Update

Sorry it has been a long time. Recently, I have struggled to put words on the screen. But I promised some of you I would keep writing, and others I thought I owed reassurance that I’m still alive—so here you go. It’s rather long, but then again it’s been a long time…

Atiyinu (or “Airfield”), the village in which I now work, is situated just off of a major highway and fifteen minutes from Ho, the regional capitol. It is made up of a series of small mud-hut enclaves scattered amongst the equatorial bush. Save the distant whizz of a passing truck, standing in it one could hardly fathom the existence of civilization, much less a thriving city just up the road. Here, extended families share meals on stools and children happily entertain themselves with rudimentary objects. If you want to know where the stereotype of “Merry Africa” comes from, visit Airfield.

But back on the highway, a bright-blue, beautiful new school building now stands as a bridge between Airfield and the rest of the world. It is the product of a successful partnership: the community’s land and labor; my NGO’s money and design. It was completed a year ago, and now every morning a remarkably large number of children appear out of the bush and file down the roadside—a few always barefoot—to report for morning assembly.

I have met a lot of charities and NGOs who are building schools in rural Ghana. And it is no surprise why: if you were to take a poll of the rural poor and ask them what they desire to have most—a school, heath clinic, or better housing—my conclusion is that the vast majority would choose the first. It may be because they feel a good school represents a good future. It may be that people equate “the West” with better education more than anything else, so it is the natural place to ask for help. Whatever their reasons, the Airfield community asked, begged, and pleaded with representatives of my NGO for four years to help build them a school (following ten years of unsuccessfully pleading with the government). Then, in five extraordinary months, with serious fundraising by my director and the invaluable on-ground management of a volunteer Israeli engineer, the result was achieved.

 

But a new building alone can’t teach a child to add, subtract,  read, or think.  Without continued efforts by those involved, it just provides a centralized location for children to waste their time until their parents return from the farm. Turning a new building into a functional school is a whole other undertaking. Any charity has to be keenly aware of the long-term commitment—or at least a long-term strategy—required before it starts raising money for a new building, be it a school or whatever. Money is not the limiting factor in development; it’s understanding and forethought.

I showed up to this school a year after it was built. During the interim, there had been no regular presence from my organization. As my director neither had the resources nor the interest in running a school, she had seeded the building to the municipal government in exchange for guaranteed provisions including new staff, supplies, furniture, a feeding program, and electricity. Not surprisingly, when I arrived the school was understaffed, undersupplied, under-furnished, underfed, and—most painful to encounter—dismally dispirited. There was a new energetic headmaster; however, he lacked an ounce of managerial skills and directed most of his energy inwardly (i.e., he is completely absorbed in religious self-righteousness and likens himself to Joshua amongst the Israelites). There were also a handful of government teachers, but they didn’t like working outside of town, they arrived late, they didn’t think their headmaster was receptive to their needs (he’s not), and they were generally just malcontent (as are many school teachers in this country).  The school supplies that existed were in piles on the floor in the headmaster’s office, and the entire lack of organization made me think the school was built yesterday, not a year ago. The unstoppable cheerfulness and smiles of the children were, as always in my experiences here, the one saving grace.

The situation in Airfield is quite different from the private village school of Bakua last year. For starters, as a government school, the teachers and headmaster are assigned to their posts from all over the region, so they feel no personal investment in the community or its partnership with our NGO. Whereas the Bakua private school staff worked extremely cooperatively with me last year (excluding the proprietor, of course) because they saw it as directly in their self interest, Airfield takes some coaxing. The goal for both has been fundamentally the same—to help improve the quality of education for the rural poor—but the obstacles in reaching it have been quite different: in Bakua, it was working with an inept, profit-driven proprietor; in Airfield, it is working with some particularly uninterested government employees.

