My beloved brother, Dr. Lawrence Awasum, there are many things I can say about you that will merit a book but I will limit it to some highlights of your value in my life:
Tribute to Dr Lawrence Chi Awasom.
Dr Awasom and I met for the first time in my office in the College of Education at Texas Southern University (TSU) in Houston in1996. He visited to introduce himself to me since he heard that I was at TSU. I was extremely pleased to meet someone from my Ngemba traditional group in the Southern Cameroons. We seized this opportunity to communicate both in English and the Ngemba language beginning from that date.
Dr Awasom, popularly known by his students as "DR. OUR SON" or as "Dr Awesome", was Professor at Houston Community College. He fascinated his audience by convincing them that he, Dr Awasom, had several mothers (his father's wives).
Dr Awasom's global pedagogic perspective has greatly improved on human inter and intra personal communication across a wide variety of racial, ethnic, gender, and class groups. Dr Awasom identified the greatest weakness of Multicultural Education as it exists today, as being its emphasis on human diversity, with less emphasis on human similarity. To solve this problem, he developed a Core Multicultural Curriculum that unites students, teachers and administrators from different ethnic and socio economic backgrounds into one cohesive academic family.
In addition to teaching, Dr Awasom was a researcher and prolific writer of issues in Multicultural and socio cultural areas.
There is no doubt that Dr Awasom's untimely departure has created a vacuum in the academic community, and numerous friends in the Southern Cameroons and in the Diaspora.
It is with tears in our eyes that we acknowledge the fact that you are gone - gone for ever!!! May your gentle Soul rest in perfect peace.