Yaoundé, Cameroon II - 2024

Host: CABTAL - Cameroon Association for Bible Translation and Literacy
Venue : Chapman Center (CABTAL), Yaoundé
Trainers: Dan Morgan, Rebecca Tangou
Dates: December 2 to 13

Dan's travel to Yaoundé (via Istanbul) went without any delays or issues.  Rebecca was already in Yaoundé, as she had just finished teaching a 7 week media course at iDelta - (a three year cycle of training courses for personnel involved in language projects held at the SIL training center).  Her participation as a Kalaam trainer was possible through arrangements with her director at SIL Togo. 

Preparation of the Matchbook server also went without any difficulty. 
Since this was the first time installing this updated platform, there was only limited documentation to work from, so Stefan stepped me through through the process. Overall the setup was much easier - requiring much less intervention on my side - I am guessing that the new documentation will  amount to less than 25% of the detailed instructions we previously had in our matchbook setup documentation. 

Internet connection and power. 

We had very few noticeable power cuts during the workshop, the center generator came on when needed.  On Saturday before the course started Etienne took me to the next MTN boutique (Internet provider office) where we spent a good part of the morning getting setup with a mobile router and unlimited data (supposedly at 10mbps) for a month.  This was because the center wifi was not expected to be consistent, due to work in the area. 
In the end the mobile data did not perform as promised most of the time, but the router - (and an account registered in my name) are available for future workshops. The data plan - which as a special offer included the modem - cost 35 to 40 USD. 

Rebecca and I and all the participants were lodged  in the CABTAL apartments. 
This was the second time for CABTAL to host a website workshop  - within 9 months! We benefitted from their experience and things ran smoothly. 

We had 10 teams, (18 participants) all from the Eastern Region of Cameroon. Rebecca  and I shared the teaching; we moved a bit slower through the material, allowing more time for practical application between 'lessons'. As a result not all of the topics were covered, but we felt that the participants were better able to put the topics discussed and demonstrated into practice.  Two of the teams had other commitments and came late in the first week - but quickly caught up. 

 Etienne (IT and technical training) and Jaques (facilitator for the projects in the Eastern region) were available to help students and Etienne also presented the session on copyright and one or two other topics. 

Meeting with SIL and CABTAL

On Monday of the second week Rebecca and I met with Fabien, our host at CABTAL, and Sandrine (the project implementation coordinator at SIL) to discuss future needs and cooperation with SIL and CABTAL in the area of websites for their projects. 
SIL Cameroon has 30 ongoing language projects and would like to see each of them have an active website. 

CABTAL is involved with 116 language communities - 62 of those are active projects, and 54 are either in the initial stage, or already have the New Testament or whole Bible. 

Between the two organisations, they would like to plan for 3 website workshops in the calendar year 2025, hoping to hold the first one for 12 anglophone teams in April! Seven of the teams would come from CABTAL and 5 languages would come from SIL. 

 Unfortunately the April date is probably too early for good planning, as it is only 3 months away. For the following two 2025 workshops they proposed August and December. 

In view of the number of projects needing websites I told them we should really focus on training a website trainer. They both reacted favorably to this, but I think we need to talk with them in more detail about what that would mean. 

 ... 

In the second week I arranged with Stefan to upload the sites on the Thursday night.  He got them queued up, but after the first site transferred correctly, there was a problem with the hub VM during the processing of the second site, so none of the other sites transferred that night. I was able to launch that one site during the closing ceremony Friday, but the other 9 sites were only uploaded once I was back in Germany, and over the following week I did some final clean up and launched the remaining sites one by one. 

WhatsApp groups

As I prepared each site for launch there were often last minute questions I had for the teams. 

I made separate WhatsApp groups for each website; these included both WMs but also Jaques, Etienne and Rebecca.  

This allowed Jaques to sometimes answer on behalf of the WMs (he usually knew whether they had any connectivity), and I wanted Etienne to be aware of the issues that sometimes need to be discussed/resolved in the final phase before launching each site. Rebecca was included in case she had opportunity to clarify something when I may not have been at my desk.   These groups are still there, and some of the website managers have used them to ask for help.