Darleen Guien approached Dollie co-founder Dorothy Miyake during their glass blowing class at Santa Monica College.  Darleen and her brother Paul were planning a reunion trip to Cameroon, Africa and were interested in taking dollies with them.  Over 40 years ago, Paul had been a Peace Corps volunteer for 2 years in Bafia, a small village in Cameroon.  At the time, Darleen was a student at CAL Berkeley and she decided to visit Paul in this far away country, and ended up taking a leave of absence from her studies to stay for 9 months! Even after all this time, Paul and Darleen have maintained close contact with the friends they made in Cameroon who now work at schools, hospitals, and medical mission centers.  Darleen’s story is as follows:
I have finally found some wifi that works so I will tell you what happened. My brother and I went to Bafia, the village where we lived 42 years ago. It is now a town but it is still desperately poor, as is the rest of the country. I have been going from heartache to heartache seeing how very little these people have.
Having clean drinking water is a problem, everyone seems to scrape by. There is some agriculture and there are many street vendors who sell all kinds of odd things. The taxis are actually small motorbikes (sometimes there are 5 people piled up on
one).
We were lucky to find our former landlord still alive in Bafia. He is 75 (3% of the population is over 60). Life expectancy is 54. 43% of the population is under 14. He was an educated man, economist, and the Director of the Budget of the Ministry of Finance for many years…and a man of great integrity which is rare here. Cameroon is known as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
We asked him how to proceed with the donations. He said many times donations to children are found on the marketplace where the parents try to sell them. So he strongly recommended 2 missions: the Catholic Mission and the Presbyterian
Hospital and Mission.
We first visited the Catholic Mission and had an audience with the Bishop of Bafia (I had never met a Bishop before!). We were accompanied by the director of the nursery school who is a nun. I gave half of the dollies and teddies to the Petite Section which has the youngest children. I told the teacher to keep them in the classroom for all the children to play with, as they have so few toys. Also the classes have about 50 children so I didn’t have enough to give one to each child. The teacher was overwhelmed by the gift and the children were visibly delighted.
The second mission was run by Cameroonian Presbyterians. There used to be American doctors there. It seems church donations are scarce now and the hospital is run by the state and is literally crumbling. The school is still run by the church. We met the Reverend and the Doctor of the hospital who brought us to the nursery school. The classes were crowded beyond belief. Even worse than the other school. I distributed the second half of the donations, and the teachers were in awe of how lovely the dollies and teddies are. There were 2 teachers in that classroom for the youngest. There are no real windows so the teachers will bring the toys home every night so they aren’t stolen. The other school was a compound with walls and locked storage. This school had neither.
I came out of these schools a bit weepy and emotional. I think these colorful toys will light up these children’s lives. They have so little. The Bishop, Reverend and especially the teachers thank you from the bottom of their hearts. I think the gifts are safe with them. After all, God is watching!
All the best,
Darleen (and Paul)