Youth Day

All week long, classes had been 'disturbed' for Youth Day preparations and Youth Week activities: marching practice, singing practice, special events like bilingualism day... Youth Day is a national holiday, celebrated by marching and singing competitions at the main field. At first, I was not excited to go all the way to Tobin field to stand in the hot Sun and watch thousands of students march by. 

The actual event proved to be fun, standing in the hot sun and watching thousands of students march by. The nursery school children were super cute, even if they needed more practice marching.

The primary school and secondary school children tended to be more in step, and sharper-looking. The whole idea of the "March Pass" is to look good as you march by the grandstand. The schools are scored, and winners announced. 

Finally, after several hours, including a break for a picnic, it was SAC's turn. It was fun to watch the kids we know march by, then congratulate them and talk with them a little bit before heading back home to a much-needed nap. 

The whole event reminded me a little bit of Los Alamos parades... everyone in town was either in the parade, or watching it. Now it is back to work, after missing several days’ worth of classes. Time is running out to teach!

-Eric

Sometimes You Need Coffee

Some days are fun, and easy: the students behave in class and ask good questions, homeschooling goes well, we have good interactions with a variety of people, we get some time to relax together.

Some days are difficult: friction develops in certain relationships, the students misbehave, the students fail an exam you tried to make easy, the goat gets stolen.

And some days, you just need coffee.

Today is a coffee day.

I stayed at the lunch table after our children went to take naps, for the purpose of marking midterm tests.  I fell asleep with my pen on the page, and woke up to find a red line across some poor student's test. That's when I decided to make coffee. (The results are (so far) not so bad for Form I. One student even scored 100%! I have a pretend wager with her to see if she has the top mark on the exam.)

It's pretty busy around here because Logan and I are both giving exams and marking them... and there's always housework to do, and extra work supervising at school, and walking to town for groceries and cooking gas and errands... Anyway, I'm just plain tuckered right now. Which is a good thing! It feels good to be in the swing of things.  Now, if only I could learn to go to bed earlier...

-Eric

Cabiru

Cabiru is one of our worst students, according to his marks. If he doesn't have the lowest grade in the class for an assignment, he's the second-lowest. Cabiru is in Form I, the equivalent of 5th or 6th grade, but reads and writes poorly. His English comprehension is low, and if you didn't know better, you'd think the boy was stupid.

He's not. I teach Math, which means that sometimes, the illiterate students can excel, if they wish, because numbers aren't letters. Math speaks its own language. At the beginning of the year, Cabiru couldn't read my written instructions on the board, e.g. "List all the factors of the given numbers." Now, I have changed my approach to be sure to read aloud all instructions, if it isn't clear. Cabiru's marks have gone up! On a recent quiz on plotting points on a cartesian plane, he scored a 9/10. He knew what he had to do, and with his verbal instructions, he was able to excel. 

There's still a long way to go... there won't always be someone to hold his hand through life, and literacy in English is an important skill that Cabiru still lacks, though he is improving. It is frustrating because his deficiencies are likely due, in part, to poor education policy at the national level, whereby every student is promoted every year, regardless of marks. 

Recently, my wife brought some of our own books into class to share with the students. They love books; many don't own books besides their school books. I once asked a form 5 student what she likes to do, and she replied, "I like to read." What do you read? "I read chemistry, biology, economics, geography..." There is little reading for pleasure, little reading outside of classwork. Well, the students loved to see our books (mostly children's books for early readers) and Cabiru latched onto a book we have called Wanyeeto, which is a collection of Lamnso' folk tales about wanyeeto, the anteater, written in Lamnso' and translated into English. Well, it turns out that while Cabiru can't read English, he can make his way through the Lamnso'! It was wonderful to come to his class after Logan was finished teaching them, and have him beg her to leave Wanyeeto with him. It is rare to meet someone who is literate in the dialect, so I was fairly impressed. He's still a kid, he still causes mischief, but there's hope for him, and all the other students.

-Eric

Teaching

Well I'm having fun getting into the classroom scene here at SAC and I've been wanting to post a small profile of class life. A teaching position opened up this term to teach English to the first year or form one college students. That is around seventh grade in US speak. Though the age range for my two classes of forty is between 9 and 15. Mode is somewhereabouts 11, that seems young to me for seventh grade, but here there aren't strict regulations about when you start school and many parents put their kids into school very young to get them out of the house. The down side to that system is many of the kids don't have the mental development for the concepts they are supposed to be learning according to their prescribed curriculum. 

Some interesting bits about the challenges teaching here: in most traditional US school designs the classroom is the teachers domain. The teacher can come, prepare the room, and manage it however works for him. Here, the class belongs to the students and the teachers rotate, which means there is very little time to get ahead of anything you might want to write on the board/setup. Also, the schedule reads like this 7:00am- 7:40am English 7:40am- 8:20am History.  If you read carefully you will see one needs to have the holiness to bi-locate to be in one's next class on time.  Periods are 40 minutes each and what with the need to bi-locate and all, with a class of 40 (a small class for Cameroon!) it would be impossible for each student to even have a minute of personal attention per class. If you have the first period you only have 20 minutes to teach because often the doors are not even unlocked on time, the children don't arrive until ten minutes later (for a variety of reasons) and then they are expected to clean the room before the beginning of the class (no janitors). 

