It's Sunday. It's the 30th. September's swansong and October is stretching it's well-rested limbs for its annual 31 day foray into the collective conscience. Ahead lies a week of wrongly dated letters and back in the homeland thoughts turn to the pagan and quasi-pagan festivites that litter the winter months. The nights are drawing in, the clocks preparing in their own inimitable, unconscious manner for their slip into the embracing comfort of GMT, and the natural world is downsizing its activities for the winter.
Here, it's hotter than Lucifer's hot bits, thought not as hot as it was in March, and the rainy season has done its bit, any further seasoning is according to personal taste; where's a man with a 4 foot long pepper grinder when you need one?
It's been a couple of crazy weeks in one way or another. The highs have outweighed the lows and life goes on in the way in which I have, in the last 5 weeks, become accustomed. The teaching is as manic as can be expected and life 'au village' goes on in its own particular/peculiar manner, helped on its way by the insane ramblings and surprisingly profound ignorance of my neighbours. This week a lesson in the diurnal rotations of the earth, its most prominent satellite and the direction of the points of the compass. How simple life must be if you don't know what the moon looks like, or in which direction the sun sets. Pity her poor child who is currently being home tutored ... not by her university qualified science teaching husband but by the good lady herself.
Last weekend saw a peculiar mix of general contentedness combined with rage, anger and irritation. Some light-fingered son of a lady dog tried and succeeded in liberating me of 700 Francs. There I was hailing a moto-taxi when he sidled up beside me, stuck his hand in my pocket and helped himself. I grabbed his wrist which he tried to pull free, eventually succeeding with the small amount of change I had in that pocket, and for his troubles got a right hook to the side of the head from my motorcycle helmet wielding right hand. It may have only been 70p but that's not really the point.
That was the solitary low but it was low enough to make me walk around for the rest of the weekend like a bear with a sore head, and pretty much everyone of Cameroonian extraction, no matter how well-meaning their intentions, got what could be described as the choke barrell with a smattering of short-thrift. Even this weekend I've been a little on edge but there we go ... it'll pass although I can't help hope that my light-fingered assailant is still aching.
This week sees another day lost with International Day of the Teacher taking over Friday ... a walk down the dusty streets of Meri with the region's bastions of teaching excellence will be a novelty if only for being dressed from head to foot in material that I'd have to consider seriously before using as a floor cloth. Baby Blue or Baby Pink were the approved choices. Basically a pair of wear once glorified pyjamas; life doesn't get any more rock and roll.
The only other excitement has been the arrival of the new volunteers: 13 of them of which about half have been struck down by something. In the last 2 weeks there have been cases of Typhoid, E. Coli, Intestinal parasites and Malaria. Culture shock for every element of the human condition it would seem. As I've said before, fun comes in all shapes and sizes.
Onwards and upwards. It's now nearly 3 and I must rentrer before the taxi's start taking liberties.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Saturday, September 15, 2007
A boinked crossbill results in digital rubbish (9,8)
Another week passes and another blogging courses its ephemeral way to you across the ether; binarised bollocks from the balmy boulevards of Extremely Northern Cameroon's foremost purveyor of all things bright and lighted. Lucidity comes in waves upon which I surf the shores of sanity but in this brackish backwater the waves themselves are few and far between so don't hold your breath.
Week two and another week of firsts. The first wet-season invasion of a billion buzzing beasties all intent on dying in the intermitent flickering of my living room light. Their brief lives and flighty dreams of procreation blown to pieces in a glimmer of neon luminescence. Sex or the bright light; it's a tough call if your a bug apparently.
The first lost days of the school year. We're two weeks in, 10 teaching days, and already 20% of them have fallen by the way in a rush of all too Cameroonian disorganisation. What was achieved in the meetings for which education was put on ice? For answers please submit an SAE to Fanny Adams, c/o The Catering Department.
