Friday, October 26, 2007

Back to School

My classes finally started again last week. So far things are running a little smoother this year than last year. As with last year I've already had many students who are scheduled for other classes at the same time as mine. This occurs partly because the schedule runs from week to week in order to accommodate the large number of visiting professors who come to teach for a week or two at a time, partly because I have students from different years (normally they are all in the same classes based on their year), and partly because the Deans from the different departments don't seem to communicate very well when scheduling courses that include students from different majors (like mine).

So, things are confused as always, but on the bright side I was much better prepared this time around and was able to hit the ground running. Year two is always easier. You've already done the hard work of adapting to your school and community and had a year to prepare courses and figure out what works and what doesn't. In spite of ongoing confusion I'm finding that my new Dean this year is pretty easy to work with, and since he has a PhD in computer science he's generally pretty sympathetic.

I'm teaching two classes at the moment.

My first class is Informatique de Base (Basic Computing) which is a basic computer literacy class required of all new students. However, since the course ended up being scrubbed early last year, we're starting it all over again for the second year students. My job is easier this year since the new Dean and another computer professor they hired last year have split the course with me and are now sharing the load.

We divided the students by major. I am teaching the students from the Theology, Education, and Nursing programs. The two other professors are splitting the students from the Business and IT program (which is the largest group). In the end we'll all have about the same number of students. I may have slightly more at the end of the day.

The course covers basic operations (turning a PC on and off, using a keyboard and mouse), essential Windows (Menus, Desktop, Windows, Files and Folders, common functions), Office Applications (word processing and spreadsheets), and the Internet (search engines, Email, and security). We'll mostly be using Windows and MS Office but I may get insurrectionary and start showing the students OpenOffice once they've got the basics down. I'm using Firefox for the Internet section instead of Internet Exploder.

Since my courses could be cancelled early or I could end up stuck without power for days, I've learned my lesson from last year and am jamming all the crucial parts of my computer course into the beginning: Basic operations and essential Windows material, Word, and Internet. If that's all I get through, fine. If I have time I will into more detail in these areas and cover Excel and maybe PowerPoint.

I also have some material I can teach on a blackboard, so if we lose power I can still get some work done. I've got lessons on Windows, the Internet, hardware, and computer maintenance in reserve in case I get stuck. If need be I can also do some of the office lessons on the board (for example, I can explain concepts like rows, columns and cells for Excel on a blackboard).

I've also written a short manual for the course with chapters on each of the subjects above using lots of pictures and short, clear explanations of basic concepts and functions. Years of experience writing software manuals for my previous employer came in handy here. Well, except for the fact that I had to write the whole thing in French. Hopefully this will both help them study and serve as a resource they can keep after the class is over.

Since I can't print it and give out copies (school won't pay for it) I put it in pdf form and am going to stick it on all the machines in the lab. Students that have USB keys can take a copy of the manual and print it themselves at one of the office boutiques in town. Since most Cameroonians don't own computers, many towns have small shops (often just a guy with a PC and printer) where you can pay to have documents typed and printed.

My second class is General English. This is a much harder class for me to teach. For one thing, it's huge. I have over a hundred students jammed into a big sweaty mass in one room. For another, I didn't have a background in teaching English when I came here and wasn't well prepared for it. I did some ESL tutoring for Literacy Volunteers of America before I came here, but this is very different. Finally, the students are at different levels. Some speak English well. Others don't know a word. I'm trying to aim somewhere in the middle, but it's challenging.

I've designed the course as a basic grammar and vocabulary review. Since it's only a 45 hour course basic is about all I'll have time for. I taught the first class in both French and English (to try to ease the beginners into it), but switched to total English immersion by the third class. Since I had to go through the pain of immersion during my training, I've decided to inflict it on my students as well. Besides, it works.

So, that's what I'm up to at the moment.

Crisis Situation

The road to Nanga Eboko is bad. Even by Cameroonian standards. It's unpaved almost the whole 170 kilometers from Yaoundé to here. In the dry season it turns to dust and visibility is often nil - like driving in whiteout conditions in a blizzard. In the rainy season (which we're now in) it turns to a sea of mud. Logging trucks use the road through Nanga to carry the equatorial African rain forest to Yaoundé or Douala a few trunks at a time. In the rainy season mud, these huge, heavy trucks destroy the road. And of course, road repairs are not Cameroon's strong suit.

I was told by the volunteer here before me that the road had gotten worse during his two years here, and it has continued to get worse during my time here. The last time I took a bus to Yaoundé we did a lot of slipping and sliding. It's become normal for people to get stuck in the mud on the road or trapped behind overturned tractor trailers for a night or two.

