Change of Plans

Today Harold and I sat down with the director and founder of our school. We spent an hour and a half discussing how she started the school and how she continues to keep it functioning. It was an incredible story and as I will explain later, has motivated me to take a more active role in assisting the school.

The director’s deaf daughter was not born deaf. She caught meningitis at a young age, and it was the sickness that caused her deafness. This disability presented a huge challenge for the family. The parents had an incredibly hard time communicating with her, and disabled children in Cameroon are usually denied the opportunity to attend school. The schools do not have the money or the training to deal with any type of disability, so most disabled children are either uneducated ,or if they are lucky, receive home schooling. [As a related sidenote, our Cameroonian friend Raymond, whose legs were crippled at birth and needs two metal walking sticks attached to his arms to walk, tried for years to receive permission to attend school and only succeeded after his family agreed to pay a higher fee for school. ] Faced with this problem, she decided to start the first deaf children’s school in all of Douala. With limited funds and limited time (she worked at an insurance company in order to support her family) she started the deaf school in her own house in 1986. For eight years she hosted the school at her home, and for eight years she wrote the social services department of the government repeatedly asking for a building for her school.

Finally, in 1994, the government granted her request and gave her the building that still serves as the school building today. For a few years the current director did not run the school and hired another person to manage the logistics of the school, because she had to continue working at the insurance company. After having suspicions about money handled by the past director, she decided to quit her job and began to run the school full-time, taking a large pay cut in the process.

Throughout that late 90’s the school was still relatively small, with only deaf children attending for the first 17 years the school was in existence. In the early 2000’s, the director set out to solve a large problem at the school. The children that she was teaching would leave the school around 18 or 19, armed with basic education and practical skills such as woodworking or sewing, and would nearly always end up returning to the school because their attempt at integrating in society had failed. Their inability to communicate with non-hearing impaired individuals, combined with the taunting and teasing they were confronted with because of their disability, almost always sent them running back to CRES (the acronym for the French name of our school).

To combat this issue, our director decided to integrate the school with non-hearing impaired children and successfully did so in 2003. To date the school has 300 children attending, and integration has paid off in many amazing ways. For one, it has created much greater understanding in the community and greater Douala. With each new class of students, there are more children and parents of students’ who are sympathetic to, understanding of, and un-phased by the deaf. The children have also more easily learned how to read lips, speak without hearing themselves, and find ways to sign that are more intuitive and therefore easier for non-deaf persons to understand.

Additionally, many parents actually hid their deaf children, ashamed of the impairment and unaware that there were other children with the same disability. The school has shed light on the issue of deafness and has allowed parents to become educated about hearing impairments and proactive about helping their child.

It is fantastic to see the deaf interact with the other students in the school. Because the children are so young and introduced to the deaf at such an early age, they treat them no differently and do not view them as handicapped at all. The school decided to start issuing uniforms about five years ago, and it is an immense source of pride for the children, especially the deaf, to show that their are apart of a school community that they love so much.

While much has been accomplished, it has not come without great struggle or hardship, especially for the director and her family. In giving up her insurance job and completing dedicating her life to the school, the family has not only lowered their standard of living, but has given every extra cent they could come by to help keep the school running.

The main problem with funding is that almost every child that attends CRES is incredibly poor. The school building is provided by the government but no other money is given to support the school. All of the money the school makes is from school fees. It costs a child 80,000 CFAs (approx $180 USD) a year to attend school. These fees are intended to cover all 12+ of the teacher’s salaries; chalk, pencils and crayons; water for the children; utility bills; chairs, desks and school journals, and fabric and wood for the older children who use the materials to make dresses and wood products to sell.

As you may have guessed, many of the children’s families are unable to pay the 80,000 CFA fee. In fact, almost every single child attending the school does not pay the full amount. Knowing that the school is the children’s entire world, and that being forced to leave would be absolutely devastating, the director has allowed all of the children to remain enrolled in the school no matter how many months or years fees they still owe the school. This generosity has of course presented a huge problem for the director, and many times the school was precariously close to shutting down and only survived because of very timely donations from locals who could afford it.

