Use a textbook, go to prison
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 21/Feb/2011 21:51, 34 days ago
Go into any of the schools I work with, and you’ll notice that there is a chronic shortage of textbooks. Sometimes the teacher has a textbook, sometimes he doesn’t. More often than not it’s out of date. And the children don’t have textbooks- they just study from notebooks into which they have copied texts that the teacher has written upon the blackboard.I assumed that this meant there were no textbooks available. Shortage of school supplies is nothing new in Maga: the teachers are currently still battling to get hold of their allocation of chalk. When a VSO colleague working with a cluster of schools in the nearby village of Dargala asked me whether there were crates of textbooks not being used in Maga I was convinced that this was impossible. Why would there be crates of unused textbooks?In Dargala, my friend explained, crates of books had been sent to the schools a few years ago, but with instructions that the books could not be used until cupboards were sent to store the books in. The cupboards never arrived and so the books were never used. The teachers were apparently too scared to go against the instructions and use the books in case they were sent to prison. I promised to investigate in Maga, but I was very dubious that anything that absurd could be happening there.The next day I saw the Inspector at Maga; we discussed a few things, and then eventually, feeling rather silly, I asked if there were any crates of unused textbooks lying round the schools.“Oh yes,” he replied, “There are a some boxes in Maga and some in Guirvidig.” When I asked what was going on he told me almost exactly the same thing was going on in Maga as in Dargala. Three years ago the government had sent several crates of brand new up-to-date textbooks to two of the biggest schools in the arrondissement. The schools had already started to use the books when a letter arrived from higher up the hierarchy. It said that until instruction manuals and cupboards arrived the books were not to be used.The textbooks at the school at MagaAll the books were then gathered together and put back into boxes, where they have remained for the past three years. I asked the Inspector why they didn’t use them anyway. He said that someone from the government might come and check that the books were still unused: if they weren’t he might be sent to prison.I went to the school and asked to see the books. The headmaster showed me several cardboard boxes filled with textbooks, some of them still unwrapped. Apparently exactly the same thing is going on in schools across the region. In some schools the books are even being eaten by termites as they wait in storage.When I raised the issue of the books with my supervisor at VSO in Maroua he told me the instruction manual did actually exist and was available. In fact, he had a copy. It was on a CD. Ninety five percent of teachers have never used a computer.The only thing that astonished me more than the fact that teachers are not using the textbooks sitting in their schools because they’re scared they’ll go to prison is the fact that none of the Cameroonians I spoke to about this seemed to think it was a big problem. They actually thought it was funny that I was so angry about it. When I asked them why they hadn’t done anything about it and why they didn’t seem to care they shrugged.“C’est le Cameroun. C’est comme ça,”they’d reply (It’s Cameroon. That’s just how it is).The Inspector and headmasters where quite happy for the VSO volunteers to go to the delegation of education and try and find out what was going on (which is in fact what we’re trying to do). But do that themselves? No way. Far better that the books should just stay in their boxes.