My week in brief

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Hello all,

Since my last entry, I don't think you could really say that I have done much to read about, so I will keep this short!

On Friday I wandered down to Tom's school to help teach (and indeed to see how the kids there are taught). Personally, I would say that the education is a reason not to bring up a child in Ghana. The teacher didn't really seem to know much about what he was teaching, and didn't really explain anything properly to the students. For example, he was doing a multiplication exercise where he drew a load of boxes on the board (say he would draw 45 boxes, 9 rows and 5 columns) and then would get the child to write 9 x 5 = 45. However, he didn't explain what multiplication really was, or why there were doing what they were doing, they simply got the answer by counting all of the boxes. Considering they know their times tables (Tom told me afterwards) he could have explained it much better, and then the kids may actually understand what times tables are and what multiplication really is.

This weekend I didn't really do much apart from watch the Wimbledon final on Sunday. Declan and his volunteers came up from Nkawkaw (where he lives) and some new Irish SYTO volunteers came aswell. We went to a sports bar, and bizarrely they didn't have a decent TV at all, but it was good enough - apart from the fact we lost signal for literally the last 5 games and it didn't come back until the ceremony ...

Tom has gone up to Mole this week leaving me alone, although Declan stayed until today which was nice and probably kept me from going insane! Interestingly, from a work perspective, the Maternal Health Clinic (which we went to on Tuesday) has started doing HIV tests at the clinic. Definitely a huge improvement from us telling women they should go and get them from the hospital 20 mins away to us telling women they should have one and can have it without much inconvenience. They had only done 10 tests when we got there, with only 1 positive result. Unfortunately they told the lady with the positive result to 'come back tomorrow' to get her result as they weren't quite sure how to break the news to her. When we went she hadn't come back, and didn't look like she would, so me and Zufa will go to the clinic tomorrow to check on that status and if she hasn't come back to speak to the nurses about what they are going to do. Personally I think it was very irresponsible of them to say 'come back tomorrow' but that has happened now and I can see why they did it, but they definitely have a responsibility to tell the woman, even if she doesn't want to know.

More next time (by which point I will be on a different project!)
Sam(uel) x

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