The first passage is from Fadimatou Isa of GHS Buea Town:

On Monday the 26th of May 2014, we started out internship. We made a together meeting at the pala-pala field where all of the students introduced themselves. Mme Antonia gave us some conditions to be of a good intern which goes thus:

-Asking when you need help.
-Be honest.

-Taking initiatives.

-Keep to time and making connections.

-Furthermore, we were to write out main goals for the internship which are as follows:

-C...

On May 24^th 2014, the YAN Class of 2014 had their graduation ceremony.

Of the 42 students we had 19 from the Government High School in Buea Town,  16 from the Bilingual Grammar School in Molyko and ...

On the 22^nd of May, YAN held their final classes which was also the final  day for any students including those in the Advanced class to finalize and finish their videos for full credit. I spent the majority of the day doing my ‘last minute’ meetings with several groups at BGS Molyko.

On Monday I had sent out invitations via Facebook and SMS/text message inviting a handful of my friends (international and Cameroonian) to join me for a ‘YAN Movie Night” where each...

Sensitization projects are the main thing that sets the Advanced class apart from the regular YAN class. This year we started the school year with 8 bring and motivated returning YAN graduates who initiated the first ever “Advanced YAN” class! By the middle of the second term we had lost a few students but in the final term a couple of them re-joined.

Henry making his vidual aid for his presentation

Depending on each individual, students either continued resreaching their topic f...

There is A LOT in store for YANers in the next couple of weeks – Both for those reading from home and those in Buea, Cameroon working as students/interns!

As you have read in the last post, our main p...

"Life is not about the destination, it’s about the journey."

This week is the last week before the students have their “Easter Break” or in other words, the break between the second and third term.

On Monday I was scheduled to meet with the High Birth Rate group at the cyber in Buea Town. They are the only group this year who has decided not to do an interview but instead film themselves discussing the topic in depth. To do this, they needed to do a lot more research so that they were able to discuss for a decent length of ...

For both of our club classes last week, one at BGS Molyko and the other at GHS Buea Town, we had a special guest join us. Maddy is on exchange from the United States through a study abroad program by Antioch University. She is studying at University of Buea for three months and has chosen to work with YAN until June. This week was her first of many.

After I introduced her she mostly observed the class structure, the students and myself. I had her come with me around to each group t...

On the down side, we may have lost 2 students (Shemilove and Deril) who have not showed up for a couple of weeks and who did not show up again today. But on the up side, all of the students who were present had their homework finished!! One by one I reviewed their storyboard and corrected their letters requesting an interview. Everything looked great. Students worked...

Both classes on Wednesday (Lycee Molyko and Buea Town) had 14 students attending. At first, things were a bit hectic and crazy… but that’s how it usually is. There had been no power again throughout Molyko and when I arrived early to set up for class the doors to my surprise were locked! I called and called both teachers whom I knew had keys – no one was available. I found another computer teacher who ...

1. What is gender quality and ho...

Britt was welcomed by 8 smiling faces ready for the days lesson on videography. I had written some critical thinking questions on the board relating to the Poverty Video we were watching from last year’s YA...

Last week I held two make up classes for the International Women’s Day lesson. Early Friday morning I met up with Walters (the YAN in country ‘go to’ guy) who helped me take photos and hold prizes at the GHS Buea Town general assembly.

For the essay contest we had three students tied for 2^nd place: Ekah Judith, Malange Clinton and Kfu Patience (pictured above) and one 1^st place, Yatuh Ketline (pictured below). Prizes comprised of a variety of...

Next Saturday, March 8^th is International Women’s Day and this week I created and fun and interactive curriculum focusing on this day.

I found a great series called “Why Women Count” which is 41 five minute short films about women all over the world. Each of the five films has struggles of women from around the world, how they overcame these struggles and how they are helping others – there are many forms of advocacy shown in each video which I am hoping the students will p...

For the last year or so, the government has installed a “Keep Buea Clean” day which is every Wednesday morning. On this morning, until noon, all businesses and shops are closed so that they can clean. Clean their shops, clean the area around their business and even the road in front of their shops. There are peop...

The students were extremely receptive to the PowerPoint presentation which gave a mini introduction to Photography. Students took notes, explored the new YAN cameras and asked questions during this time to be sure they understood. After everyone had completed their notes and there were no more questions, we...

After some delay and miscommunication with the printing and distribution of the YAN Club tshirts –
Youth Day 2014 was a major triumph!!!

In Cameroon, several holidays (including Youth Day) are celebrated with a very serious and organized march from the Presbyterian High School to Enap Junction up around an area called “Clarks Quarters” which is the area before Buea Town (the highest point and end point of Buea). On this particular day, students meet and organize...

