Remote schools

‘My name is Nervis. I am in class 5 of GS Kimata. Our school has only one teacher, the head master. We are sitting six on a desk’.

‘I am the head master of GS Kimata, the lone government teacher of the school. The school is in somebody’s premises, under a hut of one classroom accommodating all classes. (…) Fowls and goats oftenly interrupt classes thereby causing ineffective teaching/learning process’.

Can you imagine a classroom in the Netherlands where teaching is disturbed because chicken or goats are entering the class? Or where you can’t be taught when it rains as the rain will just come in? Or where you have to share a bench with 5 other children? Or where there is no water, toilet or teacher?

The pupils of GS Kimata
in their school

All of this is happening in Government School Kimata, one of the schools I visited last week for the Remote Schools project Knowledge for Children wants to do with three partner organisations. The school is relatively well accessible, at least the car can reach and it is quite close to the main road. However, the school is in deep need.

They have one hut in which almost 250 children are taught. The lower classes face one side, the higher classes face the other side of the hut. But there is no wall or something to separate them, leading of course to a lot of distraction.

There are two teachers; the head teacher who is also responsible for all administration of the school and a lady who is a family member of the person who offered space on his compound to construct the hall. She is not trained as a teacher but should teach at least three classes at the same time.

The school has two very small blackboards (what doesn’t give them enough space to teach three classes), the benches are borrowed from a neighbouring school and of course there are no books or charts or other teaching materials.

The parents, the Fon (the local king) and the rest of the community are very committed, but they are also very poor. The community consists mainly of survivors of the Lake Nyos disaster in 1986. They are not allowed to go back to their ancestral villages. They make a living through farming, but all farming here is small scale and doesn’t enable them to make much money.

No matter how remote,
the flag should be on top!

As the school is a government school, there is no school fee. However, the Parents-Teachers Association (PTA) tries to collect money to pay the second teacher. As many parents have no means to contribute, the PTA is not able to do anything else in the school, like building a classroom. So that is why the children are in a hut.

As the attitude of parents, head teacher and the Fon is very positive, we hope to be able to really help this school. We plan to train the teachers, do income generating activities for the women to bring more money to the school, provide benches, books, materials, pay fees for very needy children and more. And in this special case, we will try to find a partner who can help them to construct a building.

We don’t want to do this only for GS Kimata. For us, this school might sound as a horrible exception, but there are many schools like this in that area. Some are not even accessible by motorbike. Therefore we hope that, with our partners Benekin, Rural Development Foundation and Afoni Children of Hope Foundation, we can do something for these remote schools to enable to pupils to get good education and be able to lead their communities out of poverty in the future! 

News

Everybody who has read Joris Luyendijk’s great book ‘Het zijn net mensen’ (translated into English as ‘Hello Everybody!’) will remember how Luyendijk describes how news is ‘produced’. Demonstrations with only a few people are filmed in a way that this few people look like a huge crowd, or people hiding new baby clothes under the ruins of a bombed house to show to the TV.

He also describes how ‘news’ in a dictatorial regime is very different from news in a European country. I am not sure how the media here in Cameroon is controlled. I think there is more freedom than in the countries in the Middle East where Luyendijk writes about. However, politicians here also have quite some control over the media.

When I lived in Nigeria, we often knew of Boko Haram attacks through BBC or Dutch news far before something was published in the Nigerian media.

Here in Cameroon, I am often also the first one to know about attacks of Boko Haram in Cameroon. However, the Cameroonian armed forces are also fighting back and having success. They kill terrorists and recently they freed a German hostage. If something like that happens, it is big news and we will see reports about it for days.

I think we see the influence of politics in media here. Of course, if the army kills Boko Haram terrorists, the government is proud and informs the media. The Dutch would do the same! And I can also imagine that the government is less ready to publish about attacks of Boko Haram.

In the Netherlands, journalists can travel to a place if something is happening, they can look around, interview people, see what happens. Here is it all more complicated. First, not every journalist has the means to travel all the way to the Far North. But also, as a journalist you depend on the politicians. If you publish a story they don’t like, they might not talk to you again.

That might be similar in Europe. But a big difference is that politicians here pay journalists to write about them. Even us as Knowledge for Children, if we have news, we have to pay journalists to cover it. In the Netherlands, I simply sent a press communique and most newspapers and radio stations would report based on that or call for an interview. Here you first pay.

That also means that if I have a problem with someone, I can pay a journalist to write very bad stories about him or her. People tell me that this is what really happens during elections. For normal Cameroonians, this is also bringing problems. Because, how do you know what is true and what is propaganda? Even for Boko Haram news, we often depend on foreign information. One of my good friends has a brother in the army fighting Boko Haram. Sometimes I call my friend with news and he checks with his brother and it turns out to be true. Sometimes the brother even has to check it with other soldiers so the Dutch news knows about it before the people risking their lives for it.  Sometimes my friend gets upset; ‘I have been watching the news on the Cameroonian national TV just before you called and they didn’t mention it! How come that Dutch media know before us?’

And regarding Boko Haram, my impression is that the Cameroonian government is really trying their best to stop them. The Cameroonian army seems to be more organised than the Nigerian one. (In Nigeria it also seems that many soldiers collaborate with Boko Haram).

But, the problems are there. Many people are internally displaced because of it. Many schools along the border are closed because the army needed the buildings, or even worse, because Boko Haram took it or attacks schools and kidnaps children. Nigerian refugees live in camps in Cameroon and can’t go back to their houses.

I hope Cameroon, together with other countries, will be able to keep Boko Haram out. Cameroon is a safe and stable country in this region. We are surrounded by so many countries with problems, Nigeria, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo… Let’s do it the African way and let’s pray that Cameroon will ‘live long’!