The Plan

In early February of this year, Brian and I attended the Overseas Teaching Fair at the University of Northern Iowa; we had always talked about teaching abroad together, and we decided that now--before we have kids and a house to take care of--would be the perfect time.   At the beginning of this whole process, we assumed it would be hard to find a school that needed two English teachers and that we wouldn't get to be too picky, so we were surprised by the large number of locations with positions available.  (A quick plug for the UNI Fair: we were blown away by the event's organization and recommend it to anyone who is considering teaching overseas!)  We signed up for about a dozen interviews, but after only five--Mexico, Honduras, Haiti, Cameroon, and Dubai--we had made our decision. 

For the next two years, Brian and I will be teaching at the American School of Yaoundé in Cameroon.  (www.asoy.org)  Don't feel bad if you have no idea where this is—we didn't either until it became an option.  It's in central Africa and touches the coast where West Africa starts to curve down toward the south.  

  

The country is bilingual (English and French), so I’ll need to shine a light into that dusty corner of my mind where four years of high school French are stored…or maybe just take lessons once we get there.  It sounds like a beautiful place, and several sources have said it’s like all of Africa in one country because of the incredibly diverse ethnic groups and variety of landscapes (volcanic mountains, beaches, rainforests, deserts, savannas). 

The city where we’ll be, Yaoundé, is the capital and has about 1.5 million people.  (The whole country is about 1.5 times the size of Colorado.)  The school is on US Embassy land and is mostly made up of kids of ambassadors and diplomats from an array of countries.  It's a very small private/nonprofit school, and the two of us will be the entire English department for grades 6-12.  (We had our first “department meeting” the other day.  It went something like this: “You’re good at this and this, so why don’t you teach these classes.”  “Ok, and you’re better at that and that, so you teach these other ones.”  “Perfect.”  And then we went back to eating dinner.  This is going to be nice.)  We’ll each have to teach five different preps, which will be a lot of planning, but since the classes are small, grading shouldn’t be too bad.

In terms of why we chose this particular school, there were many reasons:

1. Neither of us has ever been to Africa, so it will be a totally new place for us to explore together.  Along this same line, we know we’ll travel to Europe and other places that are more traditional, but there’s no guarantee we’d ever visit a place like this on our own.

2. All of the people we interviewed with seemed great, but we really connected with the principal/superintendent of this school.  She’s actually from Boone—small world—and right away we felt we could trust her to be honest with us and support us in this new situation.

3. Many of the schools we looked at treated their campuses as little American islands that you never had to venture outside of; this was obviously not what we wanted in an international position.  ASOY on the other hand, places a lot of emphasis on preparing its students to be global citizens and does this in part by getting them involved in their community.  The students have to log 75 service hours before graduating, and the school helps them connect with groups helping kids orphaned by AIDS, people without proper housing, etc.  This part of the school’s philosophy was a major selling point for us—we didn’t get into teaching to work in isolated compounds of affluence—and we can’t wait to get involved with the service projects. 

4. Finally, Brian’s contract has NO extracurriculars in it!  I’m sure he’ll get involved coaching something, but it will be his choice.  One thing is for sure: he will not be responsible for two plays, the yearbook, the speech team, cross-country, and girls track, which means we might actually see each other occasionally. :) 

The school is providing us with a three-bedroom apartment, so we’re telling people that if you can afford the ridiculously expensive plane tickets, you’re welcome to stay with us!  We’re getting really excited, but we don’t leave until August, so we still have a lot of preparing to do.  In the meantime, we’ll try to update this page with news as we get it.  Also, sometime in July we’re going to visit Emily (Lindsey’s sister) in Peru, so we’ll post pictures from that trip, as well.  Let us know what questions you have about all of this, and we’ll do our best to answer them.  Thanks to everyone who has already expressed their support and encouragement—we’ll be in touch!