Grading. So again, in the US a "C" is considered average. Here the minimum passing grade is considered "average."  That would be 50 percent. The student needs to only master half of any given material to pass.  From my discussion with other teachers, and my own observations, the grades of most classes tend to follow a very sharp bell curve. About ten percent have actual zeros, 15 percent excel, and the rest mostly fall between fifty or sixty percent. I was really surprised that the the median was so low! Maybe because of where I'm from a "C" seems like a bad grade, but that the majority of students (80-85 percent) would fail according to US grading rubrics is so shocking to me. More shocking perhaps because before I arrived here I kept hearing things like: "This is one of the best schools in the Country."  And "Cameroon has one of the finest education systems in all of Africa. "

What else? Oh about five kids in each of my classes are totally illiterate. It's fascinating since I've never seen someone who is truly illiterate who isn't four! There isn't any separate remedial section they can go to so I've been tutoring them on my own after classes are over.  The rest of my class is at about a 1st or 2nd grade reading and writing level. My six year olds, Helena and James, read and write and spell better than many of my students. That alone tells me the power of reading aloud to your children! 

So that is a small window into teaching at a "fancy" boarding school in Cameroon.

En masse the children are occasionally nightmarish to deal with (what can you expect from a bunch of cooped up, under fed, sleep deprived prepubescents. But individually they are all very sweet and interesting and kind.  They all have such big brown eyes, that melt my heart when they beg me "please madam, please come see us tonight and read us a story from your book" (I've been reading them Aesop's Fables). I'm sure your heart would melt too if you could hear their funny accents. :)

-Logan

We Are Together

We were invited to a private Mass tonight, praying for the recently deceased souls of several

Sisters from the congregation of the Sisters next door.  No, it wasn't Sr. Mercy or Hilda who died, but two of their sisters in other countries, and one of Sr. Hilda's cousins. One of the themes that kept coming up in the prayer intentions was community.

We have been blessed with many strong communities, not least of which have been the families in which we were raised. I think about our Catholic Campus Ministry in college, Mar-Lu-Ridge summer camp, Holy Spirit parish and All Saints parish in Virginia, and our very dear Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish in Los Alamos. Recently we have become a part of the Lay Mission-Helpers/Mission Doctor Association community, and we were briefly engaged in the life of two parishes in Los Angeles during our training. Now here we are in Cameroon, in Nso', near Junction, at Saint Augustine College, and community is all around us.

We have slowly been incorporating into the local community (communities?) here. There is the staff community, the Catholic community, the neighborhood community, the expat community. We are meeting people and getting to know them, growing ever so slightly closer with time. We are learning the languages. We are starting to have opinions about current events and situations at work and in our neighborhood, whereas at first everything was so new and different we just accepted things at face value. We look to our neighbors for help, and offer it when it is needed. We would love to be more involved in the local parish, but that has proven difficult. We are regulars in our neighborhood, such that the children we pass don't yell "kimbang! white man!" so much as they greet us: "Father of James! Mother of Helena!" We see people around town that we know. All these things are some of the superficial ways we are included in the community.

Still, community is deeper than being recognized by the people you buy from each week or sit next to in church. We are so blessed to have a very supportive community in our parish in New Mexico, IHM. Sometimes we feel homesick, though we are glad to be away from the cold right now! We think and pray for everyone there often, and we know they pray for us often. I love to remember specific people and families in my thoughts and prayers.  Sometimes my train of thought brings me to think about certain people, like the guy riding the motorcycle wearing the Red Sox hat makes me think of a certain Deacon and his family. Or the piano printed fabric in the market makes me think of a certain friend and youth ministry volunteer. In a very real way, we have become even more close to our IHM community in our absence, and it has happened through prayer.

One of the aspects of community here is best shown by a short story.  One Sunday night I walked to Junction to broadcast my weekly radio show. This is one of the few times I venture out after dark, and certainly the only time I walk. It's not that it is really dangerous, it is just that I don't want to take any chances. On my way to the station, I noticed that another expat was spending time relaxing at a local bar. Thirty minutes later, after the show was over, I went back to that bar to see if she wanted or needed someone to walk her home.

She had just left, but one of the patrons stepped outside to look with me and see the direction she had gone. I thanked him and walked away, and he responded with, "we are together." I thought about that all the way home.

"We are together." This is a common phrase here, and this time I heard it and started to understand its meaning. We are together, we are a community, and one affects the whole. Therefore, we help who we can when we can. Gifts get shared or passed on. Concern is expressed for others' safety while they travel. In some ways, you get the feeling that people in your community truly care for your well-being, despite what feuds or disagreements you might be having. We are together.

And to our family and friends in the states, through prayer and through Sacraments and through charity and through Christ's body, the Church: we are together.

-Eric