Thursday was the second class of the Advanced YAN for the week. We started playing the same candy game I played with the regular YAN Club at Lycee Molyko and GHS Buea Town. I would give them one piece of candy that they cannot eat at the beginning of class. Then, throughout the class period, they have opportunities to earn more candy (following directions, behaving, staying on task, etc) or they can lose their candy (by misbehaving, going onto websites like Facebook, playing computer ga...

We had some challenges over the weekend creating Facebook accounts for the students.   For some reason, Facebook makes things complicated these days by requiring a phone number to create an account. Once you fill all the information for create an account, Facebook then sends a verification code to the cell phone number which then needs to be put onto the computer to activate...

Wednesday at Lycee could only have been more productive IF we had internet but since there was no internet (now marking one week) the students finished up all of their typing for the websites! This means, once the students are able to access internet, it will only take a few minutes of copying and pasting text to have their websites up to date.

Today, I wanted to start class out with a game because I realized that we don’t play too many games in class. I asked everyone...

This year, YAN welcomed back its students with a fun and interactive 'scavenger hunt'. The purpose was to not only allow the students to review what they had learned last year, but it also helped me evaluate where their strengths and weaknesses were. At first, there was only about 5 students who showed up and I had worried that I should have posted a reminder on the school's message board. But soon, anothe...

The Village: Rhumsiki (with pit stops in Mokolo, Kossehone, and Mogode)

My friend who had recently traveled here had recommended a guide for Megan and I for when we traveled. We had made arrangements while we were in Garoua and scheduled two days and one night in Rhumsiki hiking through the Mandara Mountains. We met our guide, Charles and our driver, Njida, Sunday afternoon to ask questions, get ourselves acquainted and discus details of the trip. We were scheduled to leave at 7am (whitem...

Welcome to the Northern Regions of Cameroon
“Bonne journee, bonne soiree, bonne annee, bonne vie!”
“Have a nice day, have a nice night, happy near year, have a nice life”

The next leg of my holidays was with Megan, a Canadian who will spend nearly one full year in Buea working for an NGO called Human IS Right. When she gets back to Canada, she will attend the very same school and study the same subject my amazing Aunty Patty has recently completed – International Develop...

The title of the blog post, Bumpy Dusty Roads, Mystical Twin Lakes, HOT DRY SUN, and Fulfulde, pretty much sums up everything I have been doing since my last days of teaching.

The first leg of my journey started in Douala. Douala is known to have the best night light in the entire country. Here you will find not only bars on every corner but also a slew of night clubs that are open until dawn and tons of cabarets that play some of the best music ever. Since we were going to Bange...

Friday’s make up class for the Lycee club was held at a cyber cafe for the first time this year! I decided a cyber would be best for two reasons. 1) There are only 3-4 working computers with internet in the computer lab and 2) The lab wasnt even available because GCE registration was still going on.

Therefore, I got permission from the Principle to take the YAN club off campus to the cyber I had reserved just down the road. As we were leaving, there were 5 advanced students who showed...

In Buea Town, the students use a cyber café that YAN rents out. By the time it was open for class, it was 10:30am. It’s good that we started a bit late though because most students didn’t show up until close...

Because of the GCE registration at Lycee, the YAN club spends the first half of their class period in the 'old computer room'. This makes things especially challenging for not only the children but also for me as the teacher. The children are learning computer skills while I am re-learning how to use the computers provided in that lab which are, to say the least, very old. To avoid any wasting of time,  I went to Lycee an hour early to get the ancient computers all set up and ready to g...

“What is Youth Advocacy Network?”

Over the weekend I had heard news that “Over twenty students at GHS Buea Town had collapsed!” I thought, what on earth could have made more than twenty students randomly collapse all around the same time? I realized that I have really spent a fair amount of time in Cameroon and Africa in general because the first thing that came to my head was… W...

Our interns here in Buea have spent the last four weeks doing amazing work at the three local NGOs at which they’ve been placed. Our superb seven—Tetsop, Ruth, Nelson, Eyole, Emmanuel, Lucia, and Josy—have created blogs and newsletters and facebook pages and twitter accounts, and all the while have learned how their local organizations function.  And now—this afternoon, in fact—their internships are coming to a close. We celebrated the event at Jabez Restaurant i...

We spent Monday morning with the YAN student interns working on descriptive and detailed writing, tools that are especially important as they have each been involved in newsletter or article writing, blog posts or website creation.  The first exercise paired students next to makeshift chalkboards (originally our closet doors)—one student received a piece of chalk and was directed to face the board, while the other received a random item and was directed to face away from the board.  The ob...

When we announced plans for the YAN internship in late April, most of our students immediately asked if they could be involved. Knowing that we only had openings for 7 interns—and also knowing that some of our younger students would probably struggle with the demands of a 4-week internship spent full-time in an office—we quickly scrambled to create an alternative internship for those not selected for the real deal. Our alternative plan finally came to fruition last Tuesday, w...

