Dr. Mrs FON Elizabeth FONONG: The African Woman is unique and has dynamic solutions to challenges

 Who is Dr. Mrs FON Elizabeth FONONG? 

My name is Dr FON FONONG Elizabeth and I am a medic who runs a programme with the intention of keeping families together and always happy dubbed – TESHO (Team Spirit Holistic). On this programme, I make families to understand their roles as team players for a successful game. I have co-authored a book with my husband titled 'A Great husband for a great wife' and we are working on another masterpiece which will released soonest possible 'RECONCILE? NO WAY!'. I have worked with the Public Health sector for years and I am presently the AGM of TEFON. 

What drives Dr. Mrs FON Elizabeth FONONG? 

Passion to reduce STRESS in Family and Work place relationships. When I started work in 1985 as a young medical doctor, HIV/AIDS was some scary new disease that we had to deal with. The first AIDS patient was a curiosity that drew all the doctors in our Laquintinie Hospital to take turns observing her. 

A fierce campaign was mounted in the media to educate the population on this new disease that was transmitted through unprotected sexual contact. All the stake holders were scared of this strange disease and the messages on the billboards and the media reflected this fact. The first messages were quite scary; “Beware AIDS kills!” 
Despite these scary messages, the stake holders witnessed an even scarier rise in the HIV numbers. 
As a doctor involved in educating the population on HIV prevention, I taught them the A,B,C messages conceived by WHO later on and distributed all over the world. We learnt to pass on the A,B,C of HIV prevention to the population and evaluation tests revealed that the population could parrot all the right answers at the end of our various workshops. 
Despite the fact that the population knew all the right answers on HIV prevention, the HIV numbers did not slow down appreciably as a reflection of this increased knowledge. 
That was when I started really talking and listening to the patients. Professionally, we were taught not to pry into the patients’ private lives. However, I noticed that when I gave them a listening ear, they had this yearning to tell me the story behind their HIV infections. In most cases they were so scared of stigmatization, discrimination and rejection by family members and colleagues that I was the only one they could confide in. As I listened to their stories of HIV in marriage, there was one common thread that answered the question my husband and I had been asking ourselves. The question was this: “why is it that almost everyone who has attended a workshop on HIV prevention, listened to a radio or TV message on HIV prevention can pass a written or oral examination on the subject but this knowledge is not translated into effective HIV prevention in their marriages or co-habiting relationships”? 
After hundreds of hours of brainstorming with friends, patients, married and unmarried people, we conceived the TESHO (Team Spirit Holistic) concept. We then tested the modules on a one to one basis with patients and other individuals. When we got positive feedback from those we had counselled using the TESHO program, we then decided to go public with it. News about TESHO has spread by word of mouth and we are in high demand in our town of Douala. After an introductory TESHO presentation, we ask the participants to indicate by writing down their names, phone numbers and signatures if they think that TESHO will meet their needs on HIV prevention. Over 90% of the participants sign up.

Who is your role model?

My late mother because she was able to get our dad, a real macho sub-Saharan to gladly pay school fees for all his children boys and girls at a time when girls hardly went to school. I saw how she would get our dad to spend money on his family with a smile. There were times our father would adamantly refuse to spend money on us but we the children would be surprised that the next morning he would sheepishly change his mind and give us what we needed according to his means. I used to wonder how she could do that without much fanfare but today I know its a question of excellent coaching skills.

 Where do you see yourself in the next five years?  

As a world ambassador for TESHO.

 What are the challenges of the African woman?

        - She is very strong and clever but she has let herself be dragged into a futile physical fight with the men over who is cleverer and more powerful than who.

-         The African woman does not know that emotional intelligence is more powerful than physical strength.

-          She does not know that she is intelligent enough to have a successful family life and a successful career. She is brainwashed into believing that it is either one or the other and when she chooses one, she immediately feels guilty for abandoning the other dream of hers.

-         She is looking for solutions to her challenges outside of Africa and from outside sources instead of looking inside her to conceive and implement her unique solutions that are context-appropriate just for her.

-         She needs to change her mind-set before she can achieve to her full potential.

 How do you unwind tension from work? 

        

         -    I Read a book,

-         I Put off the TV and have a 30 minutes conversation with my husband on family subjects,

-        I Converse with our children especially have a woman to woman talk with our daughter – thanks to whatsapp we can talk for hours.

What is your ICE Vision?

         - TESHO of course; teaching families to build healthy relationships with the skills that are easy and fun to learn and implement.

-    Make TESHO a household word and a household program for all families of all socio-economic and intellectual classes.

Any plans for the African Union? 

For African problems and challenges, we need to conceive, implement, monitor and propagate African context-appropriate solutions.

Should you be named the Minister of Women’s Empowerment and the Family, what wrong will you right with your vision?

Teach relationship building skills for the work place and the home in schools from the primary to the university level with age- appropriate manuals and books. These books and manuals have to be written by Africans who will incorporate in them what is best in our African culture.

What is your greatest influence?

Just being myself and living my TESHO Vision. This is my personal observation of our society. Like little children who believe in Santa Claus or father Christmas, young adults believe in living happily ever after in marriage. 

Just as little children have only a vague clue about where Father Christmas comes from, in the same way young adults have only a vague idea of how happy marriages come about. 
Come to think of it, many adults, even those in long term marriages are just going through the motions of being married. They do not know what it takes to live happy, exciting and fulfilling marriages. As a consequence, they cannot help their adult children attain that goal. 
When people get married, their deepest desire is to live happily ever after in their marriages. In many cases, a short time after the wedding, something horrible happens to their beautiful marriages and they are helpless to do anything about it. 
That was our conclusion when we started research on how to develop strategies that will foster faithfulness in marriages in order to avoid HIV. 
After interacting with young adults and with couples from all socioeconomic classes and cultures, we realized that there are certain facts that the society has ignored leading to sad consequences for everyone concerned. 
Marriage is one of the few professions that offer a license or certificate before the individual has learnt to perform the complicated task. With other professions, one has to go through lessons and a stiff test before that person is offered a license to perform the task. Many adults know that marriage is a complicated task but the society is not doing anything to prepare the young adults for this complicated task. 
The society views marriage as the couples’ private life. In the Western world, this inertia of the society to do anything about preparing young adults for marriage leads to an almost 50% divorce rate. In sub-Saharan Africa, we do not divorce like the Westerners but most couples stay in miserable marriages and seek solace outside the home leading to HIV and all the ills that follow in the wake of a marriage or co-habiting relationship gone sour. 
In sub-Saharan Africa, HIV in marriage is just the tip of the iceberg that tells the society that all is not well with our marriages. The other fall-outs are delinquent street children, increased crime, psychosomatic illnesses and depression for those who decide to stay in the marriage despite the misery. 
The stake holders in HIV control programs have shifted their emphasis from HIV prevention to provision of antiretrovirals to those who are infected. They have made giant strides by providing more and more PLWHA with antiretrovirals which is commendable. 
However studies carried out between 1996 – 2005 show that 42% of all new HIV infections in Uganda occurred in the married or cohabiting couples. Dr David Apuuli Kihumuro head of the Ugandan AIDS Commission (UAC) had this to say “There have been great strides in providing antiretrovirals to Ugandans but when we see the number of new infections in married or cohabiting couples, here is a changed face of the epidemic. Here is evidence that we have to emphasize different areas of prevention from what we emphasized in the 1990s. For every 02 people placed on ARV therapy, 05 others will contract HIV”. 
TESHO is an answer to the problems that couples have been grappling with for a long time. Problems occur in marriage because young adults have not learnt to build team spirit in their relationships. 
They have not learnt because no one has taught them. No one has taught them because no one knows or even if they know, they consider marriage the couple’s private business. 
It is time the society wakes up to realise that they have to do something to help married or cohabiting couples find harmony in their marriages in order to avoid HIV and other marital ills. 
If the society does not act, many a marriage that started off in “love land” will end up in “coldest Siberia”, the land of of no return.

What is your ICE (Inspire, Celebrate and Empower) inspiration?

The African woman is not aware of the fact that she is so beautiful, powerful, phenomenal, assertive and talented. She inspires me to bring out the best in her so families and the world at large can benefit.

One thing you hate in girls and women today you will like to see adjusted.

           

Putting too much effort to beautify and show off the outside forgetting to develop what is inside of them. Letting themselves be brainwashed into believing that a pretty face with a scantily clad body will open doors for them.I would say that God in His infinite mercy revealed TESHO living to us. We started trying out some of the basic principles that make for a cordial relationship between husband and wife like effective listening and showing sympathy. It was not an overnight sort of thing. It took years with input from many sources for us to reach a stage where we can comfortably talk about TESHO living and effectively live TESHO in our family. 