Fortunately, we are on the train line that goes from the north of Cameroon to Yaoundé, so for my last few trips I have been able to take the train (even though that means getting to the station at 3:30 AM).

However, the road has become so bad that most deliveries of goods from Yaoundé have stopped. The train only drops passengers in Nanga, so everything has to be trucked in over our crappy road. I first realized the implications of this when I went looking for eggs and was told that there were none to be had anywhere in town.

Then, on Friday I went to meet a friend in town for a beer and got the REAL bad news: there's no beer in town.

NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

OK, I'm exaggerating. They still had some Guinness but were out of everything else. Bet the Guinness is gone by now too. Ashia!

Friday, October 19, 2007

Crap. Viruses.

In my previous post on the challenges of computer maintenance in Cameroon, I should have mentioned that viruses are a massive problem here. Most people here don't think about security much. Public computers in cyber cafes are usually riddled with viruses, and everyone here uses USB flash drives to store their data. As a result, viruses spread like wildfire. We periodically get contagions here where a new virus spreads to practically every machine on campus.

Since I arrived here I've tried to improve things here by installing Grisoft's AVG Free on just about every machine I can get my hands on, and that has helped a lot. It's a pretty good program, and if you plug in a virus ridden USB key it automatically spots and cleans most viruses.

I've also tried to end the practice of installing multiple anti-virus programs on machines. While many people here pay no attention to security at all, others go overboard and decide that if one anti-virus program will protect their machine, why not three or four? Of course, having three anti-virus programs scanning your system at the same time will probably make your PC as slow as any virus or spyware would, so this ends up being counterproductive. I think they're finally getting that, and so now we usually just have one per machine.

Anyway, yesterday a students came to me asking if I could give him some free software I'd mentioned to him in conversation. I put it on my USB key and plugged into his laptop to copy it over. Later, I plugged into one of the PCs here to do some blog posting and found that I'd picked up a virus from him. AVG was on the machine so it cleaned the infected files, but in the process deleted them all. I made sure to give the guy a copy of AVG free as well and told him to clean his machine. Hopefully he will.

Unfortunately, among the deleted files were a series of blog posts I'd written (I often write them ahead of time and post them later) and pictures I'd selected to go up. I was all set to post tons of pictures of my school and village, but, alas, now I'll have to go rewrite the posts and find the pictures again. Ashia!

Crap. Viruses...

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Windows 3.1

Alive and well in Cameroon. Some student just brought me an ancient laptop running Windows 3.1 to ask for my help. The miraculous thing is that this old machine was running strong, in spite of what Cameroon normally does to computers. The embarrassing thing was that I had forgotten how to use 3.1 so it took me a few minutes to figure out what I was doing.

Monday, October 15, 2007

Eid

Friday was Eid, the festival that marks the end of Ramadan for Cameroon's Muslims. (Come to think of it, it marks the end of Ramadan for Muslims everywhere doesn't it?). Here they call it "aladji" which I think comes from "el hadji" - one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca. So anyone here who has gone to Mecca is referred to as "aladji."

Since Cameroonians of all religions love to party, Christians look forward to Muslim holidays and vice-versa. If you have friends from another religion it's normal to invite them to celebrate with you. So, Muslims go to Christians' houses for Christmas dinner, Christians break the Ramadan fast with Muslims, etc. A party is a party after all. Free food! Usually the only difference between parties here thrown by Christians and parties thrown by Muslims is that at the Muslim parties you drink soda instead of beer.

So, Friday night I was invited along with my friends Souaibou, Issa, Adamou, and Mr. Ndaki (all Christians) to the home of a Muslim friend in town to celebrate. He and his wife welcomed us with an enormous spread of food. We spent about two hours stuffing ourselves before heading home, and a good time was had by all.

Religiously, Cameroon is a mixed country. The majority are Christian (Catholic and Protestant) but there is a large Muslim minority which is concentrated in the north of the country with Muslim communities scattered throughout the rest of the nation. So, the two faiths are mixed. Every decent sized town in the country has both Christians and Muslims living next to each other. This is complicated by the persistence of many traditional (non-Christian and non-Muslim) religions as well. Many traditional religious practices are also blended with those Christianity and Islam as well, so if you go to a Christian church, you may well encounter rituals or customs that were part of the area's traditional belief system that have been incorporated into modern practices. So, religious lines can get pretty blurry here.

