Reality

These past two weeks were the toughest for me yet. A real dose of reality. I came into this thinking I was better than the rosy-eyed Westerner wannabe-hero because I knew some history on the country as well as some history of “development” gone sour, and that my expectations were tempered with this knowledge. But between the ballooning population of this once dying school, my 4^th-grade students begging me for more math homework, and a hundred kids dancing and laughing in complete bliss during Friday games, I really forgot all of it. I forgot the history, the politics, the skepticism. I began to believe the headmaster, inept but good-natured, was beginning to hold his own. I began to believe that the teachers were starting to show a little more commitment to their work. I really felt as if this school would begin to transform like a dream, slowly at first but then with decisive strides.

About two weeks ago, the cold, mundane reality began to dampen this dream. It’s the petty things, you know. Sometimes things so petty that you don’t even put them on the list of things to remember not to take for granted—like a photocopy error or an ill-timed rain over a leaking roof. And then there’s those larger obstacles that seem at once insurmountable yet equally petty, able to suffocate the dream without even commanding a solid presence themselves….

The principal obstacle of this kind was the school owner’s refusal to be fully financially transparent with us because of some rather contrived fear about his personal freedoms. No matter how hard I tried to explain to him that, by providing this very relevant and harmless financial information, we would be able to invest the money that would take his school out of bankruptcy, begin to turn him profit, and, not to mention, markedly improve the quality of education for the kids he claims to care so much about, he wouldn’t budge. We spent hours each day going in circles about this, he insisting on coming to an agreement about profit-sharing before releasing the rest of the school finances while I insisting on the reverse order. Ultimately, we were getting nowhere, except that I was going to bed drained and waking up frustrated: Almost 120 eager children, and one man’s irrational demands threatening to derail the whole thing! Without this financial information, we wouldn’t be able to ethically fund the scholarship or any other investments in the school, and my tenure as a teacher there would have to end with the partnership.

 It was really hard for me. I thought, could I have tried so hard for these children only to fail so fast? Would this be the first time in my life I would have to accept my determination was not sufficient?  What would happen to the children?

This would be a nice time to say the owner has come around and we have turned a corner, but I can’t say that (yet). What I can say is that I’m going to bed tonight without too much soul-searching. I spent the weekend sitting in the shade on a lawn chair at the guesthouse, reading an outdated Newsweek and sipping coke from a glass bottle, recuperating after a grueling week. Between pages, I spoke with another guest passing through, an itinerant Hungarian man who has spent the last ten years traveling Africa as a self-professed “moth-er,” a moth hunter and scientist (He has discovered and named several new species himself). He also runs his own ecotourism NGO to try to promote forest conservation in a continent that has less than 10% of its original forests left.

While we were sitting there, we heard a chainsaw rev up and attack a nearby tree—a common sound around here as cocoa farmers push further into the forest. He says every time he hears the sound, he suffers inside, and I believe it when I see his face. He says he knows he can’t win this fight for the trees and biodiversity, and soon it will all be gone. And yet, he has been doing it for ten years, and his resolve is unwavering.

 I’m not sure what meeting him did for me, but it somehow quelled my anguish. He is fighting on an infinite slope with no measurable goals, yet he is somehow content, in an odd way, because he is fighting. He says the things you see on this continent make you a humbler, more patient, more balanced individual back home, even if he may never go home.

I don’t know if it was him or the Coke, but I regained my composure this weekend. I remember the history that had tempered me before, now mixed with the experience of my six weeks here so far and the insights people like the Hungarian moth-er are helping me develop. I remember now that there can be no complete “success” here, but neither is there failure, because I really am learning something either way.

Macy

I am new to this “development” line of work, but I would presume immediate gratification does not occur frequently, and, if it does, it will crack upon deeper reflection: Those expedient tasks which are successful may only skirt the real problem at hand or, worse, reinforce it. Other tasks that ought to be simple and effective are intolerably slowed by the ingrained flaws of the system. So when I tell you that, one month into my Ghana experience, I have just experienced near-immediate gratification in dealing with one particular child at our school—and that this gratification will endure my deepest reflections—you must understand how lucky I feel.

