Some sad stories from Cameroon
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 12/Feb/2010 11:07, 34 days ago
Last week a little girl of about nine or ten, who is a student in one of the little village schools I worked with at Simatou, got raped. She was out in the woodland cutting plants when a gang of five boys approached her: three adolescents and two younger boys. The three older boys threatened her with machetes and then raped her. The people in the village know who the culprits are; they come from another village a bit further east. I was visiting with the regional delegate for women and the family when the villagers told us what had happened. We asked whether they’d been to the police. The girl and her mother had spent a day at the police station, we were told, and the police had sent a message to the fathers of the boys to demand that they come into the station. The assumption among the villagers is that even if the police eventually bother to go and findthe boys, and they haven’t already run away to Chad, if they can pay a suitable bribe to the police they’ll get off without charge. A friend of mine from Pouss came to visit me last weekend, and told me about a problem he was having. Six years ago he took in a baby boy who was abandoned by his parents, brought him up in his own family, and, when he was old enough, sent him to school. Then a few days ago, without informing anyone, the boy’s parents came to my friend’s house and took away the child. My friend, after he found out what happened, was very concerned: he is sure that the boy’s parents will remove him from school and will send him out to work in the fields. He’s trying to get the boy back to live with him, but he doesn’t know what will happen. I handed some forms to be filled in to one of the staff members at the inspection to fill in with some statistics we need to try and get some NGO funding. When I told my national volunteer what I’d done she told me I’d made a mistake giving the forms to that staff member. He had, during interviews for NGO paid teachers the previous term, taken a large bribe (practically an entire month’s salary) from a parent paid teacher who wanted the job, assuring him that he would make sure he gotit (the parent paid teachers get about £18 a month, a considerably smaller salary than the NGO paid teachers, who get about £27 a month). In fact the NGO was refusing to hire parent paid teachers, as this would fail to improve the teacher shortage, and the man didn’t get the job. Now parent-paid the teacher is asking the NGO paid teacher to give him the money that he paid out as a bribe, and the NGO paid teacher doesn’t know what to do. Neither of them dares to go to the employee at the inspector’s office who took the bribe in the first place. The World Food Programme sends food to one of the schools I work with which the school then organises to be given to the children twice a week to encourage them to attend school. However this term no food has turned up, and so the school is trying to stretch out last terms food to cover this term. Everyone has noticed there is less food (there was never very much to start with) and is accusing the teachers of taking it. The lorry drivers who deliver the food to the schools also force the headmasters of the benefiting schools to pay them large bribes in money and fish, and the headmaster says the scheme has caused him so many problems he would rather his school had never been selected to benefit from it.