27 months

Since the day I gave him a complimentary student card for the TRC, my 18-year-old neighbor Simon has been a near-constant fixture in the computer lab. He would often open the Centre with me first thing in the morning and stay until late afternoon, all the while exploring the ins and outs of Windows and, later, HTML. When the Video Professor learning library arrived back in April, Simon was immediately drawn to the course on Web Design. He was still new to using Windows, but I didn’t discourage him from tackling an advanced subject. He attacked the material with uncommon zeal, filling notebooks with examples of well-formed markup, experimenting with tag attributes and often committing to memory syntax I might use a reference to reproduce. In the first couple of days he was alt-tabbing from Notepad to Firefox and refreshing the browser to see his changes. When he started quoting web safe colors in hexadecimal I knew we were onto something.

Lucky for us, Joe’s final 3-week web design course at began around the same time I was leaving for an extended visit to Yaounde. I insisted that Simon first complete his Windows studies as a prerequisite to Joe’s class. He applied himself at the computer by day and reviewed his notes on my veranda, often until late in the evening (a sure sign of a dyed-in-the-wool hacker). The week before I left he passed his Windows exam with flying colors and earned the first computer literacy attestation issued by the TRC. Here’s Simon on May 7^th, the day he received his attestation (Cameroonians are famously serious when posing for portraits and he couldn’t keep a straight face for the camera):

With his credentials in hand, I enrolled Simon in Joe’s class and paid his course fee. The program Joe put together is really impressive and the personal attention he gives his students made it absolutely ideal for Simon. When I returned to post at the end of May, Simon was beside himself with excitement describing Joe’s teaching methods and his newfound grasp of semantic markup, cascading style sheets and so on. As a follow-up to Joe’s web design class, Joe Heather paid Simon’s course fee for Joe’s intensive, one-week introduction to Photoshop.

Update: Simon got his first tech job this week working in a new cyber café opposite the University of Buea. In doing so he’s achieved his first goal of becoming a computer “administrator” of sorts (he would often try to hack the admin password at the TRC) and the Internet is, at last, free of charge.