The child is a nine year old girl named Macy. Many of these children are cute, but she’s certainly top 5. She is unbearably sweet, and her smile melts the room. She also happens to be completely deaf. She has been attending the school here—one which is not equipped to educate children who can hear, much less those who can’t.

I have tried in small ways to include her in my classes, and she has clearly been appreciative: In my first week, she  brought me a present nearly every day. The best was a huge bag of oranges from her family farm. A different day, I was helping the kids cut the grass before school with machetes and, as always, sweating profusely. Before returning to class, I asked one of the teachers if I could borrow her handkerchief to dry off. Macy saw this, and, in the afternoon, she handed me an envelope with the words written, “Your gift.” There was a brand new handkerchief inside.

I assumed that schools for the deaf were hard to come by in this rural region, but I decided to inquire anyway, as I knew Ghana’s government is actually relatively supportive of the disabled. As luck would have it, I found out the regional school for the deaf is in Hohoe, only a twenty-minute drive from the village! Upon this discovery, I was determined to get Macy into that school as fast as possible. I felt every day was another day wasted when, only twenty minutes away, there was a school for the deaf—and, as it turns out, a rather prestigious one at that—waiting for her. Of course, she is just one of nine children in a poor farming family, and so the fees quickly became the obvious roadblock.

And Ghana bureaucracy didn’t help either. Everything becomes so damn complicated here. As required, we took her into town the following Monday morning to the government testing facilities to have all her senses tested. However, for inexplicable reasons, most of the staff was absent, including all those who test for hearing. They insisted on proceeding, nonetheless, and she went home that day having only her VISION tested: A completely deaf girl who uses her eyes as the primary means to communicate, and they only test her vision—sick. They ought to test their own senses next time.

Anyway, after a series of hic-ups, a little diligence finally paid off. Today, I took the father and Macy—a very, very excited Macy, who carried her traveling bag around our school in the morning to show her classmates and say goodbye—to the new school where she will board for the next 9 months. We have managed to procure a sponsorship for her from our organization to cover half the fees, and the appreciative and truly elated father has promised to cover the rest. In the taxi on the way, she was on my lap (no car here travels with less than two passengers per seat, it’s the law) and we were practicing the sign language alphabet from a small booklet I picked up—we are now five letters in to her new world.

Okay, so it took three weeks, but I still consider this gratification to be remarkably immediate for something that will have a positive impact on her entire education (she can stay at the school through senior studies and even vocational training) and her subsequent life. If I fail to do anything productive this  year for my own school back in the village, I will sleep well at night knowing Macy is not there anymore. I will miss her though.

Sunday Church

The internet was totally down for a solid six days this week, so I had to hear from a Peace Corps volunteer in the market  about Roy Halladay’s no-hitter, and I certainly could not blog. Good news is I found out there’s a guy in the nearest town who has a satellite and can get any channel for a proper monetary token. If Phillies go World Series, I know where to go.

I think I will be posting something else shortly for this past week, but here is what I meant to post last Sunday:

“Mr. NE-TAN?”

It was Francis’s son, timidly standing outside my door. I opened my cell phone to look at the time. It was 8:27 a.m. No way, a Ghanaian arriving early. Albeit 3 minutes, but still early. Not in my entire month here had any Ghanaian done anything on time, much less early.

Ahhh, but it’s Sunday, and we’re going to church. If they do anything on time here, it would be Sunday church, I thought….

