“Madame tu as beaucoup manger (madam you have eaten a lot)”, said my formal student from my previous school when she saw my protruding baby bump in a grocery shop. In Cameroon, when someone tells you that you have eaten a lot, it means you are pregnant. In light of the context, I agreed with her that I had eaten a lot. I then asked her if she had finished from her old school, and she said yes. Upon asking her where she was now, she said “in fact, I didn’t go to school this year because there was no money.” When I pressed further to know where she was, she then told me “I have a child who is one year now”. That’s when I helped her come out with the truth by saying “in actuality, you didn’t finish school, but dropped out because you got pregnant.” Without any hesitation, she said yes. I asked her what the matter with young girls these days was. “How can my students have children before me? How many of your classmates already have children? 3 or 4?” She said “Nous sommes sept (we are seven of us)”. Then she turned the stakes on me and asked “et toi madame, tu es toujours avec ton blanc la? C’est lui le pere de ton enfant? (and you madam, are you still with that white man of yours? Is he the father of your child?)”

In my mind I am going, ‘do you young people know that some of us older ones do actually get married?’ I looked at her and said “You mean my husband?” while showing her my wedding ring. She was not aware or bothered that she offended me by how she addressed me. Anyways, I told her “Yes, my husband is responsible for my child, and yes, it is the white gentle man I was engaged to when I taught you people. We got married and have begun our family.” I guess from my tone of voice, she realized that she had offended me. I wasn’t harsh, but I was very firm in making her understand that there is a thing called marriage before children for some of us who understand that.

After our conversation, it got me thinking, ‘Does marriage hold any significance in the societies today anymore? What do parents teach our teens these days?’ When I was in university, I watched students get pregnant in their first year because they were not under their parents’ roofs anymore. Some of these students would sit together and share of how they made out with a stranger at another university over the weekend and lied to their boyfriends that they were at home. It didn’t bother them that their actions were wrong, and they were not making the best choices for their future. They seemed not to have plans of any kind for their future, and life was all about fun and dating. I sat a couple of them and asked if they were the ones paying their tuition in the university, and they said no. Then I asked them why they were bent on not focusing on school? They had no answer. A number of them were pregnant by the end of the school year, and some aborted the children because they were afraid of their parents.

When I got back to Cameroon, I had similar conversations with students in the secondary school I taught at and some students I met on the streets. The girls at this secondary school laughed at me who was a virgin at 26 years old. This then was an indication that out of the 43 girls between the ages of 13-18 years of age that were in the classroom, three-quarter of them were not virgins anymore. No wonder they had no respect for me in the classroom until I began talking to some of them one-on-one to get to the bottom of the issue. The majority of these young people have not had any real role models in their lives to show them the way. Either they are from a dysfunctional family, or they live with relatives who do not give them the home sexual education they need.

In October 2018 on election day, I went to observe the elections in my area and met one of the official security persons who was meant to keep order. He got attached to me and asked me to be his girlfriend with a wife at home. I asked him if he looked at me very well? “Why would I, a married woman, agree to go out with a married man?” He said that the ring meant nothing, and one cannot be bound to only one person. I then told him “I understand that marriage is between a man and a woman who have committed themselves to each other for better or worse. My husband and I never keep secrets from each other, and as a matter of fact, this conversation is going to go straight to him in the next few minutes. If you want me to be your girlfriend, you will  need to go through him first which in any case, I would not agree to go out with you.” He looked at me and asked me what I would say to my husband, and I said “I would let my husband know that there’s a certain man at the polling station who wants to have Mrs. Astic as his girlfriend.” He said I wouldn’t dare, and I took out my phone and began to dial Mr. Astic’s number. I didn’t call Mr. Astic, immediately, but I did later when I needed to update him on what was going on at the polling station. When Mr. Astic arrived at the polling station later with his team of observers, I introduced him to the man, and he felt awkward because he knew I had told my husband about him.

If these young people have these kinds of parents in their lives, how can they know the difference between marriage and having affairs? Why wouldn’t they think it is alright for them to live promiscuous lives while attending school? Engaging in grown up activities is so prevalent in our societies today such that young people no longer have respect for those who actually understand that families are built within a certain framework for a reason; children need to be raised in a home that actually want and desire them. Yet, no one is there to tell these girls that when they have unprotected sex , they will have a child they are not ready for.

Just three weeks ago, I went for my maternity visit. On my way back, I saw a young girl not older than 14 years ago coming down a hill. She stopped to take a breath, and I saw her protruding stomach and a sharp pain went through my heart. ‘What was she thinking at this age?’ She stared straight at me while I drove by. ‘Why do the married ones have to compete with children to have children?’ was another thought that went through my mind. My heart broke for this young girl and all the other ones whom I have heard reports of up in the north west region of Cameroon. They are just children and have forgone their education for maybe a ‘one-night-stand’ lured by what????

Have we lost the virtues once held about marriage to the point that eleven-year-olds both boys and girls begin to engage in adult activities? I watched a youtube video on a teenage girl 13 years old who gave birth a day after her parents realized she was pregnant. What struck me about this case was her attitude towards her baby. She would not take care of the baby, spend time with the baby or look at the baby. On her birthday, friends and families brought her birthday gifts which were basically things for the baby, and she broke down and cried. She said “it is my birthday and why are all my gifts for the baby. It is not her birthday.” This took me to a TV show, Paternity Court, my husband and I have been watching. Judge Lauren’s words echoed in my mind “This is the reason why children should not have children”. They are still children and don’t know that when you bring a child into this world, you forgo your rights as a child and become a parent. Where are the role models in their lives?

From the many episodes we watched, these twenty-some-year-olds to 50 broke down and said that they didn’t know how to be better parents because they never had one or both parents in their lives. If they did, the example was exactly what they are today. How can these young ones act differently if the role models in their lives are exactly like them? Does this mean that they are a lost generation then?