L'Américaine au Cameroun

My bank has three old computers in various states of reliability. When I arrived, one computer was set up on the cashier’s desk, though never turned on, the CPU of another was behind her desk, and the various other parts of two and a half computers were stacked in a corner of the storage room. After an hour or so, I managed a combination that works.

Over the last few weeks, I have done a series of one-on-one lessons with each of the three employees on basic computer stuff and how to use Microsoft Word. The accountant and I worked together first, followed by the cashier. Both of these women knew the basics: How to turn on the computer, the ‘double-click,’ how to open a program. Working with them was just about showing them the frosting they could put on their letters, forms and signs for the front door.

Next came Napoleon. Napoleon is the guardian of the bank, but guardian should be understood very loosely. He sits in front of the bank, he walks around the carrefour, he smokes cigarettes outside. We don’t have much to guard, and what there is, he doesn’t guard much. Napoleon makes 9,000 cfa a month – about $16 – and still manages to send his children to school. Public school tuition, excluding books and uniforms, is 15,000 cfa a year.

Napoleon has been working the same job with the same salary for ten years. He is one of a very small and relatively lucky group of people who have a steady source of cash each month. Most people here are unemployed or underemployed. Even when people have jobs, they can often go for months without seeing their salary. Most families grow their own food, carry their own water from the river or the town well and walk for half a day to chop their own wood for cooking. With their most basic needs met, life is about the search for cash needed for things that can’t be grown: School fees, funerals, clothing, giving birth in the heath center instead of at home, concrete to put over the dirt floors, electricity or candles. Most kids aren’t in school; some because they didn’t pass level but most because their parents can’t afford the tuition. Lots of kids as young as eight work around the carrefour fetching water or wood or selling small things.

Many families that aren’t very educated only speak Bangou’s patois and lots of kids begin French when they begin primary school. For those that don’t go to school, and don’t speak French at home, they will probably grow up and inherit their families fields, as the forests are depleted the daughters will walk ever further than the mothers for wood, and the sons will grow up worrying about the search for small cash like their fathers do now.

Napoleon is bilingual (patois and French) and quite literate, so he must have completed a fair bit of school. After putting the lessons off for a few days due to electricity cuts, we finally sat down together at the computer. Not only had Napoleon never used a computer before, he had never used a typewriter. We started out looking at the computer. I described where the computer does its’ thinking, how we communicate with the computer and how the computer communicates with us. Napoleon watched me turn the computer on. He watched me turn it off. Then he turned it on. When it got time to turn it back off again, we ran into a big problem: The mouse.

I was expecting him to have difficulties with double-clicking the mouse but it hadn’t occurred to me that he’d have problems with the movement of the mouse. From his perspective – one that’s not been using computers for as long as they can remember – the movement of the mouse on the desk and on the screen don’t really mirror each other. See, when you want the mouse on the screen to move up, you move the mouse backwards. Down, you pull the mouse forwards. Doesn’t make sense.

At this point, I closed the folder for my lesson plan. There was no way we were going to get to ‘font size,’ ‘save as,’ ‘page up’ and ‘page down.’ Napoleon and I spent the next hour and a half moving the mouse, opening programs and closing programs. Once he got the concept, if not necessarily the feel, of the mouse I told him to open up Microsoft word. He opened the program and I explained the keyboard. “Now,” I said, “why don’t you write a letter and then we’ll learn how to save it.”

This is what Napoleon wrote:

Monsieur Directeur:
J’ai l’honneur vous demandez l’emploi.
Merci*

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*Mister Director:
I have the honor of asking you for employment.
Thank you