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.