We are just finishing up week two of the four-week, YAN-sponsored internship program for local students.  So it’s about time you met the interns!

Lucia (GHS Buea Town) and Josiane (GHS Buea Town):

Hi, my name is Nanje Lucia Masare and I’m a student of GHS Buea Town and also a member of the YAN club.  I work with an organisation called ProClimate International.  This organisation is out to protect the environment from pollution and also to prot...

In the morning of Monday, June 3, with summer vacation barely 72 hours begun and YAN graduation just 48 hours into the past, we welcomed 7 of our students into our house at Pala Pala field. These students, among the strongest in all of our YAN classes, hailed from each of the three schools that we teach at. We had selected them based upon the strength of an application and their work in YAN classes to participate in the first ever YAN internship, whereby students were paired with...

A Graduation Organised by the YAN fellows in Cameroon, Southwest Region 

“It was on Saturday the 1^st of June, 2013 in Buea, precisely in the Buea Council Hall in Buea Town that the graduation of YAN students took place.  It started with the welcoming of guests and students after which we had some words of prayer from Sei Stella, a YAN student who schools in Government High School Buea Town.  Then we had an introduction from Miss Clara, our YAN teacher.  After that, Walters, ...

• At all of our schools, we’ve closed out our YAN classes for the year! Final classes at all of our schools was rather hectic, since events at each school at the end of the school year, combined with a national holiday, combined...

Throughout classes this year, I have told our students bits and pieces about life in Costa Rica (where I grew up).  Sometimes, I use this as a tactic for getting their attention—breaking into rapid Spanish achieves instant quiet in the classroom.  Other times, I use Costa Rica as a point of comparison—when at the health clinic with a group of students interviewing a nurse about malaria, I explained Costa Rica’s nationalized health care system (an almost inconceivable...

I’m sitting in my living room at 3 pm on a Thursday afternoon. Classes have been cancelled here in Cameroon due to Ascension Day, and so with no school, our Buea Town students have been hanging out in town all day. I did manage to corral a few of them earlier today to come to our house and do some YAN work, and so now five of our students are sitting with me around the table, editing videos on our computers (I coaxed them here with promises of popcorn, and now Clara is glaring ...

Two weeks ago, I delivered two letters to Principal Ayompe Haddassah in Limbe— the first was handwritten by one of our students, Nelson, and requested an appointment to interview her about education for his final video; the second was from Josh and me, reiterating Nelson’s request in type with the YAN logo stamped prominently in the upper right-hand corner.    We’ve finally figured out the power of an official looking letter...

Last week, Nelson and I walked into ...

Back in January, our students wrote descriptions of ‘how things are done in Cameroon,’ and then learned how to share these on the YAN Facebook page.  You may remember some of the topics—how to take a taxi, how to buy goods at the market, how to cook a traditional meal, how to prepare for a soccer game, how the education system works…

The beauty of these descriptions was that they gave students the opportunity to write authoritatively about activities they knew, ...

“We are students at GHS Buea Town, and are here to present a project about water pollution,” Kennedy said, gazing into the camera 4 feet in front of him and trying simultaneously to remember his lines but also look like he was reciting them fluidly and effortlessly. “Water pollution is a major problem in Buea today. People wash all sorts of things, like cars and clothing, in streams that run down from the mountain. Then, people who live downstream carry the polluted ...

Last week, Green Cameroon, an NGO located just down the street from us, put on ‘Green Week,’ a series of environmentally themed lectures, workshops, films, etc. Each day a different topic was addressed: water resources, pollution, agriculture, deforestation.  At the end of the week, participants were invited to join roundtable discussions on each topic with the aim of identifying relevant problems and proposing solutions to be shared with the local council. (We even ha...

Hello to our readers in the United States, Cameroon, and elsewhere! It’s been ages since our last post—over a month, I think, which is way too long—but now that the Easter break is over, we’re excited to be back in action here in Buea.

Clara and my first week back has proven to be a good one. Our neighbors and friends in Buea Town have been stopping us on the road to greet us all week long, and—especially for Clara, who has been out of Cameroon since early March—we’ve been...

Friday—March 8—marked International Women’s Day, an event that occurs worldwide to honor and bring special attention to the hard work of women. In Cameroon, International Women’s Day is a national holiday, so schools and offices were closed across the country, and events were held in each town to recognize women. In Buea, Women’s Day is an occasion for a “March Past”—quite literally, a militaristic march past a bandstand full of dignitaries. It was to be th...

