FROM CAMEROON TO CHINA 

A DREAM TOWARD PUBLIC SERVICE

At first, it was like a lucid dream…

My friends call me Duki and I like it. I am a little girl living a dream I didn’t believe in. I had a dream to change many things I didn’t like in my country. Things like administrative bottlenecks when pursuing documents in government offices, the challenges faced in the obtention of simple documents, etc. I dreamed of a smooth administrative system where things could be done fast and conveniently without too much red tape. I grew up watching my parents go through that pain. I knew I was just dreaming. Who was I and what power did I have to change anything in a country? I couldn’t even change anything in our small family of five, let alone my country.

That was many years ago when I was still schooling in my beloved country, Cameroon. It is a country with many neighbors, located in the central part of Africa, with Nigeria to the west, the Central African Republic to the east, Tchad to the north, overlooking the Equatorial Guinea, the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean, Gabon and Congo to the south. Cameroon is often referred to as “Africa in miniature” and rightly so because the country is an embodiment of North, South, West, Central and East Africa in many aspects like climate, geography, lifestyle and traditions. If you ever found yourself in a situation where you could only visit one country in Africa, pick Cameroon and you would have experienced a microcosm of Africa.

I didn’t believe in myself very much back then because of many reasons. Life was difficult, my dad was far away from us, my mom, my sisters and I were all just scraping by. School in particular was highly competitive and with very limited resources, we had to climb the academic ladder year after year until one day, my sister and I got the opportunity to come to China for Chinese language studies, that was early in 2019.

The news came suddenly, that my sister and I had been admitted to study Chinese language and we needed to travel to Cameroon’s capital city - Yaounde to follow up documents that were needed in order to obtain our visas. This really felt like that part of a dream where you see yourself successful only to wake up the next minute and realize it was just a dream. We got visas finally and I enjoyed the whole process of traveling to China the same way one enjoys a lucid dream.

“Welcome to China!”

If you are a foreigner living in China, then you know how often you hear the greeting quoted above as you do whatever you have to do in China. The hospitality was top-notch from when we arrived to when we settled in our room. The city of Shanghai was amazing with its dazzling neon lights giving life to the forest of skyscrapers stretching beyond our view.

Our first host institution in China was 华东师范大学 (East China Normal University in Shanghai). As we went through the administrative procedures to settle in, I realized how different things were. Completing our registration process was done in one big hall in one building. We just had to move from one desk to another and at the end, everything was completed. In my country, Cameroon, such a process would take days or even weeks. I was experiencing fast and convenient administration.

The convenience and ease of doing things in China, thanks to modern technology, are advantages many of my Chinese friends take for granted because they are born into that system of doing things. To people coming from other countries, this kind of system is truly a gift and a dream come true. My classmates who left Cameroon and settled in other countries in Europe do not have as much digital convenience in doing things as I have experienced in China.

From orientation day to the first Mandarin lesson, we settled in fast and before my sister and I knew it, we started uttering basic words and making basic sentences in our new language. It was fascinating. Our teachers were supportive and understanding. We struggled with pinyin characters and tongue-biting pronunciations of difficult Chinese words but we fought on and soon, my sister and I graduated, certified in Mandarin.

Let me introduce you to this African proverb: “The top of a hill is just the foot of another hill.” As human beings, our ambitions always change overtime because like economists say, “Man’s wants are insatiable.” By the time I got certified in Mandarin, I already had new ambitions. I wanted to showcase my Chinese language skills academically and soon enough, the opportunity came in September 2020.

The Mandarin immersion challenge

You can speak a language, listen and understand the language, read and write the language, get a good score in a standardized test. Well done! However, don’t celebrate yet until you try a full immersion. That means, going beyond learning just the language. It means getting into the culture that underpins the language and actually functioning in specific contexts alongside native speakers of that language in everyday situations. That means studying other subjects in that language. My Mandarin immersion challenge taught me that, although I had passed the Mandarin language test, I was still a toddler when interacting with real native speakers in a traditional Chinese context.

That strife to achieve full language immersion led me to embark on a new journey. I applied to do a Bachelors Degree in Tourism Management, a program taught in Chinese language only, and the University that offered me the course was not the same University where I had studied Chinese language. It was 长江师范学院 (Yangtze Normal University in Chongqing), a different University, a different town, a different city and a different set of people and traditions. It took me four years of hard work, away from family and even my dear sister I had been living with. Time and again, nostalgia would crush me deep inside and I would fight it, sometimes crying in my dorm room and asking myself whether this was really the right path for me.

“Make new friends.” “A local friend will help you in many things.” My dad kept advising as usual. And new friends, I did find, both locals and those from other countries. My Chinese classmates were friendly, supportive and played a very important role in my immersion challenge. My dorm mate from Congo was like a family sister to me. She was one of my go-to persons when I  needed emotional support. I learned how to take care of myself without always asking for support from family, how to make important decisions and handle the consequences of my own wrong doings, how to manage the meagre finances I had and live a happy life in the prevailing circumstances. In fact, I learned how to be a mature responsible girl. I grew up.

