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on Camarooned Clara (Cameroon), 19/Oct/2009 14:18, 34 days ago
NEWSFLASH - photo update!sooo, due to popular demand (!) am displaying herewith some photos of my experiences thus far. admirable absence of vanity i am sure you will agree. attempting to pull off native african prints, and then posting the pics online? yourself?! who does that!anyway they say pics tell a thousand words an' all that. have (tried to, don't know if it's worked) include a couple of our house and my weekend trip to bogo, went to visit a couple of schools there. (and, equally as crucially, go drink red wine out of a carton... hello scrabble night!) like all good cameroonian women, we spent friday prepping a traditional dish called foulere. made of bitter green leaves, and not a lot else. still somehow managed to take us most of the day... picking the leaves, washing the leaves and then - most heartbreaking of all - boiling them down so that all your preparatory efforts shrink beyond recognition! something of a labour intensive dish. not much by way of fruit and veg here (i know - avoiding scurvy was the only thing i WASN'T worried about before embarking for africa!). somehow managed to wind up in the one region of cameroon which isn't able to grow much on account of the harsh dry climate. which makes it very poor. which is probably the very reason i did get sent here.didn't think that through!anyway, was glad to get to see some of the schools, needless to say seeing it myself was pretty different to reading/hearing about it. the smells, the dark, the cramped human life, difficult to convey these in words. i felt totally overwhelmed to be honest. seeing the life of a teacher out here, it's pretty hard to even conceive of. No books, no desks, no salary for the last six months, negligible training, just a dark room with a hundred odd pupils and a blackboard (not normally any chalk though.) without going into detail (and out of a desire not to get sued/booted out the country) the education system here can only be described as complicated. funds for education seem to get misdirected/lost along the way a lot. the english/french bilingualism doesn't help much either, administrative nightmare. from what i can gather, the english and french school systems are expected to co-exist perfectly harmoniously. ambitious to say the least!