Scholarships: Our Lady of Lourdes College Mankon - Bamenda

***PRESS RELEASE***PRESS RELEASE

Washington, DC - October 6, 2014 - LESA USA Inc. is a 501(c)(3) organization with a mission to educate the girl child in Africa. In fulfillment of this mission, LESA USA Inc. today announces the availability of $10,000 in scholarships to be awarded to TWENTY (20) qualified applicants. The Scholarships are awarded for study during the 2014-2015 academic year in the amount of $500 each per candidate.
Candidates in any of the following three categories are invited to apply:
1. Lourdes students currently registered in Form One to High School in Our Lady of Lourdes college, Mankon, Bamenda, Cameroon
2. Graduates from Our Lady of Lourdes College who are enrolled in a University in Cameroon.
3. Graduates from Our Lady of Lourdes College who are currently enrolled in non-Lourdes high schools
To apply, or learn about the requirements for application, visit the scholarship website at:

www.lesausascholarship.wix.com/lesausascholarship
For more information, please contact any member of the scholarship committee listed below. Or send an email to: lesausaincscholarship@yahoo.com
Thank you for your interest,
LESA USA Inc. Scholarship Committee
Dr. Nicoline Ambe - LESA California (Committee Chair)
Mrs. Elizabeth Ngu - LESA Midwest
Mrs. Evelyn Ndikum Anoma, Esq - LESA DC Awesomes
Dr. Liliane Abongwa - LESA Minnesota
Mrs. Christiana Aganifor - LESA Texas

Mrs. Kila Fobi - LESA Georgia
Dr. Enaka Yembe - President, LESA USA Inc.

P/S CONGRATULATIONS to all 15 recipients who received the 2013/2014 LESA USA Scholarships awarded last year!

Communication in the Internet Century usually means using email, and email, despite being remarkably useful and powerful, often inspires momentous dread in otherwise optimistic, happy humans. Here are our personal rules for mitigating that sense of foreboding:

Excerpted from the book HOW GOOGLE WORKS  by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, with Alan Eagle. 

1. Respond quickly. There are people who can be relied upon to respond promptly to emails, and those who can’t. Strive to be one of the former. Most of the best—and busiest—people we know act quickly on their emails, not just to us or to a select few senders, but to everyone. Being responsive sets up a positive communications feedback loop whereby your team and colleagues will be more likely to include you in important discussions and decisions, and being responsive to everyone reinforces the flat, meritocratic culture you are trying to establish. These responses can be quite short—“got it” is a favorite of ours. And when you are confident in your ability to respond quickly, you can tell people exactly what a non-​response means. In our case it’s usually “got it and proceed.” Which is better than what a non-​response means from most people: “I’m overwhelmed and don’t know when or if I’ll get to your note, so if you needed my feedback you’ll just have to wait in limbo a while longer. Plus I don’t like you.”

2. When writing an email, every word matters, and useless prose doesn’t. Be crisp in your delivery. If you are describing a problem, define it clearly. Doing this well requires more time, not less. You have to write a draft then go through it and eliminate any words that aren’t necessary. Think about the late novelist Elmore Leonard’s response to a question about his success as a writer: “I leave out the parts that people skip.” Most emails are full of stuff that people can skip.

3. Clean out your inbox constantly. How much time do you spend looking at your inbox, just trying to decide which email to answer next? How much time do you spend opening and reading emails that you have already read? Any time you spend thinking about which items in your inbox you should attack next is a waste of time. Same with any time you spend rereading a message that you have already read (and failed to act upon).

When you open a new message, you have a few options: Read enough of it to realize that you don’t need to read it, read it and act right away, read it and act later, or read it later (worth reading but not urgent and too long to read at the moment). Choose among these options right away, with a strong bias toward the first two. Remember the old OHIO acronym: Only Hold It Once. If you read the note and know what needs doing, do it right away. Otherwise you are dooming yourself to rereading it, which is 100 percent wasted time.

If you do this well, then your inbox becomes a to‑do list of only the complex issues, things that require deeper thought (label these emails “take action,” or in Gmail mark them as starred), with a few “to read” items that you can take care of later.

To make sure that the bloat doesn’t simply transfer from your inbox to your “take action” folder, you must clean out the action items every day. This is a good evening activity. Zero items is the goal, but anything less than five is reasonable. Otherwise you will waste time later trying to figure out which of the long list of things to look at.

4. Handle email in LIFO order (Last In First Out). Sometimes the older stuff gets taken care of by someone else.

5. Remember, you’re a router. When you get a note with useful information, consider who else would find it useful. At the end of the day, make a mental pass through the mail you received and ask yourself, “What should I have forwarded but didn’t?”

6. When you use the bcc (blind copy) feature, ask yourself why. The answer is almost always that you are trying to hide something, which is counterproductive and potentially knavish in a transparent culture. When that is your answer, copy the person openly or don’t copy them at all. The only time we recommend using the bcc feature is when you are removing someone from an email thread. When you “reply all” to a lengthy series of emails, move the people who are no longer relevant to the thread to the bcc field, and state in the text of the note that you are doing this. They will be relieved to have one less irrelevant note cluttering up their inbox.