(A side note: there is a Jewish synagogue in Yaoundé near the Peace Corps office. I had had no idea there was a Jewish community in Cameroon until one night I saw a bunch of Cameroonians come out of the building all wearing yarmulkes. Blew my mind.)

The government here is officially secular, no religion is favored by the state, and all Cameroonian citizens enjoy freedom of conscience. On TV the news shows Muslims going to pray on their holidays and Christians going to pray on theirs. Polygamy is legal here, not just to accommodate Muslims but also those who practice traditional religions that are (usually) polygamous.

In general, there doesn't seem to be too much sectarian tension in Cameroon. I've run into a few Christians who say disparaging things about Muslims in general, and though I don't know too many Muslims I imagine there are those who say the same kinds of things about Christians. But, by and large people here seem to have a live-and-let-live attitude towards matters of faith.

My friends here at the University (which is a religious school) are quite proud of that. When I asked them once if there was a lot of religiously motivated violence in Cameroon, they scoffed at the idea. "What, kill someone because he is of a different faith? That would be stupid."

Yes, yes it would.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Peace Corps Cameroon's Peer Support Network

A group photo from the recent Peer Support Network workshop I was involved in. Twenty-o ne volunteers from all over Cameroon, plus Richard (the older gentleman in the back) who came from DC to help us set things up, PCMO Chad (our staff advisor) and Amadou, who is in charge of Peace Corps's Garoua office in northern Cameroon. Photo thoughtfully shared by volunteer Amber. Thanks Amber.


Black Vampire 2

While in Yaoundé at the end of last month, I ran into Volunteer Kelsey, who was on her way back to America. As it happens, she and her boyfriend Reese (also a volunteer who has since gone back home) were once randomly cast in a Cameroonian horror movie called Black Vampire. They were hanging out a hotel in Bamenda and the filmmakers were shooting the movie there. they were cast on the spot as tourists that get eaten by a bunch of Black Vampires.

I had heard stories of the legendary film, but had never had the chance to see it. When I saw her in Yaoundé I learned that the same director had made a sequel and cast the two of them again. She didn't have a copy of the original, but she did have a copy of Black Vampire 2. So, a bunch of us naturally gathered together at the Case de Passage to watch it.

Reese had a bigger part in the sequel, as an evil white man who was trying to get a magic book that would allow him to control the Black Vampires that were overrunning Cameroon and use them to take over the world (or something ... I guess). We didn't see much of Kelsey. There was a scene where she randomly helps the heroes attack the vampires and kicks one of them when he's down. Then another where she's found on the ground with bites in her neck and is rushed to the hospital. After that we are told only that "Sharon is responding to treatment."

We didn't make it through the whole movie, which was a shame because I could see it was quite possibly the best film ever made. I can only hope that one day it comes to America and we can all rent it on Netflix.

For the inside story on the making of Black Vampire, see Kelsey's pictures and story here.

Computer Maintenance in Cameroon

On Friday I finally finished getting the lab in order. Eighteen PCs fixed, loaded, and ready to go for my Informatique de Base class (Basic Computing), which is theoretically supposed to start this week.
Now trying to fix up PCs in our cyber cafe (now out of commission as a cyber cafe but I've turned it into a second mini-lab for teaching). Thanks to Bill, I was able to get four used PCs through an organization run by a former Peace Corps volunteer here in Cameroon who's now a high school computer teacher. He has his students fix up donated computers and then every couple of years brings a shipment here to donate to Cameroonian schools and other institutions. (Thanks to Michael and all his students at West Ottawa High!)

So recently, I've been fixing computers like a fiend. OK, not sure how exactly a fiend would fix a computer, but I bet they would do it my way...

Computer maintenance here is a slow and laborious process. The machines we have are all old, mostly built from parts that have been scrounged together from wherever we could find them. Usually when one machine dies we can swap its parts into another machine, and so by cannibalizing bad machines we can put together a working system or two. Of course, because of the mix of different processors, motherboards, types of RAM, etc, this doesn't always work.

Figuring out what's wrong, hunting down replacement parts, then installing and testing them (and hoping they're not bad as well) is always a big pain in the neck.

And our machines require a lot of maintenance, in part because of their age, but more so because of the harsh environment here. Cameroon kills computer. It has 1) lots of heat 2) lots of humidity (in the rainy season) and 3) lots of dust (in the dry season), all of which are bad for computers. Air conditioning is not usually an option outside of some offices in the bigger cities, and certainly not at most schools.

