenship and what it even means to be a Cameroonian.
...continue reading "Cultural Dimensions/ Dimensiones de Cultura"