The Struggle At Hand

Last weekend, I climbed the tallest mountain in Ghana (on the border with Togo) with some German tourists I met here. It was a struggle, but nothing compared with these past two weeks of teaching….

If I was only concerned with teaching the children who show up to school, I think things would be fairly easy-going. Generally speaking, they are bright, eager to learn, and hilariously cute. However, all these positive traits are undermined by the overall chaos of the school. The first week, there were no classes. The teachers simply sat around and “planned,” leaving Myles and myself (there is another American here for a few months; he’s just out of high school but very mature) to entertain 20 kids with nothing to do for six hours. They must be starved for attention, because EVERYTHING we did, they loved. I think their favorites were practicing English through some short role-playing skits I wrote and playing “Simon Says” which was converted to “Chief Says” (hold your judgment about my stereotyping; the chiefs are still essential to their way of life here, evidently). The other teachers would hear the laughter and stop their “planning” to come watch us. Each day they assumed we would just do something new and exciting, as if we were magical Americans with a magic bag of tricks.

This week, we finally began with classes. Well, except that we still had no idea who was teaching what because the headmaster still hasn’t finished a proper schedule. It was so frustrating that we actually just took the schedule home to do it ourselves today. I was supposed to teach math, science, English, and “Information &  Computers Technology.” I opted out of teaching the science this term because it seems to be primarily about Ghanaian plants and animals which I know nothing about and, even the little chemistry and physics that they do cover, I realized I ought not to teach because their English is far below the level to understand such concepts. As for the computer class, they have one computer, and it’s broken—I’ll have to be creative.

Coming to the point, I am suppose to be volunteering both to teach and reorganize this struggling private school. Public schools here are terrible, overcrowded, underfunded, and lack a sufficient number of quality teachers (Okay, quick story about public school science teacher: I was planning a science lesson somewhere in town, and a young boy was looking over my shoulder. He asked me if I teach science and I said I did. He said he wished he had a science teacher; his own had refused to teach them that week because they are “unruly.” I asked what he meant by this, and the boy said the teacher was pissed that, after slapping a child in class, they reported him to the administration.) Anyway, these public schools could used some help, but NGO’s can’t work as easily with them as the private ones, and so here I am.

But the state of the private school in this village is not much better. The school has been dying because children don’t pay their fees and, as a result, teachers are underpaid. Many student come the first two weeks of each term and then, once payment is demanded, they never show up again. Students arrive late, and some teachers (including the HEADMASTER) arrive later. My organization, Pagus Africa, which has just begun their partnership with the school this year, has subsidized the fees to half their original value, on condition of prompt payment from the parents. The organization hopes to jump-start the still-young school and begin a cyclical process of improvement between the students and teachers.

The bottom line is, my job is very difficult because I have been sent not only to teach, but to help implement this program of subsidies and general improvement in an environment where “implementing” doesn’t seem to be the strong suit. The school director and teachers love to talk about how their prayers have been answered with our arrival (G-d rules everything here, but I will save this commentary for another time) and all the change they anticipate, but I have yet to see them do anything unless pestered repeatedly. They only complain that the village people don’t respect education, but one father in the village told me today he doesn’t send his kids to the school because it’s a MESS.

HOWEVER, he has changed his mind and plans to send his children tomorrow. Now everyone in the village is saying they want to send their kid, nephew, and maybe even come themselves. Why? Because there are white people.  They aren’t looking at our resumes. Most aren’t even bothering to meet us face-to-face. They just hear about our skin color and assume everything will be different now. In this way, the teachers and village people are making the same mistake. After I told the headmaster today, for example, that I thought it was important to stress that the Americans and the teachers improve the school together, explicitly saying he couldn’t always rely on a steady supply of American volunteers, he nodded and smiled, saying that he only hopes there will always be white volunteers here (they nod and smile frequently here, especially when they have no idea what I’m saying). Unless they change this mentality, it will all end in either disillusionment or dependency.

That said, we are only in Week 2, so I am trying to keep an open mind and recognize it’s a gradual process. As consolation, even if I totally fail to help revamp the school in a sustainable way, I can already tell the relationships I am building with some of the kids here will be mutually very meaningful—and the benefits to us both will be, unlike in the  case of the school itself, neither insignificant nor fleeting. 

Photos of Accra

"Football." Everywhere.


Waiting in line for a "tro-tro."

Some last-minute selling. They literally run along as the van moves
to finish transactions and somehow never drop the goods.

Inside.

Accra coast

Jamestown Lighthouse, built in 1839 by the Brits. Next to it is Jamefort, where they
kept slaves for shipment. I went inside. People live there now. It's eerie.

Fishing boats cover the sea here.

Sorta cute, sorta painful.

From Accra to Hohoe

My one week in Accra was plenty. I will miss Felicia and the kind family that made me feel at home there, but not the stench of wet garbage and fish, or the dust and exhaust that stifle you on the streets.

Getting around is hell as well. There are more craters in the road than the moon. Not potholes, craters. Drivers constantly weave and jostle to avoid them, their hands at the wheel like a toddler’s playing an arcade game for racecar driving. When there is absolutely no way to avoid them, they simply create new lanes for themselves on the roadside. However, most roads are lined with deep, open gutters for drainage, so this is, well, problematic.

Then the intersections. There are very few streetlights, so usually it is simply a game of chicken—even if your opponent is a semi-truck. Of course, no one wears seatbelts, and most cars don’t even have them. But don’t worry about the safety of those in the cars, because the women walking along the road to the market and the children playing unsupervised in the street are much closer to unpleasant death….

