A week in Wa
on VSO in Ghana (Ghana), 14/Nov/2009 20:38, 34 days ago
Our first trip out of Wa was last Sunday when we travelled to Jarapa, a nearby town, to visit some VSO friends. It was a truly Ghanaian experience: 4 hours wait for the two hour bus ride to get there, and 30 minutes wait to return in 1hr 10 minutes in a tro tro (mini bus). Both journeys cost approximately 60 p and in the 12 seater tro tro we were one of 20 occupants, plus a baby and tons of luggage. We made sure that we were the first to get on board, so that we could get the front seats next to the driver. Otherwise, we really wouldn’t have coped!It has been another exciting and challenging week. At the beginning of the week, we had our first visit to a village school, and this proved to be one of our most interesting and rewarding experiences to date. The school has three classes, a headteacher and one teacher. In local schools, children seem to remain in their classrooms at the allotted times to see if they get a teacher or not. The two staff at this school share their time between the three classes. The purpose of our visit was to support our Australian VSO colleague, Mel, in painting an educational frieze of the alphabet in the Kindergarten and Primary 1 classrooms. The kindergarten classroom is really an outdoor veranda.The three of us travelled in a taxi over one of the roughest dirt roads we have yet experienced. To reach the village, we turned off the‘main’ road and followed a track. The track became increasingly narrow. The tiny village of Dodiyiri was our destination, and the school was down a narrow footpath. We were all ready to walk the last 100 metres, but our taxi driver dutifully insisted on driving the whole way, each wheel runningthrough the bush either side of the track.On arrival at the school, we were surprised to see rows of chairs laid out beneath a tree. The Chief, elders and what seemed like the whole village, had turned out to‘greet’ us.After they had said a prayer for us, we were asked to tell them about ourselves and explain what we were going to do at the school. The Headteacher acted as an interpreter throughout.Once formalities had been concluded, we got out the pencils, a big stick ruler and the paints. We then set about creating two white strips on the walls of two classrooms. Templates were used to draw the letters of the alphabet and pictures to represent each letter: a is for ant, b is for ball, c is for cup, d is for drum etc.All the time we worked, the children helped and sorted templates, fetched water, watched intently and practised their English. Those who know Haydn well will not be surprised, but those with primary teaching experience will be appalled, that he had to repaint the g, j, p, q and y, because he failed to draw them dropping below the line. We are both learning a lot!! The children were brilliant and very excited when we got our camera out and took pictures of them.The Headteacher, elders and students seemed delighted with the new learning resource they have. The chap in the white t-shirt in the picture above is our taxi driver, known as Ecowas. Having got us to the school, he thought it would be best to stay to take us home, rather than run back to Wa and have to drive the route a second time. He was soon drawing and painting alongside us and took us safely back to the town. He is a wonderful chap. We discussed the Koran and arranged marriages amongst many other things. You may be interested to know that the price of a wife in his tribe is two cows and six sheep. (As you will gather from several of our blog entries, there is much work to do in Ghana to improve the role of women.)Later in the week, we talked to children at a town primary school about England. They wanted to know such things as the food we eat, what sort of Africans live in the UK, and does England have slaves. They also wanted to know about our families, and when Linda told them that her Mum is nearly 90, they burst into a spontaneous round of applause. The students were particularly surprised to know we could not grow bananas in the UK.We have also spent this week running IT sessions with education officers, demonstrating how EXCEL can sort and graph data. We also worked at a local secondary school and gave each teacher half an hour’s practice on Word, in anticipation of the imminent arrival of electricity at the school. Some of them had never touched a computer before.A really surreal experience was at Wa School for the Blind, where Haydn found himself with the kindergarten class. The teacher he was due to support was not there. The students sat in anticipation. They spoke a range of languages, but not English. In desperation, Haydn asked if they could sing a song. About 5 of them stood individually and sang a solo. At the end of each song, they all applauded their classmate with the unusual, but traditional, Ghanaian rhythmic clapping. (Much to Linda’s amusement, Haydn still can’t get this right - rhythm is definitely not his forte.) Fortunately, “10 Green Bottles” came to his rescue. Teaching a kindergarten class of non-English speaking, blind children was definitely an unexpected experience.By contrast Linda, had just worked with a teacher who had given the class of blind secondary students a cookery lesson for the first time. She had bought all the ingredients out of her own pocket and put them into individual packets correctly weighed out for the recipe. Her husband had brought in the gas cylinder and their oven from home and set it up in the classroom. To explain such actions as“rubbing fat into flour” or “adding a pinch of salt”, the teacher and Lin had to demonstrate the action on the arm of each student, so that they could understand what they needed to do. The students loved it and asked so many really intelligent questions. They were soaking up new knowledge and showed great determination to learn new skills. Ghana is working hard to improve attitudes to disabled people generally, but there is still a long way to go.