The first 150+ lesson and there's more to come I feel. Mayhem has tended to be the adopted approach but then TEFL favours a student centred approach but then it doesn't expect classes of greater than about 25. Did he let that put him off? Don't be silly. "I'd like you all in groups of 6", he said, with the reckless abandon of the clinically insane. 10 minutes of Beatlemania-esque noise pollution but it was worth it. Fellow VSO-EFL-ers look at me as if I'm mad ... horses for courses is what I say and if that means dessert too, then so be it.
One of the more surreal moments was during a conversation with my neighbour who has returned with solitary sprog in hand so I am still a family of one. She whose accent is so convoluted I have little idea as to what she's talking about most of the time and whose stick of consciousness is as gnarled and twisted as a, something gnarled and twisted. An example:
Mrs NEIGHBOUR: "Avez-vous un chien?" / "Do you have a dog?"
Yours TRULY: "Un chien?" / "A dog?"
Mrs N: "Oui, Un chien pour cultiver les choses dedans." / "Yes, a dog for growing things in"
Yours T: "Un chien? Pour cultiver les choses dedans??" / "A dog? For growing things in?"
Mrs N: "Oui" / "Yes"
Yours T: "?" / "?"
Yours T: "?? ... ?" / "?? ... ?"
Yours T: "Oh, 'un champ' ... " / "Oh, 'a field' ..."
That was in week two. This week, during one of those fascinating rural conversations about hatching tiume of various beasts of the air, I told her how we'd once put a duck egg under a hen who had hatched said duckling. She couldn't work out how a chicken had hatched a duck ... I gave her a brief lesson in genetics and haven't seen her since. Not quite sure what she's doing but she then gave me a bowl of guinea-fowl eggs. Do you think she wants me to try and hatch them? It might break her heart if they actually hatched as guinea-fowl and not English teachers ...
Welcome, as it were, to my world.
In parting I leave you with possibly the finest piece of advertising the world has ever seen ... it's my opinion and I have no pretences towards humility but it's kept me smiling for at least 10 years now ... here's hoping it works. If not, there's a tag underneath.
Enjoy people, until next time.
"Hi. I'm Ray Gardner, spokesperson for Blackcurrant Tango ..."
Week two and another week of firsts. The first wet-season invasion of a billion buzzing beasties all intent on dying in the intermitent flickering of my living room light. Their brief lives and flighty dreams of procreation blown to pieces in a glimmer of neon luminescence. Sex or the bright light; it's a tough call if your a bug apparently.
The first lost days of the school year. We're two weeks in, 10 teaching days, and already 20% of them have fallen by the way in a rush of all too Cameroonian disorganisation. What was achieved in the meetings for which education was put on ice? For answers please submit an SAE to Fanny Adams, c/o The Catering Department.
The first 150+ lesson and there's more to come I feel. Mayhem has tended to be the adopted approach but then TEFL favours a student centred approach but then it doesn't expect classes of greater than about 25. Did he let that put him off? Don't be silly. "I'd like you all in groups of 6", he said, with the reckless abandon of the clinically insane. 10 minutes of Beatlemania-esque noise pollution but it was worth it. Fellow VSO-EFL-ers look at me as if I'm mad ... horses for courses is what I say and if that means dessert too, then so be it.
One of the more surreal moments was during a conversation with my neighbour who has returned with solitary sprog in hand so I am still a family of one. She whose accent is so convoluted I have little idea as to what she's talking about most of the time and whose stick of consciousness is as gnarled and twisted as a, something gnarled and twisted. An example:
Mrs NEIGHBOUR: "Avez-vous un chien?" / "Do you have a dog?"
Yours TRULY: "Un chien?" / "A dog?"
Mrs N: "Oui, Un chien pour cultiver les choses dedans." / "Yes, a dog for growing things in"
Yours T: "Un chien? Pour cultiver les choses dedans??" / "A dog? For growing things in?"
Mrs N: "Oui" / "Yes"
Yours T: "?" / "?"
Yours T: "?? ... ?" / "?? ... ?"
