My First Week of School

September 9th, 2010

This concludes my 3rd week at post and my first week teaching at a real Cameroonian high school. About 2 days after getting here I came to the realization that I was going to have to get used to a lot of “me time.” I'm in a city- a district capital. This mislead me to believe that there were going to be things to do and food to eat in my town. The center of town consists of about 25 little tiny shops with the exact same products-pasta, cookies, unscented bar soap and toilet paper. Then there's street venders selling tomatoes, cucumbers, leaves, peanuts, and eggs. I have discovered 3 restaurants in town. The first one I found because I was walking through town with another volunteer that came in for the day and a shady guy came up to us and was like “hissssss hey white girls, there's a restaurant over here.” So of course we follow him through an alley and lo and behold, there was a restaurant with a chalkboard menu and everything. I asked if they had cold drinks and he said yes they have fish. I love language barriers. So we sit down. When ordering drinks, it turns out they only have ginger juice, which is fine because it's delicious. Then my friend orders fish and I order chicken. They're out of chicken. Beef? no they're out of that. Ok fish it is. The fish was good and the elation of finding a good restaurant lasted until my friend and I had a case of the runs when we got home. Not gonna lie, I'll probably go back.

So this week was the first week of school. I was told to be there on Monday at 6:45am. So of course I got there at 6:40 and there was not a soul in sight. The first people started coming in about 7:20. The principal rolled up at about 8:15 in a car, the only person who has one. All the teachers gathered in his office for a meeting. He gave us all a pamphlet on Cholera and said that the ministry requested that we teach our first lesson on cholera. I'm the only female teacher. The only other woman working at the school is the secretary. The new people that just got transferred are not even here yet. So the first day I introduced myself to my classes, which had about 15 out of 100 people present. This week was the last week of Ramadan, so many students did not come. Others didn't come because they did not know that school was starting, so we told people to tell their friends. No one this whole week showed up for afternoon classes. I was told by numerous people that it was because of the sun. Don't get me wrong, if I was fasting I would not want to come to class either but really? the sun in africa? All week, the date of Ramadan was unsure because it goes by the moon. So if it ended up being Thursday we would not have class Friday. Well, it turned out to be Friday, but only about 20 out of 2800 students showed up for class on Thursday (must have been the Christians) and so class and the general meeting were cancelled. The classes I did teach went fairly well. The students are far below the level in English that they need to be, but I was expecting that. It's just also really hard to teach people vocabulary about 'The News' when you can't even buy a newspaper in the town and most of them don't have TVs. I have to teach them the concept and then the English which puts a wrench into things.