I’m sitting on the porch this morning and looking up (as usual) at the summit of our magnificent mountain, which today is visible above a ring of clouds hovering at its base. It’s drizzling out—not a good sign for the impending rainy season—and it’s also surprisingly cold. Many people imagine West Africa as place with sweltering rainforests, and they wouldn’t be wrong. Just yesterday, I was trekking in Limbe through a mangrove forest, where the humidity and the temper...

First, to enlighten our readers who may not already know, let me present a definition: a podcast is an audio broadcast made available online for downloading onto a computer or an mp3 player, like an iPod. To tell the truth, I didn’t know very much about them either before this week, when it became my job to teach podcasting to my YAN students. Clara and I approached this unit with some trepidation: how, we wondered, were we going to be able to get all 90 of our YAN stude...

One of the many cool facts about Cameroon is that the country’s population includes hundreds of small tribes—so many that there are, according to recent estimates, over 250 distinct languages spoken here. The epicenter of this linguistic diversity is in the Northwest Province, several hundred kilometers north of Buea, where the name of each and every small town is frequently also the name of a tribe and of a distinct language. Though Buea (in the Southwest) is the ancestral h...

About a week ago, I got the following text message (without the capitalization, punctuation or embedded hyperlink): ‘Hi Clara, this is Kalika from Peace Corps.  I got your number a volunteer in Buea.  One of my relay members for the Race of Hope dropped out and we desperately need a replacement.  Want to run?’  The rest, as the say, is history.  With just a week to go before the race, I had to scramble to get the necessary paperwork together for registration…passport...

Monday, February 11^th, was Youth Day here in Cameroon.  In anticipation of the big day, schools largely ceased to hold regular classes for the entire week prior—instead, students rehearsed for concerts, practiced their dance performances, prepared for football (soccer) matches, dribbled basketballs, or simply milled about.  Despite the general chaos last week, we managed to entice an impressive number of our students away from the festive milieu to begin a unit on photog...

Visitors to Cameroon (and readers of our blog) probably know that it is hard to speak about Buea without talking about the huge mountain that towers 4,090 meters above it.  Mount Cameroon, the tallest mountain in West Africa, is actually a not-so-dormant volcano—it last erupted in 2000—and it is claimed that when the paramount chief of Buea dies, the mountain erupts. Luckily for us, the chief appeared to be in good health this weekend (at least as far as the mountain was conc...

Early on Sunday morning, the power went out in Buea.  Apparently, Sonel (the Cameroonian electricity company) was doing maintenance for the day in the entire South West region.  Rumor had it the lights would be back at 5 pm.  Just before 5, we had the first big rains of the year—usually, the rains don’t come with such intensity until mid March.  Most people I’ve talked to about the weather attribute the early arrival of the rainy season to climate change.  It’s bee...

A few days ago, Kelly, my ten-year-old neighbor, asked if I could help her with her science homework.  Usually, the visits we get from kids around the neighborhood are motivated by a love of our pile of scrap paper and (limited) marker assortment, plus the guarantee their artwork will get duck-taped to the wall.  It was a nice surprise when Kelly came knocking, school notebook in hand.  We sat down together at the table, and Kelly flipped to a page where she had copied down her assignment: ...

How do you grow a non-governmental organization? Identify local needs and local resources, and work to fulfill the former while engaging with the latter? Develop strategic objectives and a multi-year plan to see them through?

For the last several weeks, as we have reestablished YAN classes in Buea and felt confident in the teaching that we are engaged in at our 3 local schools, we have started to think about big questions like these. Organizational growth is an exciting thing to think about, b...

On Sunday evening, there was a path of glowing orange snaking its way down the dark slopes of Mount Cameroon, one of the largest active volcanoes in Africa.  Wikipedia will tell you that the native name for Mount Cameroon is Mongo ma Ndemi ("Mountain of Greatness"), but most people in Buea seem to refer to it simply as ‘The Mountain.’  Rising 4,040 meters (13,255 feet) from sea level to peak, the mountain is no small feature.   As the highest peak in West Africa, it attracts attention in ...

Like many teachers anxious about returning to school after a relaxing vacation, we were a bit worried about whether classes would go well this week. However, we have been gratified to find our students engaged and thoroughly excited to see us again and be back to work. At all of our schools, we’ve been greeted by big smiles and happy New Year wishes from students and staff alike. At Lycee Molyko, there was an audible moan of frustration when we told students that they had only 5 minutes of ...

We’re back in tropical Buea after spending the holidays in snowy New England!  It’s only been two and half weeks, but there are already new buildings under construction around town, a new picket fence by the side of the road, and new hit songs on the radio.  (Monday morning we woke up to a man singing ‘Gangnam Style’ to himself as he mixed cement for the new latrine going up next door.)  Apparently we changed a bit during these weeks away as well.   The first thing...

