September 29th, 2016 by Rachel | Tags: Peace Corps | No Comments »
Social media has the power to make connections happen much further than simply corresponding with others through the internet. Social media can often shape one person’s life. It shaped my Peace Corps experience. A couple months before I left for Cameroon two years ago, as I was scrolling down my newsfeed, I came across a post by Mobility International USA featuring a video of a woman with disability who happen to come from Cameroon and was visiting the US for Young African Leadership Institute (YALI) as a Mandela Washington Fellow. Because Cameroon was the first word that caught my eyes, I immediately wrote a comment asking to get in touch with her. I wanted to get in touch with her only because I wanted to learn more about Cameroon and the situation of persons with disabilities in the country. Within a couple days, I was in touch with Hilda Bih.
In the first e-mail response, she wrote, “I work as a journalist in Cameroon, and with a group of women and girls with disabilities in the North West Region. We are still struggling to set it up to represent and empower women with disabilities. It’s called North West Forum for Women and I’m sure your experience will be very helpful to us. I have a few Peace Corps friends in Bamenda and it will be amazing if ever you choose to be posted there.”
We continued to correspond for the next several weeks. She checked on me to see how I was doing in preparing for the move to Cameroon. In another e-mail, she wrote, “I hope you are doing well and getting ready for your trip to Cameroon. I join you in hoping and praying that you will be posted to Bamenda, your help will be much appreciated, but I guess your office will decide where you are needed most.”
Hilda was then featured on NPR a few weeks later sharing her story of growing up with a disability in Cameroon and struggling to go to school. Her story on NPR, along with my correspondence with her and also, Ruth, my counterpart who I happened to connect via e-mail too prior to my two-year service, motivated me to express my interest in being posted in the Northwest.
Here I am now in Bamenda, Cameroon. I have been very fortunate to have a wonderful program manager at Peace Corps who went above and beyond my request. On my second day in Cameroon, I only requested to be in the region of Northwest so that I could have opportunities to do secondary projects with Hilda and other persons with disabilities. However, I have been placed right in the heart of Bamenda working directly with persons with disabilities including Hilda and also Ruth.
In the past two years, I’ve had the pleasure and privilege to speak regularly on one of Hilda’s weekly radio programs, Reaching Out to Persons with Disabilities, at CRTV (Cameroon Radio Television – Cameroon’s national radio program). We’ve spoken about various issues in the disability community in Cameroon including poverty, education, water access, transportation, employment, health, and legal rights.
Moreover, Hilda recently invited me to speak on another program called “Women on the Move.” It’s a weekly program featuring and interviewing one woman. I talked about my two-year Peace Corps service, my living with disability, and which woman served as my role model for women’s rights, which I of course named my maternal grandmother. It was a moment that had me really reflecting deeply about my life in the past two years.
