Youth Advocacy Network: Teaching Multimedia in Cameroon

In Buea Town, the students use a cyber café that YAN rents out. By the time it was open for class, it was 10:30am. It’s good that we started a bit late though because most students didn’t show up until closer to that time anyways.

The students were only 10 in the beginning so every student had their own computer for research. We only had about one hour on the internet before Camtel (the internet provider) had some ‘general issues’ and ceased to load pages. Even my own personal internet key wasn’t connecting. So from there I opened up all of the research articles from my flash drive and the students continued researching. Soon the class was 16 students with at least one student from each group present. Then, suddenly…the power went out! So no work on the computers was possible. I then instructed the students to exchanged worksheets with their other partners and share information so that everyone had the same information in each group.

Once this was complete they moved on to the ‘Preparing to Make Your YAN Website” worksheet. This worksheet has three “blubs” that the students need to complete. Even if the research is not complete, they were still able to do the first and last blurb. All students did those two blurbs and the three groups who had finished their research (for now completed entire worksheet. After every group member finished, they did peer review of each others work.

Here is the Climate Change group (missing Rubby) – From right to left it is Fadimatou, Kadija and Samuel.

When asked why they wanted to research climate change and why they wanted to join YAN….

Fadimatou replied, “…It [climate change] is real life, it happens presently in Buea. The months of November and December we’re supposed to be in dry season but there is climate change which is really affecting out environment and human activities by raining so much.”

Khadija believes that, “YAN will improve my knowledge and the research topic will help me sensitize the public on how a problem can be prevented."

And Samuel said, “I like YAN because it helps us to better our future. For example the YAN teaches us how to take photographs and how to use computers this helps us to become professionals in the future.”

I arrived at Lycee Molyko just fore 1pm. Two students showed up by 1:15pm and by 1:30pm it was still just those two. So we went upstairs to the computer lab together. The whole of Buea was out of power and had been since it went off while I was teaching in Buea Town. Thankfully, Lycee had a backup generator but I was informed that it would only last for 1 hour and 30min. The internet was out because the backup generators only backed up the computers and not the internet. I opened up research articles for the drug abuse group since they were the only ones there. They were able to find great statistics on Cameroon and drug abuse in their country.

Slowly more kids started to show up so I got them all on computers researching articles from my flash drive. Thankfully my internet key was working at this point so I was using my computer to find more articles for them and then would transfers them to my flash drive and then to the student computers. The generator went out just after 3pm. There was a total of six students who attended class from four different groups. Three of those four groups had enough research to move to the next step which was writing the blubs. The students did that and by the time the last group finished it was already 4pm. Before I sent the kids home, I reminded them that we only had two class periods left and that it was very important for all students to show up to the last two classes before the holidays. I explained how we are now working in groups and that they should seek out their group members and even other students in YAN to encourage them to come to class. I’m sure on Wednesday the class will be full!!