Two Months in Africa--What Have I Actually Been Doing??

I can’t report any huge developments on the school since I have last written, so I’d like to use this entry to talk about some other things about which I have yet to write. However, first, I think I ought to give those of you who care a coherent summary (something I realized I have yet to do) of what I actually do here, what my organization is trying to accomplish at the school, and where we stand now. This is coming mostly in response to a couple of friends who wrote me recently and said they still have no idea what I’ve been doing for two months in Africa! For the rest of you, feel free to skip the next seven paragraphs….

Okay. So halfway through my senior year at Penn last year, I decided I want to volunteer as a teacher in Africa. I found Pagus, this small NGO that effectively consists of one woman, named Ellen,  in Philadelphia, and a small, intermittent supply of volunteers. Ellen has spent the last four years supporting the development of a boarding school in rural Ghana through a scholarship for the impoverished students, infrastructure development, and short-term volunteer trips (Having visited the school, I must say she and the school director have done a fantastic job). Now that this partnership has matured and the school is, more or less, independent, Ellen decided to launch another effort with a new school. The director of a dying school in a very poor village, called Likpe Bakua, had been courting her for years to help, and she recently agreed. Around the same time, she accepted me as her first long-term volunteer, and I agreed to go to this village as a volunteer teacher and a sort of Pagus representative.

The school was created ten years ago to provide a better alternative to the government schools in this deprived region of Ghana, and it runs from daycare to 6^th grade. From what I can gather, the founder managed to maintain some stability in the school but eventually gave it up and sold it to the current director, Francis. Francis, who is a regional pastor and “big-man” of the area (he owns a car, goats, second house in Accra) decided to buy it up  because he either saw it as a business opportunity or because he has a big heart and wanted to save the children (I am now putting it at about a 70/30 mixture of the two, respectively). Francis enjoyed a brief period of seeming success (up to 180 students in his first year) and then suffered an abrupt dive into depopulation, bankruptcy, and disarray. In actuality, he operated at a loss for all the three years he has owned the place, and no more than half the student population was ever really paying. The abrupt collapse came when the school bus driver quit because he wasn’t receiving his money, and, without him, the greater part of the student population which was attending from outside villages suddenly had no way of getting to school. The rest of the school floundered, the headmaster and several teachers quit, and many parents withdrew their children because they thought the remaining teachers to be irresponsible or incompetent (I know this doesn’t paint the current management we are dealing with in a positive light, but in all fairness, I must say this community is also extremely difficult when it comes to education of their children. Many don't see the point and refuse to pay promptly or fully. As a result, the school can’t afford quality teachers and so the education became as worthless as they already felt it was. Classic chicken and egg).

I don’t believe Ellen had any idea the extent to which this school was rotting when she decided to sign on, and I obviously had no clue. I thought I would be spending my time adapting to the culture, trying my hand at teaching for the first time (to which I felt very unqualified but very excited), and just learning from the kids. I thought that to be plenty for the year. But when I arrived, I saw a school that lacked toilets or drinking water, textbooks or qualified teachers. Its roof leaked and the window panes were spoiled. There was no semblance of class structure, no clear authority figure, and no committed leadership. Most of all, there were almost no kids. Needless to say, I didn’t really think I had time to just focus on adapting to the culture.

I dove in from day one, organizing a sign-in rotation system for the oldest students to fetch river water for the school, buying clocks and pencil sharpeners, re-testing some of the children who were clearly above or below their assigned grade, revamping the class schedule, and so on. I was emboldened because the headmaster and teachers were very receptive and welcomed all the new ideas; I tried to make it a collaborative process but the state of the school was so dire that, when they seemed unwilling or unable to actually contribute, I temporarily accepted promoting dependency for the sake of salvaging the school. All the while, I was teaching approximately four hours of class a day, primarily Math and English for the 3^rd-5^th graders, along with shorter classes in Information and Communication Technology and Creative Art (I hope Mrs. Mattingly, my elementary school art teacher, is not reading this). In the evenings, I would meet with the school owner/director to hammer out the details of our NGO-school partnership or even the chief of the village to find out about how the community viewed the school. (I need to mention, at this point, that a couple weeks in, another volunteer named Myles arrived to stay for three months with me in the village. Fresh out of high school, I was skeptical about having him around, but Myles has turned out to be extremely effective, mature, and a fine partner.)

