Yaoundé, Cameroon

March 11 - 22, 2024 Instructors: Jon Barker & Dan Morgan

Dan and I arrived in NSI airport in Yaoundé, Cameroon on March 7th. Dan had to change plans as the first leg of his flight (Frankfurt – Brussels) was cancelled due to the Lufthansa strike which started the morning of the 7th. He was able to fly a day earlier and overnight with friends in Brussels before catching the rest of his flight.
Jon met with a colleague in Dallas, Texas, before traveling together to NSI. There were no issues with any of the flights and we arrived safely after 23 hours of travels. Dan arrived an hour before I did and waited at NSI to travel together to CABTAL. CABTAL (CAmeroon Bible Translation And Literacy) provided a driver to pick us up from the airport.

The apartment they provided was stocked with food and bottled water for us. Being on the 4th floor provides lots of steps for Dan and I to climb. (CABTAL offered to move us to a more accessible apartment, but we rather liked the view and the airflow on the fourth floor! The first few days we did not know how to turn on the hot water tank. Later we discovered the wiring for the tank was defective and was later repaired. The second night we experienced our first power outage. The CABTAL generator kicked on and we enjoyed power for the rest of the evening. Most evenings there were power outages; once the power was out for a whole day and two nights. The generator ran during the working day (as needed) and some part of the evening.

The lead IT Technician Etienne had to enter the access code for WiFi individually on each of our devices, and involved a third step (in a browser?) which meant that we could not set up the matchbook to take the center wifi (when it was working). The internet averaged 1-2Mbps down. It was later announced in the news that a cable in the Atlantic had been damaged, causing these issue. Most evenings, the center's WiFi did not work.

Dan purchased a data plan on arrival at the airport with MTN (the recommended cell provider) which has provided (somewhat) more reliable access, except for the first few days after the undersea cable incident.

this is during a power cut - thanks to batteries and efficient led lamps...

The weather here has been ‘unseasonably’ warm according to one CABTAL staff. On one occasion, Yaoundé felt like 97 with the heat index. We had thunderstorms/rain almost every afternoon or evening of the first week, which usually was accompanied by power outages.

The training facility is on the 3rd floor of the main CABTAL office. It’s cool enough in the morning to leave windows open, and in the afternoon, we had the luxury of using the wall unit air conditioners. It helped lower the temps by 1 or 2 degrees. There is a ‘deck’ on the one side of the conference room where students ate their breakfast and lunch. The fans on the walls were quite loud, so we asked for a sound system, which was provided on a rental basis.

There are 20 students participating in the course. This includes two language project facilitators. Jon’s translator (Jaques) is also a technician and cluster project facilitator. Upon learning what we are teaching this week, he said he wants us to return to do a training event for the projects he facilitates! The students lead out with a song and prayer before class. On Thursday one of the students voiced his concern that we should be starting with a ‘Bible Reading’/ Devotional time and that started the next day.

Surprises and lessons learned...

One surprise for me (Dan), was to learn that pdf versions of some material would not be made available on the websites, because that material was being sold in printed form, and it was feared that website visitors would then download the pdfs, print it and sell it themselves, depriving the projects of some income.
I know that some Bible societies do not release the text of 'their' scriptures for digital publication, because they depend on that income for their operations. But this was the first time I heard of that for literacy and other locally produced materials.
Very few of these sites ended up with any pdf content on their sites, so it would be good to clarify such points with our workshop host and the coordinators and make sure that digital copies of content which is approved to be on the site is really available.

Another thing I learned is a big reason why email communication with so many of our WMs (at least in francophone africa) can be so difficult:
When you get an android phone, you need help to set it up. And an email address is required. So (typical scenario) you get your son or your nephew or niece to help you set up your first email account. On your phone, you don't need to log in with password, so sooner or later you have lost or forgotten your password. If you suddenly need to access your email on a PC, you need that password. And you don't have it. And these days it is extremely difficult to recover your password from providers such as google and co., if you didn't take the appropriate precautions early on. So if you need an email address that you can access on a pc, you get someone to set you up with a new email address and the cycle starts over.
Kalaam comes along and asks for an email address, and the WMs look at you and say, which one?

When put to a vote, the students wanted a half day of training on Saturday (3/16). Some of them were able to return home to their families for the weekend. Students quickly understood how to login to Matchbook. One of the technical issues had was forgetting the passwords for their WM login. Some students had issues forgetting multiple times which led to some frustration. (A typical mistake that several made was simply trying to log in to the workshop website, instead of their own website!)