7. Don’t yell. If you need to yell, do it in person. It is FAR TOO EASY to do it electronically.

8. Make it easy to follow up on requests. When you send a note to someone with an action item that you want to track, copy yourself, then label the note “follow up.” That makes it easy to find and follow up on the things that haven’t been done; just resend the original note with a new intro asking “Is this done?”

9. Help your future self search for stuff. If you get something you think you may want to recall later, forward it to yourself along with a few keywords that describe its content. Think to yourself, How will I search for this later? Then, when you search for it later, you’ll probably use those same search terms. This isn’t just handy for emails, but important documents too. Jonathan scans his family’s passports, licenses, and health insurance cards and emails them to himself along with descriptive keywords. Should any of those things go missing during a trip, the copies are easy to retrieve from any browsers.

 

LIFE STORY - PRESIDENT PAUL BIYA OF CAMEROON

His Excellency Paul Biya was born on 13 February 1933 at Mvoméka’a, Meyomessala Subdivision, Dja-et-Lobo Division, South Province. President Paul Biya is the second President of the State of Cameroon. He assumed office on 6 November 1982 following the resignation of President Ahmadou Ahidjo. President Paul Biya is married and has three children.

Born on the 13th February 1933 at Mvomeka'a (Meyomessala) of the late Etienne Mvondo Assam and Mrs MVONDO (born Anastasie Eyenga Elle).

1. - Education

1948:            First School Leaving Certificat (CEPE) (Nden);

1948/1950:   St. Tharcissius Pre-seminary, Edea;

1950/1954:   Akono Minor Seminary;

June 1953:   BEPC

1954/1956:   Lycee General Leclerc

June 1955:   Baccalaureat lere partie

June 1956:   Baccalaureat 2e partie Lycee Louis le Grand (Paris).

University education

Degree in Public Law, Diploma of the Institut d'Etudes Politioues, Diploma from the Institut des Hautes Etudes d'Outre-Mer.

Diplôme d'Etudes Superieurs in Public law.

2. - Professional Career

• Charge de mission (assistant) in the Presidency of the Republic: October 1962;

• Director of Cabinet, Ministry of National edu­cation: January 1964;

• Permanent Secretary, Ministry of National Education, July 1965;

• Director of Civil Cabinet (Chief of Staff), Presidency of the Republic, December 1967;

• Secretary General and Director of Civil Cabinet: January 1968;

• Minister of State, Secretary General in the Presidency of the Republic June 1970;

• Prime Minister; 30th June 1975;

• As Constitutional successor, he becomes President of the Republic after the resignation of Ahmadou Ahidjo on the 6th November 1982; this according to the constitutional amendment instituted by law n° 79/02 of 29th June 1979. On taking the oath of office, he undertook to democratise political life, to bring about social and economic liberalisation, to introdu­ce rigour in management and moralise attitudes, and to reinforce international co-operation.

• Elected President of the Cameroon National Union (CNU): 14 September 1983.

• Elected President of the Republic on 14th January 1984, reelected on the 24th April, 1988, llth October 1992 (First election with direct uni­versal suffrage with many candidates) : 12th October 1997 and llth October 2004.

• Elected President of the CPDM, Cameroon Peoples Democratic Party after the CNU was trans­formed to the CPDM; 24th March 1985 in Bamenda.

• When on the 19th December 1990, Mr Paul BIYA promulgated the law on associations and Political parties. He was in effect restoring multiparty politics in Cameroon (since September 1966, when Cameroon was under the one party system). As of today, over two hundred parties have been legalised. The CPDM obtained an absolute majority during the March 1997 legislative elections and its candidate won the Presidential election of October, 1997.

The President however chose to form a government that included other political parties. Three parties are represented in government; the CPDM, the NUDP and the UPC. 5 parties are present in the National Assembly: The CPDM, NUDP. SDF, UPC and CDU.

His Excellency Paul Biya married Mrs Chantal BIYA on 23rd April, 1994.

He is a father of three children: FRANK Biya, Paul BIYA Junior and Anastasia Brenda BIYA EYENGA.

3.- Honorary Distinctions

Mr BIYA is a holder of many decorations and honorary distinctions:

• Grand Master of the National Orders (Republic of Cameroon);

• Grand-Croix of the Legion of Honour (Republic of France);

• Great Commander of the Medal of St-George (United Kingdom and North Irland);

• Grand-Croix de classe exceptionnelle (Federal Republic of Germany);

• Grand Collier de I'Ordre du Ouissam Mohammadi (Kingdon of Marocco);

• Great Commander of the Order of Niger (Federal Republic of Nigeria);

• Grand-Croix de I'Ordre National du Mérite (Republic of Senegal);

• Commander of the National Ordre (Republic of Tunisia);

• Doctoris Honoris Causa (University of Maryland, USA);

• Professor emeritus (University of Beijing, Republic of China).

4. - Publications

Mr BIYA is the author of a political essay entitled "Communal Liberalism".

This work has been translated into English, German and Hebrew.

In it the Head of State announces the advent of multiparty politics (which became effective in 1990) after the temporary period of the one party State. He explains his choice for economic liberalism and private initiative while at the same time advocating national solidarity, equitable distribution of the benefits of economic growth, social justice, the development based on inventiveness and peaceful co-existence of various cultures and peoples who make up the nation.

Finally, he reaffirms the need for modernisation of the State and the desire to maintain close cooperation ties with other countries of the world.