The worst hazard for PCs here is the power though. Electricity is constantly going out, and when it comes back up the resulting power surge can often fry machines that were left plugged in. Ideally, all PCs should be hooked up to a voltage regulator and/or a UPS power backup (I managed to snag a few for my mini-lab thankfully), but again, given the lack of resources these are often unavailable. In that case, when the power goes out during class I have all my students unplug the machines immediately. This doesn't guarantee that they won't be damaged by normal fluctuations in voltage (since it's unstable even when the power is on) but at least it reduces the risk of damaging the machine when it comes back on.

And of course, very often the power goes out when I'm in the middle of fixing a PC or installing software, or teaching class, so it's just plain annoying as well.

Thinking back to my days in corporate America, I realize now that I was working in paradise from a maintenance standpoint: power was stable and every machine had a backup; the office was climate controlled; computers were pretty new; and if something did break, hey just send someone to OfficeMax to buy a replacement on the company's dime. Here if a part blows I have to go all the way to the capital city of Yaoundé (four to eight hours away) to replace it, assuming the school has the money to replace it, which they often don't.

Yes, in terms of computer maintenance, America is truly the land of milk and honey, with streets paved with gold-filled integrated circuits.

On the bright side, all of this has been keeping me busy. And if you like a challenge it is satisfying to finally get a battered old Pentium 166 running again so your students can at least use it to practice their mouse and keyboard skills.

Such is the nature of service as a Peace Corps Volunteer: you do the best you can with what you've got. As they used to say in Great Depression era America: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."

Explosions

For some reason, a lot of things have been blowing up when I plus them lately. Power supplies that had been accidentally set to 110 volts (not by me), monitors, fried RAM and motherboards, power cables that had a nick in them. Lots of sparks and little fires and popping sounds and always the acrid smell of burning electronic gear. Perhaps the gods of fire are angry with me and are taking it out on my computers for some reason. Ashia!

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Knowing Just Enough to Be Dangerous

The University where I teach offers several different IT degrees. However, since many of the students have little or no prior computer experience before coming here, many of them are learning for the first time. Some do know more about computers, but since they're mostly self-taught or informally taught they may not have the best understanding of everything they're doing.

What this has meant, as I discover every time I do maintenance on PCs in the lab, is that there are a whole lot of students here who know just enough to wreak havoc but not enough to fix the damage they've caused.

And to make matters worse, last year all of them had the Administrator password. So much for security. Ugh. Hopefully we can keep a lid on the new password this year.

Busy Busy Busy

Working in the computer lab all day today (or until the power goes out) setting up computers for the start of classes next week. Marie Noelle (one of my coworkers) and I have eighteen machines to configure. Since many of them are screwed up in various ways we're just reformatting the disks and reinstalling everything clean. Yesterday power was out until 4 PM and then went out again at 8, so we only got in a few hours last night. Gonna be a long day. On the bright side while I wait for stuff to install maybe I can occasionally steal a minute to post ... like now.

Monday, October 8, 2007

Blog Love from Bill

I see Bill has posted a detailed review of my recent pratfall in a Buea gutter. Gee, thanks Bill ... I think ...

Update

Captain's Log. Stardate 10-8-2007.

Have been delinquent in updating the blog recently due to laziness combined with normal power and connectivity problems. In the last three weeks I:
  • Gave a few computer lessons to a pair of teachers at the college (private high school) that shares the campus with the university. Basic mouse and keyboard stuff.
  • Used some of the new spare parts I got from Bill to fix up another machine and upgrade a second in my little improvised computer lab. Still have three or four dead machines to fix.
  • Spent a week in Yaoundé for two things. First, Peace Corps Cameroon has set up a peer support network for volunteers and I was asked to join. Basically the idea is to have a list of volunteers around the country people can call if they need someone to talk to. (Being stuck alone at post while suffering through days of explosive diarrhea can get depressing.) Someone from Peace Corps Washington came out and gave us two days of counseling tips and helped us set up ground rules for organization, confidentiality, responsibilities, etc. Second, at my last province meeting I was elected the representative for the Center province volunteers to the Voluntary Advisory Committee (VAC). This is a committee composed of a volunteer from each province, the country director, and various other staff members that makes policies and addresses volunteer concerns. So, basically I'm the congressman for the volunteers in my province. While there I had hoped to do some posting, but the office was filled with other volunteers, meaning that the computers were occupied constantly.

Right now I'm working on some new (used) computers the university bought for the lab, getting them ready for the start of classes. The students are back today and my classes are supposed to start (in theory) next Monday.

It's been raining a lot lately. Water and mud everywhere. Power goes on and off .

That's about it for now. Eventually I will post some pictures and stories about what I did over the break, I swear.

End log entry.