RELUFA's work

Most of our blog has been about our own experience here living in Cameroon, along with pictures, for friends and family. But beyond simply living here, we spend a fair amount of our time working for a Cameroonian NGO network called RELUFA. Some of RELUFA's support comes from Joining Hands, a mission of the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA). So Ann and I are officially Presbyterian volunteers.

Christiana, a RELUFA coworker, has been reading some interesting books related to RELUFA's work lately, and has offered to loan some to me. I just finished reading one of them, a stern indictment of the international aid industry entitled The Lords of Poverty. The book ends with the hope that "it will become possible for people to rediscover ways to 'help' one another directly according to their needs and aspirations as they themselves define them, in line with priorities that they themselves have set, and guided by their own agendas." This seems to be very much in the spirit of the work of Joining Hands. If you're curious, you can read the Joining Hands mission statement here.

You can read about RELUFA's recent activities in the Cameroon section of the latest Joining Hands newsletter, prepared by our friend and coworker Christi Boyd, the Joining Hands Companionship Facilitator here in Cameroon. It describes:

• efforts to get the PCUSA to officially join the Publish What You Pay campaign, which works to get multinationals in the oil, gas and mining businesses to publish their financial transactions and contracts, and why this effort matters
• a review of the environmental impact of the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline project, and efforts to get the oil companies to meet their obligations to communities that have lost their drinking water as a result
  
• RELUFA's new fair trade program, with Partners for Just Trade
  
• the recent workshop on campaign organizing for peaceful social change (I missed most of this, daunted by the prospect of all that discussion and my own limited French, but now regret it)
  
• one Cameroonian fruit dryer's encounter with EU bureaucrats

These are just a few of the efforts that our work here supports, directly or indirectly. We've been working for RELUFA for almost a year now, writing articles and software and working on web design. Some of our work is for programs that didn't even get mentioned in this issue of the newsletter because there's so much other activity to report. And RELUFA is continuing to expand in the areas of fair trade and revenue transparency, and looking for opportunities to expand its microfinance program as well, all in the interest of its mission to alleviate hunger, poverty and social injustice in Cameroon.