Anyway, over these past two months, I’ve learned that running a mile a minute can’t take you backwards in time. It is easy to forget the bounds of your role when you see obvious problems that can so easily be fixed, and no one else seems to be trying to fix them. But I really should have known better than to think we could turn the school around on a dime. After all, you are tampering with issues that transcend the school; they run deep into the culture, community, and history. Nonetheless, I can’t say we didn’t make progress. With the subsidized fees and the presence of foreigners, the student population ballooned. With the improvements in structure and infrastructure, it began to function like a proper school. We were even able to hire two new teachers—both infinitely more qualified than the previous staff.

But it is this rapid progress that allowed my delusion to carry on for so long and made the realization that I wrote about in my last entry that much harder to bare (For those of you who don’t want to read back, I reached a breaking point in the “negotiations” with the school director because he didn’t want to agree to the terms of the agreement my NGO director had made with him via phone/email prior to my arrival—there were some serious misunderstandings about what those terms were, of course). Just as I magnified, in my own mind, the significance of the immediate progress of the school, I magnified this failure into a true crisis: I questioned the whole experience here, my purpose, blah, blah, blah. I was spreading myself so thin I couldn’t see the intrinsic value of the experience or the real impact on some of the kids.

But, as I wrote before, ultimately this event served to temper my expectations, my demands, and my disappointments. I have now decided that, if the partnership fails, I’ll stay on as a teacher for the year (after all, that’s all I wanted to be in the first place). Of course, it won’t be easy for me if the school reverts back to its former state, but I think I now have the experience in hand that I’ll avoid another existential crisis and accept the impact I can make in the realm I can make it. Before, I hadn’t truly convinced myself (even if I told myself I had) that no matter what happens, it’s not a waste. I’m 80% sure I’ve convinced myself now. If I can get the other 20% there, I’m invincible.

Okay, summary finished. Sorry that took so long. What about the rest of my experience here? Let’s see….I love the village I am living in. It is nestled in the foothills of the mountains that separate Ghana from Togo. It is very, very green. It has a few shops in the town center and vans that pass through that stuff people like sardines for the 30 minute trip to the nearby town of Hohoe where the market is. I would guess the village consists of one to two thousand people, comprised of seven clans (which are indistinguishable to an outsider) led by seven family heads who report to the chief. The people are very kind and, after two months, some of them have even begun to stop gawking at me! Only a few of them have passable English. I have begun to learn their language, but it’s slow coming.

I stay at an informal guesthouse here run by one of the wealthier townsmen and his wife. They rent out six rooms that extend from their own house, each furnished with an uncomfortable bed and a ceiling fan (yes, there’s electricity, although frequent blackouts). The bathroom is communal, but the toilet flushes and there’s a real shower (I was almost disappointed when I saw the shower head; I had been mentally preparing myself to shower with a bucket for a year). Needles to say, no hot water, but I rarely miss it. Besides a “guard” dog, a puppy, a cat, and two kittens, the couple lives alone with their 11-year-old grandson, Denis. I love having Denis around, who is also one of my students, and he is finally getting over his shyness toward me—he even followed me (barefoot) on my evening jog tonight.

As far as food and water go, I have a gas cooker and a refrigerator, so I make a lot of my own food and boil my own water. Tonight, I tried to recreate my Mom’s tuna casserole (it was more like milk-pasta pudding, but it was tolerable). The madam of the house has adopted Myles and me as her own and sometimes makes us very tasty local dishes for dinner as well. The variety of food here is extremely lacking, but I’m making due. On the whole, I’m pretty comfortable with life here. If nothing else, there are so much fewer distractions here than back home that, for the first time in my life, I feel like I have time to actually read!

And, because I am trying to make this entry a catch-all, and it is already interminably long, let me conclude with a bullet point list of things I miss about home (besides my family and friends):

·         Whole wheat bread

·         Gym

·         Meritocracy

·         Salads

·         Muffins

·         Real Coffee

·         Unbelievable efficiency

·         Complete disinterest in your existence when walking down a street