Yours T: "Oh, 'un champ' ... " / "Oh, 'a field' ..."
That was in week two. This week, during one of those fascinating rural conversations about hatching tiume of various beasts of the air, I told her how we'd once put a duck egg under a hen who had hatched said duckling. She couldn't work out how a chicken had hatched a duck ... I gave her a brief lesson in genetics and haven't seen her since. Not quite sure what she's doing but she then gave me a bowl of guinea-fowl eggs. Do you think she wants me to try and hatch them? It might break her heart if they actually hatched as guinea-fowl and not English teachers ...
Welcome, as it were, to my world.
In parting I leave you with possibly the finest piece of advertising the world has ever seen ... it's my opinion and I have no pretences towards humility but it's kept me smiling for at least 10 years now ... here's hoping it works. If not, there's a tag underneath.
Enjoy people, until next time.
"Hi. I'm Ray Gardner, spokesperson for Blackcurrant Tango ..."
Sunday, September 09, 2007
An Educational Perspective
Here I sit; back in the canned cool of Hôtel le Sahel, surrounded by those members of Cameroonian society with email addresses and the well-heeled adventurers that choose this characterless hostelry in which to conceal themselves from the plight of the poverty riddled masses huddled outside its whitewashed walls.
Back beneath the solitary bright light of this 3 horse town for a weekend of English conversation and a hops based beverage or two.
The first real, proper, genuine teaching week has been and gone and the fears that kept me from sleeping last Sunday were all but unfounded. Yes, class sizes were on the wrong side of ridiculous, but the novelty of having a "nassara" being a prat at the front of the class, all in the name of education seemed to keep them entertained and that's got to be part of the battle. 139 has, thus far, been the mark to beat but given there are still 40-odd children missing from that class, the jury is still out ...
The good news: we are three teachers and possibly 4 as of tomorrow. There's no-one teaching Maths, Chemistry, Physics, Technology or Biology but they're not very important really, are they. I mean Maths ... who needs Maths? Shocking really but I guess if a teacher gets here before the school year's out it'll be a good thing.
Biggest challenges so far: teaching in the rain. Yes the roof leaks a bit but it's the noise that does it. I think the heavens were being drained for their annual inspection last week. Tuesday to Thursday saw deluges of biblical proportions and the tin-roofed classrooms became war zones. The noise was unreal and for all the wild gesticulating I was doing, I don't think any of the kids are any closer to fluency. Big Challenge 2: Bingo. Explaining the concept of the game to a group of children who have never been asked to think for themselves, who can't understand why anyone would want to do such a thing, in English - a language which is thin on the ground at the best of times and non-existent the rest - was novel to say the least. It took 90 minutes but I feel it was 90 minutes well spent.
And that's the thing. Here they are trying to be bilingual, studying from books that are so far above their knowledge level as to be demoralising, in classes the size of entire schools back home and with nothing but a blackboard on which one cannot write, with no books. Each class gets 5 hours of my time per week. That's 300 minutes of English per class. If classes were 100 strong, each student would get 3 minutes of learning time per week; 30 effective teaching weeks = 90 minutes per year, assuming of course that classes start on time, I do no speaking, each student attends every class and there are only 100 students per class. With none of the assumptions being true, I'm not quite sure what they're hoping to achieve. Bilingualism in 90 minutes ... if they find the answer it may just solve all their problems.
A factual outpouring from this font of general inanity; it doesn't happen often and normal service will be resumed. Gutteral rumblings have once again forced my hand, and so, like a malicious croquet fanatic I will post once more and calm the beast within.
Back beneath the solitary bright light of this 3 horse town for a weekend of English conversation and a hops based beverage or two.
The first real, proper, genuine teaching week has been and gone and the fears that kept me from sleeping last Sunday were all but unfounded. Yes, class sizes were on the wrong side of ridiculous, but the novelty of having a "nassara" being a prat at the front of the class, all in the name of education seemed to keep them entertained and that's got to be part of the battle. 139 has, thus far, been the mark to beat but given there are still 40-odd children missing from that class, the jury is still out ...