Studying Tourism Management was very enlightening and enriching to me. It opened up new avenues of my big dream, to see my country transform from the slow inconvenient administrative procedures that marred relations between the government and citizens, into a more people-oriented system of governance focusing on the ease of doing things using modern technologies. I read an article that was published on the official Huawei website titled: “Cameroon’s NSIF Is Drawing Up a Digital Blueprint for Public Services.” That article highlighted not only the good friendship between China and Cameroon in terms of collaborative growth, but also showed that my country was effectively heading towards digitalization and e-governance. My academic research projects including my final paper all targeted these fields. My dream got more exciting.

My six months internship in Chongqing Kingworld Hotel added much-needed field work experience to the academic knowledge I had acquired. It gave me hands-on experience on hotel reservations, front desk activities, client management and how to use digital technologies to handle huge tasks in record time. I built new relationships with my colleagues and that new angle of Mandarin immersion was also quite challenging and instrumental because it was a non-academic setting.Then my graduation day came. I graduated with pride and for a moment I felt like I had reached the top of a mountain again. Then suddenly I found that graduating with a bachelors degree meant just reaching the foot of another mountain.

Next Mountain to climb - Pandaland Chengdu!

Chengdu is the capital city of Sichuan Province. It is a city with a history of more than 2,000years but also a vibrant modern city with about 21million inhabitants. It is China’s southwest hub of science and technology, trade and business. It is famously known as the home of Giant Pandas. It is the host city of my next academic challenge - the next mountain to climb. After a successful completion of my bachelor’s program, i applied for a two year masters program, that led to my next mountain guide which is the high-ranking 电子科技大学, (University of Electronic Science and Technology (UESTC), a public university founded in 1956 by the instruction of then Premier 周恩来, (Zhou Enlai).

I chose to pursue my Masters in Public Administration at this University because it offered the ideal environment to further develop my academic and professional aspirations. UESTC is recognized as one of China's leading universities, particularly renowned for its excellence in innovation, technology, research, and interdisciplinary education. As someone who dreams of contributing to the modernization of public administration and digital governance in Cameroon, studying at a university that thrives on technological advancement and problem-solving was a natural choice.

Although It has been a big academic challenge to me, I have thought about giving up sometimes but that dream to do something to effect the change I desire so much for my country has kept pushing me forward. Beyond its strong academic reputation, UESTC provides access to distinguished professors, diverse international perspectives, cutting-edge research resources, and a culture that encourages critical thinking and innovation.  Studying at UESTC has therefore been more than an academic opportunity; it has been an important step in equipping me with the knowledge, skills, and global outlook needed to contribute meaningfully to my country's future development. As I write this article, I can say I am almost at the summit of this mountain - the hardest part.

The topic of my thesis is: “Factors Influencing Customer Satisfaction in the Adoption of E-reservation Systems in State-Owned Hotels in Cameroon: Evidence from Selected State-Owned Hotels in Yaounde.” Researching on this topic has opened my eyes and broadened my horizons. I have seen the intimidating scope of work that needs to be done for a country to achieve effective e-governance and get satisfaction from its citizens. The research has also shown me how advanced China is, and how far behind my country as well as many other countries are. Each time pessimism has tried to cloud my mind, I have found motivation in one of my favorite Chinese proverbs; “Be not afraid of going slowly. Be afraid only of standing still.” Thus, I have climbed this mountain slowly but steadily for 2years, without standing still. I think I see the summit right now. I can never thank UESTC, my teachers and my supervisor enough for the knowledge and guidance they have given me. Our elders in Africa have a simple proverb for situations like this: “When a short-tailed dog is thanking you, it doesn’t look good enough.”

What’s next…?

There are three questions in my mind right now:

Am-I ready to go to the field and apply the knowledge in Public Administration I have acquired all these years? I have a hesitant yes to this question because a silent voice inside me is saying I am not ready even though the rest of me is pushing me to take the bull by the horns. Will my country give this little girl with a dream that I am, the chance to contribute to the change in the transformation of public administration we want so much? I have another hesitant yes to this question because most people don’t like change, let alone governments. In my country, change and innovation are often seen as threats to those who enjoy and benefit from the status quo. At the summit of this mountain, will I look up and realize that I have merely reached the foot of the next mountain? I prefer not to say. I learned this answer from Facebook.

Time will tell.

If you have read this my little story this far, I want to thank you heartily. My English name is Thanks. My Chinese name is xieya谢娅. I didn’t say this at the beginning of the story because I wanted to keep it for the ending.

Thank you for taking your time to read.

Ms. Alongamoh Thanks

Student ID: 202424160105

Final year Masters Degree student,

University of Electronic  Science and Technology

Email: duki_2000@qq.com