Raymond (on the left) is an academic software resource person and member of the numala team

The technical staff (Etienne, Timothé) have provided us with all necessary equipment for providing a good learning environment. Etienne has sat in on a number of the classes and has been able to assist students with technical needs. Jacques (Jon’s translator), Martial (project facilitator) and Raymond (one of the project members and academic computing resource person) are also helping students with issues.

Timothé

Etienne also does technical training for CABTAL, so the students are used to him. He presented Copyright/CC and file organization to students today (3/15) which was well received. He pointed out to us that the students need to be given clear steps on how to accomplish what we want them to learn. It requires going slow and being repetitive. We have about half the class that would be categorized as ‘getting it’ while others are slower and need more attention.

Dan did more of the teaching the first week. The students are eager to learn and are attentive to the lessons. They show up to class on time without any issues.

I, Jon have struggled under the heat and adjustment to the Cameroonian food. I was out on Tuesday with illness and returned to class that afternoon. I had a rash/bug bite on my neck Wednesday. Thankful for a sister of a friend who is a nurse that lives right across the street from CABTAL who diagnosed and provided treatment. There are 2-3 students who feel comfortable speaking to me in English.

STUDENTS

One pastor who is here shared how important it is for his people to have a website to share their Bible. His main house is in Yaoundé but he also has a house out in the village.
We have a chief from a tribe also attending the training. He is the main web manager for his website.
We have a young man working for the Nugunu language that has almost a working website in about 2 days of class.

During the second week, most evenings Dan and I would work through till 9pm and students could access the Matchbook from a conference room next to the apartment we are staying in.

Graduation

By Wednesday of the second week, we had a sense the students pages were close to being ready to publish. We spoke with the CABTAL director and Thursday at 3PM would be their certificate program. CABTAL offered to have the certificates professionally printed as this was the 'cultural' practice. Because the interent was slow, I had to copy the PDF download from CANVA of the certificates to a thumb drive and deliver to the director. Many mistakes were found in typos and after 4 attempts we finally had a good certificate. It may be best to get started on this earlier in the training as extra costs were incurred when the printer printed an earlier version of the document.

During the actual ceremony, Jon's translator (Jacques) took over the moderation until the interim director of training (Fabien) could arrive. Jaques is a natural moderator and did a great job. This gave Dan and I opportunity to express our thoughts about the training to the students and guests. In Cameroon, the certificate is very important event, so each team could invite two individuals. Family members in the area were invited along with other dignitaries of CABTAL.

We had close to 50 in attendance, including the students. A cultural thing seems to be that multiple people are invited to distribute the students certificates, which led to some awkward moments as we were not sure where we should stand once others successively took over the hand-shaking and distribution of the certificates. A light 'snack' was served after the program.

The students were thrilled to receive their certificates.

After the closing ceremony we both stayed on until dinner (about 6:30) to answer questions, and allow some of the students to continue working on their sites. Although officially we were finished, we said we would be available to work with teams the next morning as well, expecting 2 or 3 teams to stay - instead 5 teams stayed on, which meant we had to rent the main hall another day, since the smaller conference rooms were booked for some consultant checks the last few days.

We were able to present some teaching on links and text on image that we hadn't gotten to in the workshop, but then we got onto a topic that generated a lot of discussion and basically took up the rest of the morning: using the websites to present information on how to support the translation projects and related activities.

At the end of the morning we were invited to stay on for a mini-dedication with the Nulibié team: the pre-publication proof of their New Testament had arrived, and there was a program including a meal, some music from the local artists and speeches from important members of the community. The website managers who we trained are also the translators for the project, so this was an important milestone for them.

Due in part to the uncertainty of which sites would really be ready to launch by the end of the workshop, and whether the internet would be good enough for teams to work on their sites the last few days, I (Dan) waited too long to request the purchase of the domain names and did not give enough advance notice to sys-admin to allow the transfer of sites to our server.

Instead, I spent several days following my return to Germany going back and forth with each team by whatsapp, making suggestions for final improvements to the sites, pointing out bits of translation that still were needed, and in a number of cases making some improvements for the teams. We were able to launch 9 out of 10 sites by the end of the week following the workshop.

Website Managers trained: 20

Websites Launched: 9

Just before I (Dan) began working on finalizing this update, the WM for the one team which has not yet launched their site contacted me by whatsapp to request an audit as he feels his site is ready to launch. So I expect that site will also be launched in the next few days.

Download:

pre-dedication nulibié

Tuki	www.asttuki.com
Daba	www.dabalabar.org
Nulibié	www.ugeluhuábelíb.com
Lefa	www.codelefa.com
Merey	www.mereymedia.org
Numala	www.astradenum.com
Muyang	www.muyangmedia.net
Nugunu	www.niimbonugunu.org
Yambetta	www.yambeta.com
Nuasúe	www.nuasue.org