The good news: we are three teachers and possibly 4 as of tomorrow. There's no-one teaching Maths, Chemistry, Physics, Technology or Biology but they're not very important really, are they. I mean Maths ... who needs Maths? Shocking really but I guess if a teacher gets here before the school year's out it'll be a good thing.
Biggest challenges so far: teaching in the rain. Yes the roof leaks a bit but it's the noise that does it. I think the heavens were being drained for their annual inspection last week. Tuesday to Thursday saw deluges of biblical proportions and the tin-roofed classrooms became war zones. The noise was unreal and for all the wild gesticulating I was doing, I don't think any of the kids are any closer to fluency. Big Challenge 2: Bingo. Explaining the concept of the game to a group of children who have never been asked to think for themselves, who can't understand why anyone would want to do such a thing, in English - a language which is thin on the ground at the best of times and non-existent the rest - was novel to say the least. It took 90 minutes but I feel it was 90 minutes well spent.
And that's the thing. Here they are trying to be bilingual, studying from books that are so far above their knowledge level as to be demoralising, in classes the size of entire schools back home and with nothing but a blackboard on which one cannot write, with no books. Each class gets 5 hours of my time per week. That's 300 minutes of English per class. If classes were 100 strong, each student would get 3 minutes of learning time per week; 30 effective teaching weeks = 90 minutes per year, assuming of course that classes start on time, I do no speaking, each student attends every class and there are only 100 students per class. With none of the assumptions being true, I'm not quite sure what they're hoping to achieve. Bilingualism in 90 minutes ... if they find the answer it may just solve all their problems.
A factual outpouring from this font of general inanity; it doesn't happen often and normal service will be resumed. Gutteral rumblings have once again forced my hand, and so, like a malicious croquet fanatic I will post once more and calm the beast within.
Saturday, September 01, 2007
On est ensemble
I'm back.
Back here in both senses of the word. Back in extremely northern parts and back on this patch of virtual real estate, peddling my intellectual wares in both. Most of it should probably be recalled for the toxicity of its garish paintwork and is almost certainly not suitable for children, but that's for someone else to decide.
Having left the verdant pastures of South Lanarkshire, itself basking in a somewhat tardy summer, it felt a bit odd stepping off the plane in the heat of here. The greenery that was so notable in its absence when I left has appeared with something that is definitely on the more aggressive side of avengeance. Mile upon mile of barren and lifeless desert has been replaced by fields of 10 foot high millet, corn and various of the other green staples upon which this country survives. The goats and donkeys which were free to wander wherever they wished in search of a succulent succulent or two are now tied down so as to limit their perambulating prandialising.
Dry river beds are now raging torrents by comparison and the roads bear testament to the pounding this country has received. The road from the airport is nigh on unpassable being more hole than not and scattered along its length are legions of Cameroonlets, frantically filling the holes with dirt, waving down the passing cars to get them to slow down and then asking for a 'cadeau' for their efforts. So wrong on so many levels. We're not talking provincial backroad here, we're talking arterial link between the capital of Chad, Ndjamena, the north of Cameroon, its more prosperous southern counterpart and the coast. It's basically the M74. And there are children mending it. Voluntarily.
Sitting at the bus stop in Garoua, being crawled over by lizards and approached by some of the world's more bizarre salesmen (one guy had a handful of sunglasses, a solitary tooth brush and an iron), I got talking to a guy from Chad. Told him what I was doing here and the struggles of teaching 180 students in one classroom and about life at school in general and he was appalled. He couldn't believe that the situation was so dire in a country that is, by comparison, so rich. You could rake and sift hell's ashes and still not find any hope for Chad's development: it's landlocked, perpetually on the brink of civil war, mostly desert, all but cut off from everywhere and apart from a puddle of oil has as many natural resources to exploit as a bucket of luke warm vomit ... not a nice image but fairly accurate.