Several hundred kilometers northwest of Buea sits the dusty francophone city of Foumban. The city is the center of the Bamoun people, who have preserved centuries-old animist traditions and who produce some of the finest traditional masks, bronze work, cloth, and handicrafts in all of Africa. Foumban is also famous as the site of Nguon, one of the best-known cultural festivals in all of Cameroon. “Nguon” means “locust” in the Bamoun language, and the festival...

In our work for YAN, there are busy weeks, and there are slow weeks. This past week was decidedly one of the latter. The reason, as we explained in last week’s post, has to do with the high-stakes standardized exams that students must take here. Cameroon is divided into Anglophone and Francophone regions based upon how the country was divided by the British and French governments during the colonial era. In Anglophone Cameroon (our region), the education system roughly mirr...

This afternoon, an avocado fell on Josh’s head.  The avocado wasn’t immediately visible as it had rolled off into the dust, but the thud and subsequent shriek of surprise were hard to miss.   Josh’s lenses popped right out of his glasses, but he was otherwise unharmed. It was an unripe avocado, so it may be a few days before we can slice it up for lunch.

Avocado encounters aside, our week went according to plan (as much is this is possible in Cameroon).  Our stud...

November 15

8:30 pm—Sitting on the back porch of our house, listening to the chirping crickets and (for some probably religious reason) the distant sounds of people clapping in unison. Tomorrow, Clara and I head on vacation, our first so far (and probably our longest hiatus from class all year, apart from Christmas break). I’m excited to go—to take a break from Buea, to see something very different, to speak French, and to remember that I am here to experience something ...

How can we stop the persistent increase of malaria in Cameroon? What causes corruption? What traditional medicines can cure snakebites? How can Cameroonian culture be protected from the influences of modernity?

These questions, and many others, comprise the myriad searches our students have conducted using Google this past week, as they continue online research for their projects. Clara and I have also collected a fairly large database of news articles and PDF files about t...

Since arriving in Buea Town about two months ago (wow! It’s hard to believe it has been that long already), it has felt wonderful to be gradually welcomed into the local community. We now have a Mami in the market whom we know to go to whenever we want to buy tomatoes, okra, potatoes, or veggies, and another Mami we seek out for pineapples, coconuts, oranges, and “pears” (the local term for avocados; and by the way, “Mami” or “Auntie” is a term of respect for...

After 45 minutes of Google searches and Wikipedia pages, our students needed a few minutes to stretch and regroup before finishing up their research for the day.  I asked them to pull eyes away from computer screens and stand up.  Last week, we broke up work by playing speed ‘Simon Says’ (high schoolers look indignant when you explain the rules of this apparently childish game, but then find themselves racing to touch elbows or toes, hop up and down one foot or touch t...

Happy Halloween! Here in Buea, Cameroon, Halloween is not a holiday of much consequence—some people have heard of it, and our Peace Corps friend Nate has introduced to his Cameroonian neighbors the idea of eating candy and dressing up (albeit in clothes from his own closet). Coincidentally, the Muslim holiday of Eid Al-Kebir (or “Tabaski”) occurred last week. We have learned that Eid Al-Kebir commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son at God’s comman...

Any teacher will tell you that the best part of their job is interacting with students (clichéd, but true).   Last year when I was leading ten-day intensive biology and conservation courses with Ecology Project International, I lived and breathed my students—we spent every hour of the day together (and many hours of the night while walking the beaches of eastern Costa Rica looking for nesting leatherback sea turtles).   As a result, I very quickly came to know each of t...

Murphy’s Law, for those who have never heard of it, is the idea that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. I’m not actually sure who Murphy was, but I do recall hearing once of a pretty funny experiment that proved his law surprisingly true. At some point, a scientist organized thousands of schoolchildren across Great Britain to butter pieces of toast on one side and drop them from a height of 20 feet or so, and record whether the toast landed with the buttered or the ...

If you want to leave Buea, you have to go through Mile 17.   Marked only by a gas station and many rusty vans waiting to cram in just one more passenger before departing for any number of destinations around Cameroon, Mile 17 is nondescript but all-important.   From this crossroads, it’s an hour or two west to Douala (our city of arrival and site of my first Cameroonian gutter-pee), five hours southwest to the national capital, Yaounde, and half an hour south to coasta...

It was a weekend of rain, long walks in Buea (by Clara—she’d like to add that it was more like power walking for 15 miles behind Cameroonians in track suits), and lots of lying in bed with vague bouts of nausea (by me—I won the dubious honor of “who will be first to take a round of Cipro”). We also had a chance to participate in some excellent late-Saturday-night karaoke with our Peace Corps friend Nate and his Cameroonian friend Serge, who regularly transforms h...

The Government High School in Buea Town is a short walk from our house—after passing the burial ground (if you say cemetery, no one will understand you) and through the market (no okra just now, thank you Mami) we arrive at a hard packed soccer field and enter into the complex of cement classrooms and office buildings.  

