Hi Matt
I see Mongolia and Cameroon share lots of thing in common. We do not organize high school graduation ceremonies, but we have national tests also in June for the Freshmen, Juniors, and Seniors (9th, 11th, and 12th graders) attending the Francophone school system (Cameroon is a bilingual country. We officially speak French and English). The kids attending Anglo-Saxon school system write a different test, and only Sophomores and Seniors are concerned (10th and 12th graders). The kids have to pass those tests to move on, otherwise they would stay in the same class and repeat it for the next school year until they succeed their respective national exam.

During school day, students in Cameroon stay in one classroom, as your students do, and the teachers are the ones who move between classes. Only private schools have a school bus (but not all of them). Depending on how far is the school, some students walk to school, other board a taxi. Wealthy parents drive the kids to school with their personal cars or they hire drivers for the job.
Summer school is organised by few private schools, and generally it is for students who did not perform well during last school year. For summer vacation, children in Cameroon do various activities. Some go out to the country side to help their grandparents who do farm work, others visit family and relatives. But most of them get engage in business activities such as selling stuff in the market to make money. They use that money for their personal expenses and sometimes they even help their parents to pay for their school fees and the school material (books, notebooks, pens, rulers, etc).

Guess what, from my window I see also herds of cows walking back and forth in front my door, going to the cow market which is not very far from my house lol (But that is not very common to see all over the town). The cows are followed by men, walking hours from the train station to the market in order to be sold. They are reared in a different region, very far from mine; so they use trains to reach our regional market.

It’s always good to know people elsewhere live same life as we do 🙂