LE JOUR (Cameroon)
NKOL-METET – When class is over in Nkolya II School, in the small Cameroonian village of Nkol-Metet, children get to work.
As in many Cameroonian schools, children, sometimes as young as six years old, do personal tasks for their teachers -- like carrying firewood to their teachers’ houses at the end of the day, drawing water and harvesting their fields.
The children are "paid" with candies and fruit juice, and “have fun,” explains Avoulou Yolande, 7, to the Cameroonian newspaper Le Jour. But parents are starting to fight back: “If you’re the only parent to ask the teacher to stop your child chores, the risk is to face an anger that will have consequences on the teacher’s attitude towards the child,” one mother, Marguerite Olama, told Le Jour.
Read the original story in French