On Tuesday morning, we were greeted not only by the usual rumbling of bulldozers working on the town water supply just outside the school premises, ...

We woke up early on Monday morning, ready for the chain of crowded taxis and overstuffed vans that would bring us to our first YAN class in Limbe. Upon arriving at the Government High School (GSS) an hour and a half later, we were met by ICT teacher Mr. Wilbur, immaculately outfitted in a pink shirt, pinstriped dress pants, and pointed black leather shoes. (Cameroonians like to look good at all times, especially in school.  And in spite of the extended rainy season which m...

Principal Madame Lois looked into the crowd of students (light blue shirts, dark blue shorts or skirts) packed into the cavernous auditorium, waited a moment for semi-silence, and addressed her school through a buzzing microphone.  She explained that clubs are just as important as the classes in maths, chemistry, civics, history, Spanish, French, and English.  Clubs give us the opportunity to develop skills we will use later in life and that allow us to be good ambassadors...

Now hop forward!  Backwards! Forward!  One, two, three, four...twenty!  Good!  Are you with me?  Now step up—no, face the mountain—there, that’s better!  One, two, three, four...twenty!  And squat.  Back straight.  Buttocks lower.  Lower!  Are you with me? Your partner will now place his leg on your shoulder while you raise it up and down while maintaining the squat position.  One, two, three, four…twenty!  Now you rest.   Ok, again.  Are you with me? 

Almost t...

In the next few weeks, President Paul Biya is scheduled to visit our town of Buea (southwest regional capital of Cameroon—hence the visit.)  To prepare for his arrival, the city is receiving something of a makeover—buildings that are too close to the road or deemed unfit to represent the town have been spray-painted with instructions reading ‘demolish before...’ or ‘paint white.’  Other buildings have already have already reached their expiration date and now l...

Our first night in Buea, we slept on a towel on the tile floor of our new house.   That momentous tile floor marked the beginning of our year in Cameroon.  But that tile floor was quite a challenge to get to.

If you rewind from the tile floor, you’ll see us in the back of a taxi from the Douala airport.  We’re slightly dazed, very excited, and simultaneously taking in the midnight view and asking Walters (YAN volunteer extraordinaire) as many questions as possib...

This past week has been rough. My water has not been on for almost 6 days now. I reek, I can’t make most of my food so I have been living off tomatoes and mangos, and I seem to be losing my voice.

This past week has been a very busy one and it doesn’t seem like it is going to slow down anytime soon. By the time this is posted, I will only have thirteen more classes/office hours with my students. In that time they need to have collectively completed four ...

In the six days that I have been in Cameroon, I have had no running water for five of them, lost electricity for one, and during all six have had a variety of technical difficulties with the kid’s video projects. Welcome to Africa.

For the most part, these incidents have been minor and easily dealt with. No running water? Buy some bottled water so you don’t die of heat stroke and...

T-minus eight days and counting until I head back to the US.  It has been a great ride here – full of ups and downs, a lot of hard work, and too many cold showers to count.  Today we’ve finished up our video filming section and waiting on my replacement to bring new cameras for them ...

When I was growing up my mother was never one to stand into the crowd.  She made sure that we didn’t either.  When I was kicked out of girl scouts, unfairly mind you, she started a troop of her own for me to join.  When she started a community garden she came to church dressed in a tomato costume.  When I wanted to be a genie for Halloween and we couldn’t afford a bought costume like the one from “I Dream of Genie” my mother did the best she could to make me what can...

There’s a bar near my house called “The Best is Yet to Come” – it’s a common phrase on taxi cabs, road signs, and even the occasional building or chop shop.  It would be ridiculous of me to pretend like my time here in Cameroon has not been filled with ups and down; but in my l...

Working in Africa is always a challenge and a joy – this week the challenge has been with my legal status in Cameroon.  The joy is watching the kids make their first cuts on their podcasts.  I think the most wonderful sound I’ve heard since I’ve been here is the echo of children’...

And truthfully it’s not that hard.  Today we hit a little roadblock – the files wouldn’t play, the sound won’t come through, oh yeah and half my class didn’t show up because there was an epic futbol game going on.  So, I spent about an hour figuring out how to reformat the file...

This, according to a friend here involved in the primary school system is an actual statement made by an actual teacher to actual students here in Buea.  Students in Cameroon are taught not to question the authority or scholarship of their teachers from an early age and, even if they wer...

I’m sitting here quietly doing my work and watching as one of my students struggles to make it through the many security checks on her Facebook and email accounts.  We’ve entered in codes provided to us via text message and she has entered and reentered the bot check letters over and...