This past August our director faced immense tragedy when her deaf daughter, her entire motivation for creating and continuing to run the school for all of these years, died suddenly (she did not elaborate on the cause of the death). [Note: I had written in an earlier post that the deaf daughter was still alive and working at the school, but it was actually a different deaf teacher who is not related to the director, I misunderstood the first time around because I was very poor at French when I first arrived.]

The director said she was so bereaved that she did not want to continue with the school, because all of the enormous difficulty she faced running the school would be too much to bear without her daughter there with her. However, all of the deaf students began fundraising in the local community in order to ease some of the administrative burden she faced. She also said they provided a great amount of emotional support, and each of them also paid for a bus ticket to a distant town in order to attend her daughter’s funeral, where only the deaf were allowed to handle her casket and bury her.

What I hope to stress here is how amazingly resilient our director is. Not only has she survived the death of her daughter, she has recovered the school from a very damaging fire in 1995, and has continued to carry on despite unbelievable funding obstacles.

When I asked what she would do if she had more money, her immediate response was that she would first pay the teachers a higher salary. Because of the limited amount of income the school receives in fees, the teachers are only paid 70,000 CFA a month, or around $150 USD. While life here is certainly relatively cheaper than in the U.S., this is hardly enough to have a decent standard of living. To put this into perspective, they probably spend 12,000 CFA every month just on their commute to work. Also, I’ve been here for less than a month, and I’ve spent 150,000 CFA – and I don’t pay for my housing or 80% of my meals. I know it is a daily struggle for these teachers to get by, and they work very hard and are exhausted after struggling every day to teach the children (teaching these young children, especially the deaf ones, is very rewarding but very draining – the classes are much too big and it is very very hot in the classrooms). The director laments that her teachers should be receiving at least twice the salary that they receive currently.

Additionally, there are many many other areas that the school needs monetary support in. Wood and fabric are always low in supply, there is not enough water for the children, and many are without proper writing utensils. The school also pays for training for their teachers, so that they are more equipped to work with the deaf, and also pays for a doctor to visit and check the deaf children’s hearing so that the teachers know what level hearing they have.

After hearing this story I knew that I wanted to help the school increase its funding so that it may continue its mission and be able to better compensate its teachers. I think school is of the utmost importance when it comes to development, especially here in Douala. In Cameroon, a good education is one of the only means of staying out of poverty. Most importantly, school is not a handout or a temporary fix, instead, it helps the children help themselves. Furthermore, the students at CRES are not only learning math, French, English and many other subjects, but they are also learning how to accept differences and to treat all people equally. CRES is the only school of its kind in Douala, even 25 years after its founding. Without it, the deaf children in Douala would have no where to turn.

So, I have come up with a plan to help CRES’s monetary situation:

1. I am going to be donating $1000 of my own money to the school. I was lucky enough to earn a $20,000 scholarship, paid Research Assistant position and have support from my parents to attend Georgetown, so I plan to work as many RA hours as possible to make up for this debt.
2. I am going to create a fundraising website, somewhat similar to the one I made to support my volunteer trip to Vietnam. I hope to feature pictures of the director and her family, children and their life hardships (almost every one has a very tough background), and will use this space to explain the need for additional funding at CRES.
3. I am also going to actively seek out grants from non-profit organizations in the developed world. I am thankfully quite familiar with this process because of the nature of my past internships at human rights organizations. Although both 2 & 3 will be difficult with the poor internet connection here, I am hoping to locate a very good internet cafe, which I recently found out does exist.

Before I officially begin any of these activities, I am going to sit down with my French teacher tomorrow and write a letter to the director in French to explain my plan and obtain her approval. While I am fairly sure she will accept a donation from me, I want to make sure she is comfortable with the idea.

Right now all I ask is that you please consider the importance of this school and its survival. If after tomorrow I receive permission to go ahead with these activities, I will post on my blog that I have approval and then I will elaborate on how you can help if you are interested.

Thank you for reading.