Blogs from Ashanti, Ghana, Africa - page 22

Well then... an awful lot has happened since my last real post, so bear with me as my scatterbrained brain tries to cover it all. Firstly... I tried Batik. A friend I have made that does all the batik (making of cloth with wax and die) for most of the schools around offinso offered to teach cassie and I how to do it, so Cassie and I spent the entire day with him, doing the whole thing ourselves and he even took us to the dissability home where he teaches them twice a week so that they can make money from their work. I got made fun of by one of the apprentises as I proceeded to draw spaceships on my cloth (the only thing I know how to draw with any sort of ability) because ... read more

We got back from Kumasi last night after a looooong tro-tro ride that almost did me in. The ride there wasn't bad at all, just typical tro-tro business. The only problem was that we had to wait for 2 1/2 hours at the station for our tro-tro to fill up...when you're waiting, you have to actually sit in the van to keep your seat so we were all crammed in for what seemed like an eternity. The ride to Kumasi took about 5 hours and I don't think there's an inch of pavement between Oda and Kumasi, bumpy roads the whole entire way. When we got to Kumasi, we got off at the station (it's the biggest one in west Africa I think) and it was CRAZY!! Kumasi traffic is OUT OF CONTROL...Atlanta doesn't even come ... read more

So I arrived back to work on tuesday morning and went over to the corner where the notebooks are kept in cardboard boxes and nearly had a heart attack! Two furry white balls closely resembled rats were in one of the boxes. My interaction with the students went something like this: "Ah!! What's in there?" "Madame, it is cats" "why are there cats in our classroom?" "because they live there" "since when?" "since they were born on the weekend" "oh, how will they live here? what will they eat?" "they'll suck on their mommie's milk!" "oh, well I guess that should have been obvious" So there are two kittens living there while I and my 20+ students try to learn. And by the way... all women in ghana wear fertility beads so my host-mom said I ... read more

To sum up Ghana, I will quote from a bumper sticker: "On judgement day you'll wish you had Jesus stickers on your car" Four days later I can cooly admit that my post about my first day at school was the nicest I could have made it... in reality my first day was hell and I cried when I got home... but since then, the school is awesome... I'm tag-team teaching the oldest kids (a much smaller class of only 22 students and located on an outside wall so it is much less noisy... my first class was directly in the middle). My goal for the class is to get them all reading by the time I go... they are so eager and I am reading them a chapter of the Boxcar Children Book each day ... read more

I'm done. I've been volunteering at Kwahu Tafo, in the eastern region of Ghana, for four weeks, and now I am finished. It was challenging. That's euphemistic. It was hard. And not the work itself: that was negligible. It was hard because it was, for me, the intersection of tedium and culture shock, plus plenty of tension from putting a group of strong-minded young westerners in a pressure cooker. Which isn't to say I regret it. But I'm travelling now, and glad of it, though today I suspect I might have giardia or something similar, which is sucky. In the mornings I taught (in theory) English (in theory) at the Presbyterian Junior Secondary School. In the afternoons I led sessions on drama at the cultural center (read: the Catholic kindergarten). Both of these were fairly superficial ... read more