Okay, enough about Accra. Wednesday I traveled the four hours from the city to the town of Hohoe in a tro-tro (a tro-tro is a small van crammed full of passengers, which I would also complain about had I not used up my bitching-about-transportation word limit). The director of my school picked me up, and I am staying with him through the weekend. The village where I will work and live is just 20 minutes away, and classes begin next week.

Hohoe is part of the Volta region, and this area is absolutely beautiful. The Volta river (which powers much of the electricity to the country) winds its way through valleys and mountains plush with greenery. People grow a lot of rice and cocoa here, and everyone seems to have a farm.

Even if you have a different job, you have a farm here too. That’s just how it is. When Francis and I drove to see the guesthouse in the village where I will be staying, the wife of the owner told her 10 –year-old grandson to get in our car and drive with us to their cocoa farm to fetch his grandfather so that we could negotiate a price. We did, and we settled on 90 cedi a month (a “discount,” he said, because I would be teaching his grandson). For anyone who wants to visit, they have a spare room and a flush toilet!

Anyway, I like this area a lot. It has shops and a market in the town, but it’s not so chaotic or dirty. And I feel very welcome. Children still stare as I pass and giggle the world for whiteman (oh, I forgot to mention the language here is different than the one in Accra). But I think they will get used to me soon, and maybe I will begin to blend in eventually—well, figuratively speaking.

Oh, one more thing I have to mention: Until I came to Volta, the best bananas I’d ever eaten were the tiny ones they grow in Chiapas, Mexico. Here, these are equally good and twice as big! Francis bought two dozen bananas from a woman on the road carrying them to the market for 1 cedi (~ 70 cents). He said they would go bad soon, so he ate six on the drive. I ate three, and then he asked me if I don’t like bananas….

A Jog To Remember

On the plane ride over, three different flight attendants asked me what I was going to do in Ghana. Subsequently, one offered me unlimited free booze throughout the 11 hour flight, and another said I should be on some Anderson Cooper show I’ve never watched (I liked the first one; the other was a tad ridiculous). Despite the smooth flight and the wine, I didn’t sleep a wink.

At the small airport, I warded off about three dozen men welcoming me to Ghana and checking to make sure I had someone to pick me up (oh yeah, they were ALL taxi drivers). Eventually I found ‘Auntie Felicia,’ the aunt of my Dad’s former law student who gave me, a stranger, an open-ended invitation to her home in Accra whenever I wish to return from the countryside where I’ll be teaching. We rode to her house where we lunched on cassava, plantains, and fish with spinach and pumpkin seeds (the cassava had zero taste, but the fish-spinach dish had plenty of taste to go around).

In the afternoon, I thought I might go for a jog to stretch my legs, since I was told the area was safe during the day. Felicia told me the sea was a straight shot from the house, pointing the way. If I was not back in an hour, she said with a smile, she’d send a search party.

After jogging a couple miles along the road, the pavement turned to red dirt and the colorful, gated houses turned to crowded rows of aluminum shacks. Everyone I passed began to stare at me, some happily yelling things like “Boroni” (white man) while others laughed and muttered to their neighbors. I had to dodge the chickens meandering the path and the children kicking makeshift soccer balls.  I had long lost sight of the ocean in the crowded shacks, but an opening revealed that the sea was, in fact, parallel to me, and I had was not an inch closer to it than when I had set out! Tempted to continue, but remembering promises made to a few friends and my mother less than 24 hours ago to be careful for an entire year, I decided to keep my promise at least through the first day and return to the house.

Well, that proved to be more challenging than I thought. I must have taken a turned from one winding path to another after entering shack-land, but I could not find the turn because every path looked identical. I slowed down, thinking it better to walk rather than sprint in the wrong direction. The sun was beating down, and my shirt was soaked (although this happens to me in air-conditioning too so I really only paired these thoughts for effect). Trying to systematically check the paths from the point I last remembered, I began walking down one way until I was sure it was unfamiliar and then backtracked. Of course, those who were watching me (which was everyone) clearly thought I was either pathetically lost and/or off my rocker. At this time, I had no phone and I had not brought money (woops).

After almost an hour of this futile game, a stout woman approached me and, in a domineering tone, said, “Where are you going? I see you pass by me many times and I think ‘this boy is lost.’” I told her where I was trying to go, and she snapped, “You wait.” She then began asking several women around her about the street I was trying to return to, and then beckoned me to follow. To summarize the rest of this circuitous journey, she led me around shack-land, in seemingly no clear direction, frequently asking people directions to the street (in the native tongue) and, more often, seemingly explaining to them with a wry smile what the heck she was doing escorting this sweaty, white creature. Eventually, after introducing me to her daughter at a variety shop and to her first-born son in the market, we got into a taxi and drove a few miles until, at last, things looked familiar again, and the road became paved once more. Upon dropping me off, she exchanged a laugh with Aunt Felicia, wrote her number down for me, and gladly accepted my 10 cedis (more than three times the return taxi fee), although she had asked for nothing.

From this experience, I learned a few obvious travel lessons of which apparently I need reminding (don’t roam around on no sleep, carry some money, etc.). Also, my conviction was reinforced that it is a universal rule, wherever you are in the world, that you can always look to women to help you when you are in need, especially those with children—they just seem to get it.

 Oh yeah, and when I trying to find my way back, I stumbled upon the ocean, ironically.  The waves crashed on a narrow beach filled with children in their undies or totally naked, playing alongside men unloading fish nets from large kayaks. See, I was never lost.