Youth Advocacy Network: Teaching Multimedia in Cameroon

Shadeism from Shadeism on Vimeo.

“Shadeism” produced by Nayani Thiyagarajah

I teach a group of girls at a grammar school in Buea, Cameroon. They are vibrant. Smart. Brave. But, all carry the beauty complexes passed down by their mothers.

In the cosmetics stores a popular whitening lotion with a picture of a woman whose skin is digitally altered to change from a brown complexion to fair tone fills the shelves. The soaps are most popular and each product comes with a “guarantee” to lighte...

Word travels fast in Buea. Once the head of the journalism department at the university found out a “new media specialist” was visiting, he called for me.

Pale yellow buildings are flung across the sprawling campus in no particular sequence. The taxi dipped in a pool of mud left from the rainfall the night before in front of the communications and humanities building.

I sat down across from the dean's paper-scattered desk. Mr. Akangwa, my boss at the grammar school, pulled out my resume ...

“Malaria reminds you that you are alive” - My neighbor Felix.

Only an African would have sage words on malaria. But, he's right. Just like an asthma attack makes you value the air we breathe, losing yourself in sickness for days, and coming out of it reminds you to be grateful for life.

To be real, I was no where near death. I wasn't in the hospital hooked up to IV drips. And I knew the end of the pain was only a few days away thanks to an early dose of malaria drugs at the onset of my sy...

“She has malaria.”

For a moment, I thought my roommate was talking about someone else. A student or fellow teacher perhaps. My doting neighbor came by to check in like always and noticed my concentration was off as she unleashed her round of morning questions.

“Asha,” she said in her thick accent that makes every word sound aggressive. (Cameroonian lingo: Asha is a word to express empathy that loosely means, “I feel sorry for your life.”)

“Africa. Mosquitoes.” She smiled like ...

As a first-year teacher, I'll admit it: I'm a pushover.

My voice rarely rises. I fall for the puppy dog eyes when a student forgets an assignment. I cringe at the punishment of paddling used in the school system here, and instead will reduce a student's lab time.

Few rules are posted on my classroom walls. But one is no free play on the computers during a lesson. No pacman. Solitaire. Instant Messenger. Nada.

I stood a few feet away from my desk when I realized Emilian's window was not closed...

We squeezed out of the taxi packed with four in the back seat and two in the passenger, and walked in the middle of Clerks Quarters.

People shuffled the streets shoulder to shoulder and merchants shopped their wares at every turn. Walters grabbed my hand and lead me off the road.

Now, when I hear “salon,” my mind flashes to the Saturdays spent at Hair 4 U in South Philly where gossip was the soundtrack to buzzing hair dryers, and the latest Essence magazines made the hour-long wait a li...

Agnus hid her face in the flaps of her faded blue collar when I reached to take a picture.

“No,” she protested. “I don't look pretty.” She continued thumbing through the pages of Glamour Magazine.

My 13-year-old neighbor, with sheepish eyes and an unassuming smile, paused at a cosmetics ad. She traced her index finger down the highlights of the blonde-haired model. I never so desperately wanted a copy of Ebony. Essence. Uptown. Anything to counter the penetrated message that beauty is...

Before coming to Cameroon, I pictured this place in my head. Black sand. Ocean. American food. I was in!

Limbe Beach is a tiny resort area just outside of Buea. After hitching a ride with Mr. Bibum, the founder of the deaf school where I volunteer part-time, and his wife Margaret, my roommate and I grabbed some breakfast (omelettes and bacon!) at a restaurant inside the wildlife reserve.

Mr. Bibum and his wife joined us and told the story of how they met a university in the UK, where Margare...