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Moving to Cameroon with a child?

 
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panthalassa



Joined: 11 Oct 2011
Posts: 1

PostPosted: Wed Oct 12, 2011 5:03 pm    Post subject: Moving to Cameroon with a child? Reply with quote

My fiance is from Cameroon and I am an American. We are expecting our first child in February. We have discussed the possibility of moving to Cameroon but I think we would have to wait until our son is at least a year old. I just have a few questions about life in Cameroon, especially some concerns about our son.

I know yellow fever and cholera are required immunizations for entering Cameroon. I read that babies should not get these immunizations until they are 9 months to 1 year old. Are they exempt from the immunization requirement until they are old enough to have the vaccine? I don't think I would want to risk exposing my child to those diseases without the vaccine but I am just wondering what the requirements are. I assume we would just not be allowed to take our son to Cameroon until he had those immunizations.

Were you able to find childcare?

Do you have any safety concerns in Cameroon? I have read that some parts of Cameroon can be dangerous but that is true of any country. We would be living in either Douala or Yaounde.

What kind of jobs are available to foreigners in Cameroon? I have teaching experience in Korea and preschool teaching experience in the US, but no teaching degree. I am just wondering what kind of job opportunities would be open to me.

Thank you for any help.
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Mr. English



Joined: 25 Nov 2009
Posts: 298
Location: Nakuru, Kenya

PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2011 2:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have never worked in Cameroon, but I spent a couple of months there in 2006. Douala and Yaounde are both typical African cities: There is poverty and wealth, there is street crime, there is prostitution, there are good people and there are bad; exercise caution at night on the streets. Africa is not a cheap place to travel, and is not necessarily a cheap place to live either, though it depends on how you live. Food can be bought cheaply in markets; restaurants are not cheap. Internet connections tend to be the shits, though this might improve shortly as a cable is in the process of being laid around Africa that should improve things immensely. Telephone calls are expensive, and air travel between African countries is expensive. There are some fine beaches in Cameroon. They cut their forest down at an alarming rate, though there is still fine forest to be found. French is commonly spoken among those who are educated, and English is spoken best by the educated in the French parts of the country; in the English parts they speak a patois that is difficult to follow. Corruption thrives; at the airport say "no" to everyone; there is no charge to get your luggage through customs, baggage handlers' claims notwithstanding. You will find Douala to be far more interesting than Yaounde; Yaounde is a bore, nothing much there, just a sprawl that happens to be the capital; Douala is an actual city.

And work, not much that I know of.
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nomad soul



Joined: 31 Jan 2010
Posts: 11454
Location: The real world

PostPosted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 9:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

On a related note...

Cameroon’s Language Divide Disrupts Education
Al-Fanar Media | 30 May 2018
Source: https://www.al-fanarmedia.org/2018/05/a-language-divide-disrupts-education-for-some-in-cameroon/

Pertula Ngeng Yuh wants to take the exams she must pass to receive her country’s General Certificate of Education and graduate to secondary school. But the 15-year-old girl must wait at least two more years. She’s now taking the first of three years’ worth of “ordinary level” courses before she can take the exams. “In my new class, children are younger than those like me who come from the English-speaking side,” she said, referring to the language divide in this predominantly French-speaking Central African nation.

Pertula and her mother fled to this coastal city more than a year ago to escape an increasingly violent conflict in Cameroon’s English-speaking Northwest Region, where a crackdown on protests by Anglophones escalated into military clashes between armed secessionist groups and government troops.

The tensions along the language divide have become so intense that many young Cameroonians have fled to neighboring countries in Africa, and some have even joined the thousands of Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans who have migrated to Europe seeking a new life.

For Pertula, relocating to Douala was a setback educationally. In September 2016, she started taking ordinary-level courses at Wum Catholic Mission School in Bamenda, the capital of the Northwest Region. A few weeks after classes started, however, teachers in the region went on strike to protest discrimination against English-speaking Cameroonians. More militant protesters later threatened to burn down the school if it opened.

“People warned us that if we went to school they would burn our school,” recalled Pertula.

(End of excerpt)
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