I am a big fan of the personality test by Myers and Briggs – basically it’s a bunch of questions about yourself and how you react to certain situations.  There are four categories where you can fall into one of two categories:  extroverted or introverted; sensing or intuitive; feelin...

Friday I was bite by a bug in the eye.  Now, I think because I lack good hygiene, it’s infected.  My eye is swollen and a covered in puss filled blisters.  We haven’t had water all day; but it’s no so bad because at least the electricity is holding.  Ah, life in Cameroon.

Swoll...

Well office hours have started and I think they’ve been quite a success for both the students and myself.  I, despite my missing roommate, have kept myself busy and happy and they are getting much needed practice on the computer.  Although, as I write this, the Internet is down and we�...

Sunday I went to a volunteer fair organized by the European Union organizations working here.  It was a great opportunity to meet with locals and internationals alike doing work here in Cameroon.  I focused on the local organizations with a not so subtle agenda to get them to come into m...

It’s been a full week since my final trip to Yaounde to get my visa sorted.  I got into a patterned of classes and then leaving – wondering around the big city by myself and not worrying about it.  Being here for an extended time has been both a good and bad thing.  Not having to mov...

So, I’ve got a 3-month extension on my visa here in Cameroon.  In order to be blessed with this visa I have to stay another 2 days in Yaoundé.  I won’t lie – it’s nice to be in Yaoundé but it’s equally sorrowful to be traveling alone again.   I got some bad news from home las...

Another ride to Yaoundé another story to tell.  Each time I get on the bus there is a new sales men – and the occasional preacher.  This ride I found both encompassed in one man.  He started as they all do – invoking the creator and asking “him” to protect us on our journey.  Ho...

After a successful trip to Yaounde – where I got a visa, a meeting with the US embassy, AND all the cheese I could carry back with me I returned to class on Monday.  We’re supposed to be six days into the schedule and it seem like we’re more like four days into the schedule.

Ly...

Budget traveling in Cameroon is an experience – there is so much beautiful countryside to look at – as long as you don’t pay attention to the fact that it’s 100 degrees, your squished into a van with 20 other people, and at any one of the numerous checkpoints along the way you co...

Dear Connecting Classroom Participant,

Greetings from Cameroon!  October is upon us and, if you haven’t already, it’s time to start creating our videos.  We’ve started filming here in Buea and the kids are very excited about hearing from you too.

First things first – the vide...

So, I’ll be honest.  My transition between high class livin in Baghdad and the life of a volunteer in Cameroon has not been easy.  I have struggled to try and get things done without a staff on hand.  I have struggled with taxis and locals and toilets and cooking.  You’d think that liv...

Monday we had our first YAN meeting – and only about 4 out of 20 people came and those 4 didn’t expect to stay – they were just there to pick up permission slips.  Needless to say I was disheartened but not dissuaded.  We had 200 people applying – there was no way that out of thos...

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately – about politics and protest, laundry and rain, international development and Africa.  It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the number of infrastructure deficits here and the lack of outrage.  I think my naivety has gotten the best of me...

I grew up with the Texas two-step – here I’m learning the two-step Cameroon style:  two steps forward and two steps back.  I’ve been here for a month – prepping our program, expanding it, and trying to find partners.  I’ve had dozens of meetings – half of the time spent waiting for the meeting to actually start.  I�...

I’ve tried my best to withhold my impressions on Buea from this blog – focusing instead on the work being done and my personal challenges.  Come to find out that’s a wrong course of action.  My personal reflections are more than welcome on this blog.  I’m still hesitant though –...

We’re making moves here in Buea - trying to connect students from the US and all over the world with students from our program here. 

We’re expanding the curriculum - connecting classrooms and youth groups in the US and Cameroon.  We want to tell the stories of youth through emails, Facebook, podcasts, and videos.  In a larger sense we’re going to try expand the reach of YAN by targeting our advocacy.  In a smaller sense we’re sending emails and brainstorming ideas.  

YAN isn�...

Really, I’m not really much of a braggart, but in respect to all awesomeness that has been the last 19 months of my life I feel the need to tell you why should volunteering abroad if you haven’t yet.

Lets start at the beginning… its fresh, crazy, fascinating, jubilating, different. When you first arrive its nothing you expect, it’s a realization of what the word culture really means. How cultural differences aren’t just traditions, past-times, songs, etc, but social interactions an...

Volunteering abroad is funny thing. When taking the plunge to go abroad, our assumptions on difficulty are often corporeal, things like pit toilets, unbearable car rides, etc. But I’ve found that the real trials we international volunteers face here is social.

Recently, I was at the market with a fellow volunteer who asked the price of grapes. “Whiteman pay 500 for 1-1 grape.” Many Cameroonians have a way of seeing us foreigners as money bags. They assume we come from our palaces in the...

