Wait, that was our last job! But, here’s a bit of the work of Peace Corps in Cameroon. At least our part of it.
Our literary class, kicked off earlier this month, has been great! We have about ten students who are very motivated and enthusiastic about the opportunity to improve their reading and writing skills. And we are very motivated and enthusiastic about this opportunity to really invest something of value in the lives of these women and men. We had at first thought to limit our class to women, since girls are usually the ones forced to leave school after basic education if parents can no longer afford fees for all of their children, or if extra help is needed at home. Women, we felt, had less opportunity to gain literacy, and as primary child care providers, also provided a point of entry to introduce the value of reading and writing to families. If kids see Mom leaving twice a week to learn to read and write, that makes it pretty important. And if Mom comes home and reads to her kids later, even better! But then we had two young men come into our classroom, and couldn’t think of turning them away from our “women’s literacy class.” So, then and there, we became an Adult Literacy Class. Having the chance twice a week to share something we love with people who just drink up everything we offer – and stay even after our time is officially over – keeps us really energized when our office jobs are not so busy.
Currently that isn’t a problem. Jack is continuing to teach computer literary at the Delegation for Basic Education, training inspectors for the primary school, and acting in the role of inspector himself as well. He’s also been working on updating operating systems and looking into the One Laptop Per Child program, which has some pilot programs already here in the Northwest, but not currently in Bamenda. Jack is also on the ICT (information communication technology) Committee and is working to increase the use of ICT in other Peace Corps sectors here.
Kiyomi’s sector has recently changed from Small Enterprise Development (SED – “sed”) to Community Economic Development (CED – “sed”), and she’ll be working on the CED Steering Committee to develop the new project plan for Cameroon. She finished an organizational assessment with her NGO in the fall and is working on a series of staff-led workshops to address the areas of weakness identified by the staff in the assessment.
Today was National Youth Day. Youth Day is the modernization of Empire Day, from back when Anglophone Cameroon was part of the British Cameroons. Somewhere around 1962, Cameroon decided that the youth of the country represented the future of the country, and what better replacement for Empire Day than a celebration of the youth of the newly formed nation? Technically “youth” is defined here as people ages 14-25, but presidential “youth” initiatives have included people up to age 40 or 45, and Youth Day celebrates all individuals in school, from nursery school up to technical training college. We got to sit in the grandstand with the governor (who was on time today) and watched a parade of all the schools in the area. The nursery schools were by far our favorite – knee-high children in school uniforms marching with their full souls in it, as only toddlers can do, knees up to their bellybuttons and arms swinging over their heads. The theme for this year is, “Youth and participation in the major accomplishments policy for an emerging Cameroon.” We don’t know what it means either. A generation full of so much energy and joy and adorableness as those nursery kids though, we figure, has to have good things in the years ahead of them.
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