By Azore Opio
The kids were on break. Some were playing football on a dust-filled pitch. Some just stood in small groups chatting. Others clustered under the only two shade trees that have survived the unscrupulous hands of vandals.
These kids need better environment to learn
There were no dragon flies to announce the advent of the dry season. Neither were there praying-mantises to frighten the schoolchildren nor grasshoppers hopping in the grass. The weather in Tiko though, was very friendly, thanks to an early morning shower next door in Mutengene.
The venue is the Government School Likomba Complex with a student population of some 300 kids all of them between 10 and 12 years old. They don’t have a toilet where they can answer to nature whenever it comes calling. The only structure that could serve them is an abandoned, half finished, doorless and roofless six-door block outfit.
The other one, which now serves as a screen for those hard pressed, is the old toilet – equally decrepit, roofless, doorless and nearly swallowed up by grass.So the kids; boys and girls alike, as well as their teachers, do their thing anywhere on the compound. One of the headmasters, Mr. Francis Akume, said they are usually greeted every morning by a compound strewn with all tribes of dung.
The schoolchildren don’t have potable water too, yet a clear stream flows hardly a dozen metres in front of their school. That is their toilet as well as their rubbish dump which they share with the neighbours. But this is not why CEHDev, Centre for Environmental and Human Development, a Buea-based NGO, went down to Likomba on Tuesday, December 16.CEHDev went down to introduce the pupils of Likomba Complex and Tiko Complex and their teachers to the phenomenon called climate change or global warming, if you like.
It was a prelude to a six-month programme aimed at sensitising the kids and their teachers on the adverse effects of climate change as CEHDev has observed in the Tiko area – the receding level of the Ndongo stream; the disappearance of fruit trees; the dwindling fish population and some popular species like “cover pot”, in the sea next door, due to the depletion of the mangrove swamps and their pollution with industrial waste; the disappearance of insects such as the praying-mantis, the dragonfly, the butterfly, chameleons, the monkey, the alligator and all the like.
The workshop was also the first of a dozen projects running from December 2008 to June 2009.The objectives of the projects are to raise the awareness of the schoolchildren and their teachers to change their attitudes and practices and take action in the fight against climate change; diffuse the knowledge on environmental degradation and waste disposal to the community, discuss the responsibility of schools in the fight against climate change, carry out baseline studies (what do the people know about climate change); training on tree nurseries and tree planting, establishment of nature clubs and organisation of environmental education lessons.
CEHDev hopes that by the end of the project, the participants would be enlightened enough to act responsibly and protect the environment.
God/ Allah/ Buddha help Cameroon.
I went to primary school in the early 80s in a little village so remote we used to consider Tiko a city! In my school we had public toilets and tap water....and that was in the 80s!! Why Cameroun di regress na regress? Is there really a God in that heaven? If so, why aren't "some" people dead?
Posted by: BrotherJohnson | Sunday, 21 December 2008 at 12:23 AM