Meet my scholarship girls and English students!

Our first meeting ice-breaker was learning to flip pancakes : )

I've started working with four awesome young women from my town who were selected to receive scholarships by an small US-based organization started by a former Peace Corps Cameroon volunteer and her friend - A2Empowerment. They work with volunteers like me who are in country - I ran a local campaign to seek out deserving young ladies who are ambitious and financially struggling to stay in school. I had more than 30 girls get in all the application materials on time - I picked the ten strongest, and Anne and Anne in the US selected four here, and sixty overall for Cameroon. Telling the families their daughters had been selected from such a big pool was a thrill - seeing parents so proud of their daughters, and girls so proud of their own accomplishment, was humbling and really special to be part of. Definitely made the hours of organizing application papers and the painfully slow and disrupted scanning/uploading/sending process worth it!

It's a $60 scholarship, which is making the difference for their families, and sending one of the girls back to school several years and twin babies later. There was definitely some hesitation in believing that the scholarship will actually come through - most things seem not to work out here for one reason or another. And since this was the first time I've done a financial aid type project it felt a little funny after all the expectation that that's what we SHOULD be doing here as "whites" - but since I get to work with the girls and their families and be involved in the process, it feels less like charity that's just promoting a stereotype and more like a cool way to build relationships.

The best part is I get to do a whole program with them to talk about being a strong student, goals for the future, the importance of giving back, staying on track, managing money, and fun stuff like cooking, learning English, and doing art. Three of the girls were willing to talk a bit about themselves...

"My name is Kolacke Ngole Christelle, I am a young Cameroonian, age 20, who wants to tell you about her life. Until I was 12 I lived as a happy girl with my aunt and uncle in Douala. My aunt worked at a metal sponge factory, and I knew her like my maternal mother because my real mother had me at the age of 14, and my father disappeared, I never saw him. My aunt loved me - she said I brought her luck because as soon as she adopted me, she managed to conceive her own child after seven years of trying! But her husband my uncle did not, he said his money was going all towards me and not toward his own children. I knew that a real father could never treat his child this way, and this is when he started being very severe to me. He hit me at each mistake, deprived me of meals for at least two months - it was his lastborn who loved me and would save me part of her meal, which I ate hidden by the toilet. I spent days and nights crying. He told me to leave the house, so I left for a week, and it was my aunt who found me and brought me to my mother. That's when I finally met me father at age 13, and when I went to live with my grandparents in Nkongsamba, where I live now, he sent me to school for 2 years before he died. After, it was my grandmother who helped pay my schooling, but right now I'm not in school. Now I am the mother of twin girls, Carole and Clarence."  

"I am Dolgeline, I'm in Premiere D (second to last year of secondary school). I come from a family of seven kids, I'm the third. My dad has been sick for many years, today he suffers very seriously, and it's my mother who takes care of us and pays our school fees. She does small commerce - selling baton de manioc (sticks of boiled cassava tied in leaves and sold as a snack or compliment). When I get back from school I have to help her to make the batons, and then I go and sell them to have a bit of money to buy food. I really like school, I like science and math, and also English, but I have lots of trouble with this last one! I would love to be a very great nurse tomorrow, that is my most dear dream."

"My name is Iongi Kammogne Kevine, I was born in 1995. I'm in 2nd (third to final year of secondary school), and my parents are from the Bayangome tribe. My father is a motorcycle taxi driver, and my mother is a cleaner. I have an older sister who is in her final year of school - she takes Spanish - and two younger sisters. During vacations my mother sells beignets or bread, and we often help her selling peanuts too. I still have my two grandmothers, who are very sick, and my big sister has a lot of skin and heart problems that always have her at the hospital. So my parents usually don't have money to pay for school when the beginning of the year comes. At school I like Earth and Life Science, but math is a menace!"

One of the activities we did, called the Bridge Model, where you start on the left with all the influences of your current life , look toward the right side where all of the things you want in your future life are waiting, and then build a bridge of everything you need to get from one side to the other without falling into the sea of risks and problems that derail your progress like prostitution, tribalism, AIDS, and ignorance. One of the girls suggested honesty as a link on the bridge, and another girl argued passionately that honesty was the LAST value you should prioritize if you want to advance in life. Sounds crazy, but it was such a good insight into the society they live in - since there is usually no functional system of getting things done in an official, honorable way, lying, manipulating and cheating your way forward are widely accepted as the way it must be done. As Cameroon is one of the top most corrupt countries in the world, a phenomenon that is intimately woven into their daily lives, the girls said that if you are honest, you will be the only one, and will get nowhere. 

It's true what everyone says...teaching English is way harder than you imagine! Once we got past "head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes", it's been a good challenge trying to keep the group (they are the ones who requested the class) motivated as they ( and I!) see how complex and tedious language is.
Cameroon is a bi-lingual country with French and English, but few citizens speak both, which makes for an administrative nightmare with issues like work transfers, police check-points on the road, and trying to do things like get a passport in the French speaking main cities. Even Francophone and Anglophone school systems (among other systems) are totally different, so the country feels pretty crippled for its being divvied up that way by a post WWI treaty. Being here you can see why the Anglophone regions feel marginalized and exploited and why many of them want to secede and join Nigeria, their idolized, beloved, much more developed Anglophone neighbor.

Reading a list of encouraging words to practice pronunciation: "If at first you don't succeed, tree, tree, tree again!"

 All the art in the back was put together as a small art show by the Peace Corps volunteer I replace - made by both volunteers and Cameroonians.