To be quite honest, my Airfield experience has been personally trying in a way that Bakua never was. Until we broke the partnership off, I always believed Bakua could get where it needed to go—even in the worst moments. I was continually brainstorming and discussing new ways to fix reoccurring problems. The road may be mired with pitfalls, I felt, but I’d be damned if we weren’t going to get there.

 In Airfield, I couldn’t even see the road anymore. Perhaps it was the lack of buy-in from the staff, or the lack of meaningful guidance from my NGO. Perhaps it was the abrupt, rather thankless end in Bakua that gave me the feeling of being burnt at the stove and not wanting to  try again. Perhaps it was simply the little known African disease called “exhaustion.” Whatever the reason, I didn’t have the zeal that had driven me through my first four months here. In short, I lost my faith. 

I am working on trying to get it back, though. And some progress has been made. Since I have been here, I have successfully lobbied the government to send teachers to all the classes which had previously been left unattended (to make room for a permanent teacher, I gave up teaching junior high science, although it was the best part of my day!). I recognized a serious lack of communication amongst teachers and the headmaster, so I have begun weekly teacher meetings to provide a forum to meaningfully address the array of problems the new school faces (before, everyone just quietly complained). Punctuality was terrible, so I began a reward system to motivate it which has worked pretty well. With my encouragement, two formerly listless teachers have pursued their passion and begun a “culture” club for drumming/singing/dancing on Friday afternoons, and another teacher and I are collaborating on a twice-a-week after-school reading program. I have worked with the headmaster and a community nurse to improve healthcare and sanitation (that one is slow coming). In terms of material improvements, I procured 100 new desks after repeatedly lobbying the local Member of Parliament who had promised them over a year and a half ago. Also, after hearing complaints that the school was unmarked so cars didn’t know where to stop, I organized a community-led construction project to build and paint a cement sign post on the roadside to provide a marker and add much-needed school spirit.  Finally, I am working with government officials and community members to design and build a school library.

“Small inroads” is my director’s motto—and that is exactly what I’m trying to do in Airfield. An optimist would say that I have shown a previously uninterested and unorganized staff a path to organization and improvement (an actual optimist here did tell me that). But, these days, I am not an optimist. I have to constantly fight my inclination to feel “small inroads” is whitewashed lingo for “make yourself feel good while ignoring core deficiencies.” First and foremost, the quality and quantity of actual teaching time in the school is still terrible. Second, the headmaster does not do his job (which incites the first problem). There are still bone-wrenching times where it all seems hopeless: like when five teachers are sitting around doing nothing until one of them finally gets up only to beat some of the unsupervised children with a stick for fighting and then sits back down; or last Friday when the headmaster took school children to labor on his personal farm during school hours; or simply when peering into classes and noticing that rote memorization still pervades every lesson of every subject. 

But the rather negative “realism” I have developed about all this is unproductive. Realism does not wake me up in the morning and make me want to go to school. If realism means walking around with a sour face and a short-fuse, it is not a useful tool for working in a developing world that is never short of antagonism. If I currently represent how “realists” operate, I assure you that they have no place in this line of work.

It is only the optimists here that I have met that can keep trying, keep chugging along, keep prodding. In this sort of work, nothing ever works the first time, or even the third time: you have to try, then try a different way, then try again—and eventually you get something that sort of works!  And while that may sound dismal, that’s the process for progress here. In this framework (or lack thereof), it is only optimists that can identify, collect, and build on the specs of success sprinkled over the debris of botched attempts. It is only optimists that can endure the experiences here, and continue.  If their positivity is not realistic in perspective, it is certainly a very real force in their unrelenting efforts to make positive change.

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In rereading this, I realized I wove together two messages that might seem to conflict: the need for long-term, tempered diligence, and the need for unabashed positivity. However, they are not at odds. On the contrary, success here depends on both together: diligence alone will lead to dismay (as I found over the last few months), but positivity alone will lead to unintended—and sometimes disastrous—consequences. Although this experience has been a personal struggle to find that sweet spot on the Venn Diagram, it’s definitely there.