A group of six students from the State Registered Nurses (SRN) School in Limbe are urgently appealing to authorities for permission to take their promotional exams, scheduled for Saturday, September 21. These students believe that, if allowed to sit for the exam, they would perform well.
One of the students, who relocated from the Centre region and was unprepared for the ongoing crisis in the Southwest, expressed the difficulties she faced in adapting to the region’s challenging conditions. Frequent gunfire, ghost towns, and lockdowns have severely impacted her ability to study effectively.
Coming from a modest background, this student fears the financial consequences of being barred from taking the exam. With one year of study at SRN costing around 500,000 FCFA, the burden of repeating the year would weigh heavily on her family. Instead of completing the program in three years, repeating the year could extend her education to four years, further straining her family’s finances.
Despite these challenges, her passion for nursing remains strong, and she successfully passed the government exam, which assigned her to the Southwest, where armed conflict has raged for eight years. “We are lost here in the Southwest,” she admitted.
She further explained, “All SRN schools are refusing to let us take the exams because we haven’t validated all our resit courses. Some have four, five, or two courses left to validate. Our names are not on the list. We are praying and begging the ministers, delegates, and all the authorities to allow all of us to write the promotional exam.”
Repeating a year, she said, would not be easy for her and her peers. Many of these students, most of whom are still in their first year, believe they are capable of catching up. They’ve seen the work required and are hopeful that a chance to sit for the exam could make a significant difference.
“On Mondays, we don’t go to school. We attend classes from Tuesday to Saturday without any time to rest,” one student explained, pleading for mercy from the authorities.
The plight of the SRN students in Limbe is compounded by the fact that they have not had the same opportunities as students in other regions of Cameroon, where schools have not been disrupted by lockdowns or ghost towns, as is the case in the conflict-ridden Northwest and Southwest regions.
“All the expenditures, the internship, and the stress have gone in vain,” the students lamented, hoping their pleas would reach the right ears.
