Mbouda, Cameroon 2026

Host: SIL Cameroon

Venue: SIL regional office in Mbouda

Dates: January 12-23, 2026

Trainers: David Fetrow and Christoph Sasse

Website Managers trained: 9

Websites created: 5

Facilities

The workshop was held at the SIL office in Mbouda, which is close to (but not in) the Northwest Region of Cameroon. Although this was a six-hour drive from Yaoundé, it was logistically easier for the participants to attend a training here.

The facilities were basic but adequate. When we arrived in Mbouda on Saturday, IT staff were finishing installing a Starlink connection. In spite of this, we continued using the Matchbook during the workshop, which worked well for us and allowed us to continue working during power cuts and other interruptions to the Internet.

Participants

We had originally been told to expect up to 10 teams, but only 5 showed up (a sixth team cancelled at the last minute due to illness). One of the teams did not have much content to publish, while other teams with more content (including one with a recently published New Testament) did not attend. While that was a little disappointing, the teams that came were motivated and worked hard. Hopefully new procedures put in place for future workshops will make it easier to confirm participant information in advance.

We were also joined by Jonathan Abouem, who works for SIL Cameroon and was asked to attend the workshop to learn Wildfire and provide follow-up to the teams in the future. He was a quick learner and could be a good partner going forward.

Training Plan

One advantage of the smaller workshop size was that we were able to teach the content fairly quickly and spend more time working with individual teams. By the end of Day 1, every team had created a site map and built the basic page and menu structure for their sites. Most of the basic content types had been covered by the end of the first week.

We started the second week with a show-and-tell of what the teams had done so far, which also helped us to do an initial site audit and identify areas where each team needed help. The last few days were spent building home pages, learning more advanced content types, and fine-tuning the sites in preparation for launch. We talked quite a bit about promotion and maintenance going forward, and even had time to help several of the teams set up Facebook pages. All of the sites were basically finished by the end of Thursday, leaving Friday to tie up loose ends and celebrate the end of the workshop.

Launch

We tried to transfer the sites from the Matchbook during the workshop, but had some connection issues. After returning home, we were able to successfully transfer and launch all of the following sites: