Greetings to you my friend. We go by the names Nathalie Yao (27y) & Ndefru Louie (33y). We are Africans and to be more précised, Cameroonians. We met each other in July 2018 and have been dating since then. By the time I met Nathalie, she was in school being trained to become a secondary school teacher and I was working as a Volunteer management for a Non-profit I founded which just began at that time receiving international volunteers for projects in our country.

If you had never heard about the country Cameroon before 2015, then you should have heard from the later part of the year 2016. Reason being that Cameroon has been engaged in an armed conflict now for over 4years and counting. Cameroon is one of the bilingual countries of the world as English and French are its official languages. This is a country made up of ten regions (states) and out of these ten regions, only two are English speaking which are the North West and South West Regions. The armed conflict which I earlier mentioned is what is today known as the Anglophone Crisis because the English speaking part of the country mentioned above wants to break away from the French part. It all began peacefully but the government responded with the use of arms and so separatist groups have been formed all over the English speaking part of the country to fight the government forces. You can imagine the results of this but just to name a few, thousands of people have died, people have been rendered homeless due to the burning of houses, schools have been shutdown and others burnt, businesses have closed down and others burnt, kidnappings here and there and ransom being asked, NGO’s have either had to relocate or close down and in my case, we had to close down since we could not afford the expenses involved with moving to any of the French speaking regions as life is more expenses there and remember I mentioned we were just at the level were our feet’s were gaining grounds.

I guess you are probably imagining how or what people now do in other to survive. I am the kind that always hopes for a better tomorrow and while I wait, I have been getting busy with whatever can put food on my table, pay my rents and bills and also to pay the bills, rents and upkeep of my fiancé as she is gaining experience teaching Biology which she studied in school in one of the English secondary schools in a town called Edea which is located in the Littoral region Cameroons economic capital one of the French speaking regions. Nathalie graduated in the month of August 2020 and we got engaged on her birthday 6th of August 2020. We would have loved to be married earlier than now but due to the armed conflict coupled with COVID – 19 and the fact that known of us has a regular salary, I have not been able to save for a wedding and in fact for the last 6 months, we have been able to survive on my savings. I know you are as well probably wondering why I said “I have not been able to save for a wedding” because I know the civilized way is that the man and woman all take up some of the wedding financial burden. In our Cameroonian context, your wife to be’s family expect you to handle all the financial burden except for cases were the ladies family is educated and understand that it is two families coming together to become one. But this is very rare and the ratio is like 2 in every 35 relationship.

In Cameroon and most African countries, part of the legal process to be married to a lady, the man would have to pay what we call a dowry. When a man and his family visits a lady’s family to express their interest in marrying their daughter, the lady’s family will later prepare a list of items to be bought and brought including some amount of money and all these items will be shared within the ladies uncles aunties etc. In most cases the price will be very high especially if the lady went to school or university or has a good job. You can begin to think of my case because Nathalie is educated and actually I have visited her family and they gave my own shock of the season.

I do not want to bypass the fact that this is a time when all attention is directed towards family and friends due to the impact of the on-going Corona Virus and I wish I didn’t have to get to this point. You will agree with me that when we are kids and begin to understand life as we grow, we want the best things in life and we want to live as comfortable as possible but then the realities of our days are a hindrance to some of these wonderful dreams that we all had. One is supposed to enter the “next stage of life” (being married) with at least some financial backup either at the bank or in assets but in our case, by the time I am done with my Traditional wedding, I will not be too different from a “beggar”. This is because Nathalie’s parents are not “well to do” and I have a list from them amounting to over $4500US that is $2100US as dowry and $2400US for items to be purchased. Again in our context, the day the man is presenting all the items requested by his in laws to be is the day the lady officially becomes his wife as tradition demands and so this is normally called the Traditional wedding and Nathalie and I plan to do the Traditional wedding and the civil wedding which grants us our marriage certificate. We plan on having only our closed friends and family members first of all due to COVID restrictions and secondly for financial reasons as we would rather direct funds towards the future of our marriage life. As earlier mentioned, it would have been awesome to get at least a honeymoon and all the other opportunities that newlyweds get but you will agree with me that rather than having all that and later get back into rents and the hardship that marriage life also has to offer, we would rather for now forgo all that pleasure and go for what matters.

If you will be willing to support us, we would love to be able to raise $25.600. we are going to have part of the funds directed towards our traditional wedding and the rest towards acquiring an apartment and if we are lucky enough to get more than what we ask, then it will be directed towards the renovation of the apartment we are looking at getting.