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My Kente Cloth
This is a picture of me in my new kente cloth with traditional sandals on with my counterpart's wife. 5/5/09
Hey everybody. Last week the form 3 students started taking the WASSCE. The exams are scheduled so the students take one subject per day. Each student writes exams for a total of 8 or 9 subjects I think. All students write exams for the core subjects: English, Mathematics, Integrated Science, and Social Studies. Then the students chose and additional 4 or 5 elective subjects to write exams for according to what stream they are in. My school for example has 3 different streams: General Arts, Business, and Agriculture. Because there is only one subject per day and so many different elective subjects; the WASSCE will not be completed until the end of May. Once the form 3 students have finished writing all their exams they will be done with SHS. One of the problems with the WASSCE is that it takes an extremely long time to mark the exams and get the results back to the students. For example, the school received the results from last year’s form 3 students just a couple months ago. Students are not able to get into any tertiary education facilities without their results from the WASSCE, which means that students are pretty much obligated to take at least 1 year off from school before continuing their education if their scores are good enough.
Last week I visited a PCV that works in Adanwomase to develop tourism around kente cloth. The town had an opening ceremony for the new visitor center that was built with help from the European Union, an NGO whose name I forgot, and the Peace Corps. A number of the community members insisted that I wear kente cloth to the ceremony so I borrowed a cloth and wore it to the event. During the middle of the event, another PCV and I were asked to act as a tourist in a short documentary about kente cloth and Adanwomase. One of the tour guides from the visitor center took us on the kente tour and a camera crew taped everything. Then at the end of the tour they interviewed us about our experience. I don’t think they were planning to have the documentary shot during the middle of the opening ceremony for the new visitor center, but like with most things in the Peace Corps, you just have to be flexible and make it work. I’m not sure how believable I was as a tourist though, considering I was wearing kente cloth during the tour.
The other reason I went to Adanwomase was to buy myself a kente cloth for my birthday. The cloth that I liked on my first visit to Adanwomase had been sold, so I looked around in the other stores to see if I could find something I liked or if I would have to place an order to have a cloth woven for me. In one of the stores I found a cloth that I liked even better because it had the same diamond pattern from the first cloth, but it had more white which makes it really stand out. The cloth was GH¢100 but I bartered it down to GH¢90 because I’m a PCV in the Ashanti Region. My cloth is black and white and I’ll try to get a picture up on the blog if the internet isn’t going too slow. I’m not sure if I mentioned this before, but black and white cloths are worn to church, weddings, and sometimes to funerals. I also found out that the first kente cloths were all black and white because there wasn’t any imported colored thread at the time.
This weekend I went to a funeral for the mother of one of the teachers with a group of the teachers from the school. We were supposed to take the school van to the funeral, but it had broken down again. Instead, we took public transportation and it took 3 hours to get to the town where the funeral was. I’m getting use to the procedures of a funeral, which can be boiled down to lots of greeting and receiving refreshments as a thank you for showing your condolences. When you arrive at a funeral, you walk around and greet everyone by shaking their hands. Then you find a seat and everyone comes around to greet you. I have never shaken hands with so many people in my entire life, and I was thinking that I’m glad that there haven’t been any cases of swine-flu in Ghana yet, because it could spread quickly with all the hand shaking that occurs at funerals.
Now, I have a little story to illustrate the little ups and downs you experience as a PCV in Ghana. On most Saturdays I listen to commentary of English Premier League games on the BBC through my shortwave radio. This last Saturday the electricity was running high and it was obviously over the 220 volts that the current is supposed to be at. I could tell that the current was high because my ceiling fan started spinning extremely fast although it was set to low, and when I opened my fridge I could tell that the light was noticeably brighter. So far I haven’t had any electronics break because of power outages or fluctuations, so I didn’t think twice about it. My radio was working fine and I had listened to sports for over an hour when all of a sudden the radio made a pop and went dead followed by the smell of something burning. It was pretty obvious that the transformer overheated because of the high current and blew. I was pretty bummed that my stereo was broken and that I couldn’t listen to the BBC to find out what’s going on in the world, but the story doesn’t end there. Today I noticed that the stereo also takes batteries, and I figured it was worth a shot to see if the radio would work with batteries before trying to get it fixed or throwing it away. The stereo takes 8 D batteries, which seems like a lot, but it just so happens that I have exactly 8 D batteries as spares for my maglite. As luck would have it, the stereo works fine off battery power. I’m not sure how long the batteries will last, but at least I’ll be able to listen to the BBC until they die.
This week is technically the first week of the third term of the school year. Each term consists of 13 weeks, but that doesn’t mean that there is actually 13 weeks of teaching. The term doesn’t officially start until we have the opening of term staff meeting. At the end of last term, we were told that the staff meeting to open the 3rd term would be on Monday the 4th of May. Then this weekend I was told that the staff meeting would actually be on Tuesday. On Tuesday I waited to find out when the staff meeting would start, and finally around noon it was posted that the staff meeting will be on Thursday. As long as the staff meeting happens at some time this week, we will technically be on school. As a result, the first week of the term will consist of a staff meeting and that is all. It is also likely that the 13th week of the term will only consist of the end of term staff meeting. Classes will commence in the 2nd week of the term but there will surely be straggling students that don’t make it back to school until the 3rd or 4th week.
This morning when I went to go on my run I found that someone left me an interesting note on the steps to my veranda. The note was written in chalk and went as follows: “I came and could not find you. I love you. I don’t hate you. I will be back.” If this were the first time I’d received a note like this I might be concerned, but I have gotten hand written notes from students that are very similar and they are totally innocent. It is important to remember that English is a second language for most Ghanaians so there is some misunderstanding in the translation. Take care.
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Melissa
non-member comment
I love the picture of you in your Kente cloth! I hope you bring it home so we can get a better look at it. I love the note that was left for you...reminds me of the letter we read at Christmas :) Glad to hear things are going well! Miss you