Working with schools
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 09/Nov/2009 10:24, 34 days ago
I'm here working with five primary schools in the Maga region, three in tiny villages out in the bush, about half an hours cycle ride away from Maga, and the other two in the centre of Maga, which is a large village with huge numbers of children. There hadn’t been an international volunteer in Maga all of last year, and so the only work that had been done here with the schools had been to write their development plans. Unfortunately these were incredibly ambitious and required the international volunteer to come up with large amounts of money from somewhere. Last year when there was only a National Volunteer the schools were unwilling to work with her because they were waiting for an International volunteer to show up with lots of funds. This meant that the initial stage of our work was actually going round the schools and explaining that theaim of the project wasn’t for the international volunteer to come in and fund infrastructure, it was for the local communities to come together and support the schools, and to do awareness raising and training with students and teachers on how they could improve their school environments.This meant my first meeting with a school council here in the primary school at Maga was an absolute disaster, as the President of the school council turned up with the initial plan that said the school would have twenty four new multi storey classrooms with electricity, and spent the whole meeting asking when these were going to be built and waving the plan at me. It’s hard to convey quite how unrealistic this is- I have only ever seen one building with more than two storeys in Maga and that was built about thirty years ago and is the house of the Sub-Prefect, the top administrative official in the region! Also the school only has twelve teachers (for about 1400 students) and no money to hire any more, so I don’t know what they were planning on doing with these classrooms when they were built.People now (after lots of explanations translated into multiple local languages) understand what we’re here to try and do a bit better. They’re beginning to recognise that their schools are their own responsibility and some parents have come up with some great ideas; at the school at Malka, a little village out in the bush, they’re collecting money from each parent per field of rice they work, and organising a big meeting with the Lawane (their village chieftain) for parents whose children are out of school.We’re also trying to organise some meetings with mothers to discuss how they can get involved in the schools. This can be difficult, as Maga is in a very conservative region and often men are unwilling to let women leave their homes for meetings. We’re trying to work with the local chieftains, sothat they call the meetings, which reassures both men and women. Women and often men here are frequently illiterate and know very little French, which can add to the challenge of working together- meetings can be very slow as everything has to be said several times often in at least three languages!It’s also important to be careful with timing, as market days and times when people are in the fields or preparing food are bad, but times just after prayers are good, as the call to prayer lets people know what time it is. We’re hoping that the Maga commune will give us some money for women’s literacy classes to help women get more involved in understanding their children’s education (it is in the budget, but because Maga Commune has lots of money problems this is no guarantee we’ll get it!).