I came to Cameroon almost 17 months ago to the day. It’s funny now to think about my expectations on that day. I was just coming out of University, excited, nervous and anxious about living in Africa. I’d traveled before and my learned experience was to travel with as few assumptions as possible since they’ll undoubtedly be turned upside down. Still, we all have an image of Africa. The media shows us the famine, the desolation, the war, and a mental image is made.

Villages, huts, guns,...

Saturday, I traveled to the village of Kumba to see a traditional African wedding with my neighbor Felix and a group of Peace Corp friends. We piled under a white canopy at nightfall wearing our bright African garbs.

The father of the groom was a smiling, bouncing, hand-shaking ball of pride. He entered the canopy like a heavy breeze with a laugh that took over his entire body and bounced off his bulging belly. The groom was...in Sweden. Turns out he had a soccer game and could not com...

Six months felt like eternity when I first arrived to Cameroon. Now, I'm staring down the New Year with three months behind me and a pocket full of lessons. I love teaching. I love my kids. But, this year was not all LOLs and smiley faces. 

I yelled, took away free play, and even had to suspend a boy for his constant disruptions during class. Oddly, it was those moments of reprimanding when I felt most connected to my students. It reminded me that they are kids, just like kids in Americ...

Shadeism from Shadeism on Vimeo.

“Shadeism” produced by Nayani Thiyagarajah

I teach a group of girls at a grammar school in Buea, Cameroon. They are vibrant. Smart. Brave. But, all carry the beauty complexes passed down by their mothers.

In the cosmetics stores a popular whitening lotion with a picture of a woman whose skin is digitally altered to change from a brown complexion to fair tone fills the shelves. The soaps are most popular and each product comes with a “guarantee” to lighte...

Word travels fast in Buea. Once the head of the journalism department at the university found out a “new media specialist” was visiting, he called for me.

Pale yellow buildings are flung across the sprawling campus in no particular sequence. The taxi dipped in a pool of mud left from the rainfall the night before in front of the communications and humanities building.

I sat down across from the dean's paper-scattered desk. Mr. Akangwa, my boss at the grammar school, pulled out my resume ...

“Malaria reminds you that you are alive” - My neighbor Felix.

Only an African would have sage words on malaria. But, he's right. Just like an asthma attack makes you value the air we breathe, losing yourself in sickness for days, and coming out of it reminds you to be grateful for life.

To be real, I was no where near death. I wasn't in the hospital hooked up to IV drips. And I knew the end of the pain was only a few days away thanks to an early dose of malaria drugs at the onset of my sy...

“She has malaria.”

For a moment, I thought my roommate was talking about someone else. A student or fellow teacher perhaps. My doting neighbor came by to check in like always and noticed my concentration was off as she unleashed her round of morning questions.

“Asha,” she said in her thick accent that makes every word sound aggressive. (Cameroonian lingo: Asha is a word to express empathy that loosely means, “I feel sorry for your life.”)

“Africa. Mosquitoes.” She smiled like ...

As a first-year teacher, I'll admit it: I'm a pushover.

My voice rarely rises. I fall for the puppy dog eyes when a student forgets an assignment. I cringe at the punishment of paddling used in the school system here, and instead will reduce a student's lab time.

Few rules are posted on my classroom walls. But one is no free play on the computers during a lesson. No pacman. Solitaire. Instant Messenger. Nada.

I stood a few feet away from my desk when I realized Emilian's window was not closed...

We squeezed out of the taxi packed with four in the back seat and two in the passenger, and walked in the middle of Clerks Quarters.

People shuffled the streets shoulder to shoulder and merchants shopped their wares at every turn. Walters grabbed my hand and lead me off the road.

Now, when I hear “salon,” my mind flashes to the Saturdays spent at Hair 4 U in South Philly where gossip was the soundtrack to buzzing hair dryers, and the latest Essence magazines made the hour-long wait a li...

Agnus hid her face in the flaps of her faded blue collar when I reached to take a picture.

“No,” she protested. “I don't look pretty.” She continued thumbing through the pages of Glamour Magazine.

My 13-year-old neighbor, with sheepish eyes and an unassuming smile, paused at a cosmetics ad. She traced her index finger down the highlights of the blonde-haired model. I never so desperately wanted a copy of Ebony. Essence. Uptown. Anything to counter the penetrated message that beauty is...

Before coming to Cameroon, I pictured this place in my head. Black sand. Ocean. American food. I was in!

Limbe Beach is a tiny resort area just outside of Buea. After hitching a ride with Mr. Bibum, the founder of the deaf school where I volunteer part-time, and his wife Margaret, my roommate and I grabbed some breakfast (omelettes and bacon!) at a restaurant inside the wildlife reserve.

Mr. Bibum and his wife joined us and told the story of how they met a university in the UK, where Margare...