Ghanaians are extremely religious. There are a multitude of Christian sects, along with significant minorities of Catholics and Muslims. Nothing seems to happen here that can’t explicitly be related to God or demon spirits, whether it be crop output or a student’s behavior. Every meal begins and each meeting ends with prayer. Most shops lack formal names; instead, they paint slogans on their front rafters like “Our Savior Always,” “Christ’s Blood Cures,” or, the oldie but goodie, “Oh, Jesus.” Here, Sunday is a true day of rest—the only day this farming community stays home from their farms.

This particular Sunday, our school director, Francis, was taking me to his church where he serves as pastor. They dress very well on this day, and so I had found my nicest slacks and collar shirt to put on. As I rushed to put on my dress shoes, the boy asked me if he could polish them down with a rag. Slightly embarrassed, I accepted—they were pretty muddy.

We loaded into Francis’s ancient German Volkswagen. I think it was from WWI, and it had been stripped of everything not necessary to make it go forward. We travelled an undulating dirt road from our small village to a smaller village, where we parked under a tree in no particular direction. We got out and walked past a few small shelters and made a sudden turn toward a modestly-sized mud hut that appeared out of nowhere. I ducked my head under the low-hanging corrugated roof as we entered and, about to ask what we were stopping here for, I realized I had entered the church. The aluminum roof, dirt floor, and wooden housing were all barren, but there were a few rows of wooden benches and, at the front, a small table draped in a brightly-colored African cloth with a slender blue vase and four pink lilacs neatly poking out. Despite the faded chalk of addition problems  scratched onto every inch of the wooden support beams and a worn chalkboard in the corner, it felt very becoming as a sanctuary. It was as if it were constructed just to prove that that any room in the world could be sanctified through the conviction of the congregation, and it reminded me of the stories my grandparents told me of praying in a barnyard at one of the member’s farms before our synagogue in Carbondale was constructed.

I won’t take you through the whole service, but between an old man in traditional garb doing some spiritual boogie that resembled the chicken dance and Francis’s sermon that likened the race of the sperm cells to the egg to God’s love, let’s just say it was sufficiently unusual. I did enjoy the hymns.

Afterward, we visited a sick man who had gone blind in a nearby house and prayed with him (I was told I was teaching some of his grandkids, but he couldn’t remember which ones).  Whatever my skepticism about religion—and especially the intense brand of Christianity practiced here—one can’t argue with the solace it brings a sick, lonely man to be visited and prayed for on a Sunday afternoon. 

School Pics

Week 3

We are three weeks in, with 57 students, one quarter of which have actually paid. Compared to 28 students at the end of the first week and only four paying, I say we are making progress. With the schedule that Myles and I have implemented now for the five teachers, some semblance of order is settling in (although one teacher can’t tell time so I have to tell him when it’s time to switch).

But at some point last week when I was attempting to teach a classroom of 10-12 year-olds how to read, with only five books to share—and even those missing several pages—dealing with constant interruptions from a child with serious ADHD that had, until recently, been treated with the cane to beat the “demons” out of him, realizing that but a handful of these kids even knew the alphabet, beginning to teach the alphabet only to be totally interrupted by the commotion of fighting children in the next classroom where I found the teacher had left for no particular reason, noticing the headmaster doodling on scratch paper in his office in the following room entirely oblivious to the chaos…I nearly decided this whole thing was a farce, and I should throw in the towel. But then there was today: I was teaching these same children, and we were finishing the alphabet and moving on to long and short vowels…and they were standing elated, shouting the vowels at the top of their lungs…. In the classroom next door, the previously-absent teacher was lecturing in a deep voice on climbing vs. creeping plants, now re-motivated with a well-received discussion about actually having a schedule….At the furthest end, I could hear toddlers giggling in the nursery classroom, and I thought about how, without this school, they would otherwise be tightly strapped onto the backs of their mothers as they were selling goods in the market all day or, at best, sitting at home unattended with nothing to do. All of this together, I felt almost gleeful, and I laughed out how drastically your spirits can change when you feel the fate of 60 kids is—at least partially—in  your hands. I always admired teachers, I think, but now I understand why.