It throws into sharp relief the massive disparities in wealth distribution in this odd country, something that was further demonstrated in a radio programme I picked up the other day. There are schools in Yaoundé, the capital, where parents pay upwards of 200,000 CFA per child, per year (about GBP200). Here, where school fees are a staggering 13,000 CFA (GBP13), most people can't afford to pay. And if they do pay, they then can't afford books, uniforms or anything else ... it stinks I tell you, and not just in an olfactory manner.
But still, as I said, I'm back. As unbusy as ever and therefore prone to sessions of soul searching. School starts on Monday and there's a hope that this might mean my mind is a little more occupied ... with 20 hours of teaching in theory, I can do little but keep my fingers crossed. Turns out there are going to be other teachers too which is nice. The thought of having to teach physics in French was getting a little scary!
Slave to my stomach that I am, lunch is calling and it would be rude to deny the grumblings ... on est ensemble, as they say, even if you are over there, wherever it may be, and I'm not!
Back here in both senses of the word. Back in extremely northern parts and back on this patch of virtual real estate, peddling my intellectual wares in both. Most of it should probably be recalled for the toxicity of its garish paintwork and is almost certainly not suitable for children, but that's for someone else to decide.
Having left the verdant pastures of South Lanarkshire, itself basking in a somewhat tardy summer, it felt a bit odd stepping off the plane in the heat of here. The greenery that was so notable in its absence when I left has appeared with something that is definitely on the more aggressive side of avengeance. Mile upon mile of barren and lifeless desert has been replaced by fields of 10 foot high millet, corn and various of the other green staples upon which this country survives. The goats and donkeys which were free to wander wherever they wished in search of a succulent succulent or two are now tied down so as to limit their perambulating prandialising.
Dry river beds are now raging torrents by comparison and the roads bear testament to the pounding this country has received. The road from the airport is nigh on unpassable being more hole than not and scattered along its length are legions of Cameroonlets, frantically filling the holes with dirt, waving down the passing cars to get them to slow down and then asking for a 'cadeau' for their efforts. So wrong on so many levels. We're not talking provincial backroad here, we're talking arterial link between the capital of Chad, Ndjamena, the north of Cameroon, its more prosperous southern counterpart and the coast. It's basically the M74. And there are children mending it. Voluntarily.
Sitting at the bus stop in Garoua, being crawled over by lizards and approached by some of the world's more bizarre salesmen (one guy had a handful of sunglasses, a solitary tooth brush and an iron), I got talking to a guy from Chad. Told him what I was doing here and the struggles of teaching 180 students in one classroom and about life at school in general and he was appalled. He couldn't believe that the situation was so dire in a country that is, by comparison, so rich. You could rake and sift hell's ashes and still not find any hope for Chad's development: it's landlocked, perpetually on the brink of civil war, mostly desert, all but cut off from everywhere and apart from a puddle of oil has as many natural resources to exploit as a bucket of luke warm vomit ... not a nice image but fairly accurate.
It throws into sharp relief the massive disparities in wealth distribution in this odd country, something that was further demonstrated in a radio programme I picked up the other day. There are schools in Yaoundé, the capital, where parents pay upwards of 200,000 CFA per child, per year (about GBP200). Here, where school fees are a staggering 13,000 CFA (GBP13), most people can't afford to pay. And if they do pay, they then can't afford books, uniforms or anything else ... it stinks I tell you, and not just in an olfactory manner.
But still, as I said, I'm back. As unbusy as ever and therefore prone to sessions of soul searching. School starts on Monday and there's a hope that this might mean my mind is a little more occupied ... with 20 hours of teaching in theory, I can do little but keep my fingers crossed. Turns out there are going to be other teachers too which is nice. The thought of having to teach physics in French was getting a little scary!
Slave to my stomach that I am, lunch is calling and it would be rude to deny the grumblings ... on est ensemble, as they say, even if you are over there, wherever it may be, and I'm not!
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