Books for Cameroon

Salut toute le monde!! Back from my Europe vaca (fabulous, details below..) and it's now the time to let you in on a project my friends and I have been working on steadily for the past year. As I've mentioned before when you're a new PCV your first few months at post are spent...how do I best put this...like a small child? You're completely unsure of your new surrounding-a place you're now suppose to call home. You can't possibly go to the market alone-some older more experienced PCV should certainly hold your hand. Once you finally make it to the market to buy food for the day-day is considered complete. And like the praise we give for a child reciting their ABC's or counting to 10-we feel we deserve it for using phrases outside of "Tu pars ou?". And once again what all this means: when a principal asks if you'd like to teach English at their school you instantly say "Yes!"
By early November I'd heard from many SED volunteers who had already started volunteering at their local school and by the time we could finally see each other face-to-face again at IST, we were all saying the same thing: yes we really enjoy our students, but it's so difficult when there are no books! In our post IST/"I'm still so stuffed from Christmas dinner i don't wanna move" trance not leaving our houses and diving into Internet research was a welcomed option. Over the course of the next few weeks we received several reply's back from family and friends willing to pack up all their old children's books and send them over. To them we say "Thank You" but we seem to have found a better option.
Inspired by former PCV's in South Africa who recently carried out the project we decided to launch our very own. Books for Africa, specifically Books for Cameroon. In a nutshell if we found the schools and raised the funds Books For Africa would send the books. 22,000 English textbooks a.k.a A LOT of books! Over the next few months myself and three other PCV's carefully selected five schools each that we found reliable and sufficiently equipped to receive 1000+ books. The schools were, to say the very least, elated. Many praises to Wendy who has taken on the bulk of the work thus far trying to get this project off the ground-researching, sending emails, and more emails, and more emails :) One year later the project is well under way. Where we're at now? The fundraising stage of course!
Here's where you come in and get to be a part of the project yourself. With only 10 months left in-country we've got about a month to bug everyone that we know for $$, so BFA will send the books by November/December, so we have time to properly mobilize and train 30 teaching staffs on proper library management, so 22,000 books arrive in Daoula by February/March, so we have adequate time to sort/deliver them, so that by the Fall of 2010-even before that for the summer reading programs-thousands of Cameroonian children qnd adults will have access to practically new textbooks. Two things I'm particularly excited about with this project: 1. For all the students who I know could really excel if just give the opportunity for self-study having books makes it possible 2. The quality of the textbooks is much, much better than what they're able to buy over here. Below is a list of websites that will be able to tell you more about our project. Attention teachers: there are several ways with which you can incorporate Books for Cameroon into your classroom learning. I would love to hear from you and can certainly provide additional help so please message me at katecook2@gmail.com. The Europe updates I guess will have to wait, time to eat crepes (it's like I'm still in France chez Wendy) and then it's off to Bafoussam to try and get my computer fixed. A broken computer = a volunteers worst nightmare. Wish me (it) luck that it's not the CPU! Waiting to hear from all of you.....


To learn more about the project: http://roundtwocameroon.blogspot.com/2009/05/books-for-cameroun-phase-i.html
To Make a Tax-Deductible Donation: http://www.booksforcameroon.org/
Resources for Classroom For Cameroon: http://tiny.cc/cfc1
Books For Africa: http://www.booksforafrica.org/