The first TESHO workshop was given to the workers of my husband's company. He had given me the privilege of naming OUR company which proved that TESHO (we did not call it TESHO at that time) was bearing fruits in our life. I promptly named our company TEFON as in Thaddeus/Elizabeth FON our names. It is rare to see a sub-Saharan man involve his wife in his business so I felt like the most valued woman on earth. Since I was intimately involved in his business (he gave me a run-down of his day's activities each evening at dinner time), I was able to see that he had problems at the office. TEFON had grown so fast that the bonding he had had with the first few workers could not be repeated with all the new recruits and team spirit at the TEFON work place was at an all time low.
In addition, really listening to my HIV/TB patients made me realize that many patients lacked team spirit in their relationships at home. The tensions generated by family conflicts drove many of them to go out as a means of escape only to come back home with HIV. 
My husband and I started talking and brainstorming on how we could build effective team spirit in our workers at the office. Then it occurred to us that if we really wanted to build team spirit in our workers, we needed to help their spouses build team spirit with them right from home. That way, talking about team spirit to a worker who left home happy would be much easier. I gave my first BTSM (Building Team Spirit in the Marriage) workshop to the spouses of our employees and it was an immediate huge hit. The workers and their spouses could not stop talking about the new skills they had learned, skills that had drastically transformed their relationships from the routine and boring to the thrilling and exciting. They shared so many positive and uplifting testimonies with us that we were encouraged to go on doing research, giving more talks and writing out what we were learning. The more we gave presentations and listened to the worries, questions and feedback from the participants, the more we realized that marriage is not as easy as the society treats it. Marriage is not a matter of living happily ever after like it is portrayed in the romance novels. We were able to gather the challenges facing families into 15 modules that we dispensed according to the needs of the participants. That was when the name holistic replaced marriage. We realized that families, workers and just about everyone needs team spirit skills in order to build meaningful relationships at home, work place and the community.
From having problems in our marriage and learning from the mistakes we made, TESHO was born. My husband and I including our kids are still in the learning process but now that we have learnt to think and act as a winning family team, there are fewer tensions in our home.

How is TESHO fighting against gender-based Violence and what recommendations will this decade long concept propose to global citizens to concretely wipe out this vice robbing girls of a conduisive study environment?

Recognized in 2015 by the Cameroon Leadership Academy at the Eneo Human Resources Training centre of OMBE in Cameroon for training hundreds of youth and women across the country and continent to become useful to the society, Tesho intends to inspire many more youth and women with innovative programs that keep them creative, assertive and proactive.  

TESHO focuses on teaching team building skills to boys and girls, to men and women for healthy stress-free relationships in the home and work place. A woman alone cannot achieve a harmonious family or work place environment because she cannot live in a vacuum. In her daily interactions in the family and the work place, she is confronted with having to relate to men and women. They all need to know how to build healthier relationships. The very inspiring and motivational TESHO team will continue to device creative means of unleashing leadership potential in dynamic global citizens.  

When a marriage is not working, divorce or stay?

 The Tesho programme is the answer to family and relational problems. It teaches life skills to the family members so that stress, HIV and marital misery will be things of the past. Tesho gives long lasting solutions to couples so they can work things out and stop threatening the cohesion of the family unit. There are however exceptional cases whereby Tesho must step out of its love, unity and acceptance options to preserve life and the dignity of a human being.  If there is physical or mental violence, separate to go for counselling and then get back together to implement the new skills with regular guidance from the counselor.

What are the consequences if they decide to stay in a dysfunctional marriage despite everything?

         Stress with a capital S leading to stress-related illnesses for the spouses and children. The consequences of these stress-related illnesses can be deadly ranging from withdrawal, sleeplessness, anxiety, clinical depression, suicidal tendencies, battery, alcoholism, unfaithfulness with all its complications. The children living in a dysfunctional family situation also suffer from the same stress-related illnesses in addition to delinquent behavior and prostitution or abandoning the home to become street children. Working on fixing the marriage is the best choice for any right-thinking individual.

Any advice for the African woman?

African Woman, you are very clever and powerful. Do not compare yourself to other women or to the men. Believe in yourself. Believe in your uniqueness and look for unique solutions to your challenges that you can be proud of.