one last time on Ghana

(Friday) A time of butterflies

My fingernails look like I’ve been digging in rich black soil. It’s not that Hohoe is dirty. It’s hot here, and so dust turns quickly into dark mud on your skin. Oh, oops, did I say “it’s hot here?” That’s wrong. I’m not in Hohoe anymore.


I’m sitting at the Accra Airport waiting for my flight out of Ghana. How could it be? The air is cool, the food is plentiful, the wines, unleashed, flow at the snap of a finger – how could this be? Hohoe is only four hours away!

Snap of the finger. Did you know that in the Volta Region of Ghana, you don’t just shake hands in greeting? You snap your finger against the finger of the one you’re greeting, to form a mutual snap. It’s tricky until you get the hang of it.

In a week, I came close to getting it right most of the time. But not all of the time.

Yevu, yevu – those words will be in my head for a long long time. It’s an especially touching greeting, if you consider the history of the white person in Africa. But the little ones don’t know that. All they understand is that if they see a white person, this is the way they express both curiosity and a welcome. White person! White person! I respond with a wave and sometimes a greeting. Ndi (in the morning), ndo (in the afternoon). But it’s the wave of the hand that is crucial. So that they can wave back with all heart and smiles.

Yevu, yevu!

Akpe kakakakaka – thank you so very much.

Friday. My last full day. I’d been told: don’t prepare a full morning for the kids. Friday is game day. After the first recess, they go out and play games.

I teach my last class. It’s super over-prepared. We do the math, the reading, the letters of the alphabet. I’ve constructed this module where we talk about opposites and I have this plan to end with a very subjective pair of opposites: if the line isn’t long, it’s? ...short. But with respect to time, what is short? Is a minute short? Yes! Is a year short? No, it’s long! How about a week? Short!



The regular teacher sits with the students during my classes


Yes, short. But I tell them, in one week, look how much you can do! In our short week, we have read eight books, learned six new songs! We’ve talked about the crops and climate of Ghana and America, about ice fishing and butterflies. Hand clapping games, jingles about numbers. Drawings, letter hunting, Complicated sums, backwards counting, imaginary animals, sign language. And we added friends. Mine is a rich pool. Twelve children in a school in Hohoe.

Oh, how I miss them already!










the littlest one








8 years old and always the first with the right answer








the oldest in class












one of the twins




the other

I mean to end on this theme of friends. We sing a song – a new one that they learned just this day – one that’s quickly risen to a top ranking in their estimation. ...Circle’s round it never ends, that’s how long I’m want to be your friend!

Recess. I see the older kids going off with a soccer ball. The preschoolers are out, too. I suggest that they line up for one last photo.





I pack up my papers, thinking – field games now. But the teacher tells me no – that’s for the older kids. I can have another hour and a half. The school director joins the class. They wait expectantly.

Gulp.

What now? I have no more curriculum!

Alphabet. We ended in the middle, let’s play alphabet games with the remaining letters. I buy myself ten minutes of planning time, even as I write words that kids are shouting out in answer to the letter game.

I can read two more books. I’ve brought extra ones. Sing one more round of make new friends. Some number tricks. Minutes pass, we’re good, we’re good. Half hour left.

I say to them – did you ever think of writing a book? What would you write about? This strikes them as somewhat nuts, but I persevere. I suggest we write one right now! Why not?! I have a whole half hour!

The previous day, I had seen something that perhaps was one of the most poignant moments for me (out of a week full of poignant moments). The littlest one (age four) had finished a drawing early. The other kids were still going strong, but she was done. I asked her if she wanted one of my story books to look at. She nodded. I gave her the book and she hesitated. Could she really hold it, look at it, examine it, all on her own? I placed it in her hands. Have those little hands ever held a book before?






Often at recess, she lingers proudly over her drawing and a bevvy of preschoolers comes out to watch her. She just recently moved up to this next level of schooling and they like to admire her desk and anything that she may have in it. (Though typically it's empty. The children here have no supplies. The teacher lends them pencils and in my week, I've handed the paper.)





Now, as the idea of “writing” a book is taking shape, the littlest one pipes up with her usual “I cannot.” She says it always in the same way: I cannot draw an animal. And now – I cannot write a book.

I tell them about the little engine that could, changing it to a Hohoe van, going up a hill. The teacher and directress catch on to the idea – I think I can, I think I can – they chant with me.

And so the kids tell me the topic and the setting and I start a sentence and they take turns finishing it for me. I cannot emphasize enough how difficult this is for them. It’s a crazy idea and there are no right answers. When they come up with sentence endings, they say them in hushed, timid tones.

And so we have a book of sorts and it's about children hiding and the teacher eating too much pineapple.

And my time in class is nearly over. One more story about a butterfly. I ask each child to come up to the blackboard and draw a butterfly. I cannot draw a butterfly – my littlest one pipes up. I think you can.

She does. As do the others. Our blackboard of butterflies.





There is a lot of hand holding and hugging as I walk to the car. The headmistress presents me with a pair of Ghana earings. It is, predictably, a very difficult moment of leaving. [Will I be back? Maybe. I'm coming away with at least a few ideas on how they can go about building up their resource base. I would like to spend time exploring this more. And, I would love to see the children again.]





In the afternoon, the volunteers are all over Hohoe: one last trip to the market. (Note to commenter: no it's not only batik. Though in my own purchases, I preferred batik, because it's made locally and I like to support the women here who print it.)


 


To the art shop of Courage. Names here are so often aspirational! Wisdom. Bright... And shop names are frequently with a religious motif:


 


...To the seamstress. To the Internet Café, where I e-sign a counter to the offer on the condo.

Late in the evening we go to the Obama Bar. It’s our first and last beer drinking evening. Ghana beer is tasty – of the pale ale kind. At midnight we walk up to where the woman has her street stand with egg sandwiches. She fries an egg, sprinkles some combination of peppers and ginger and garlic and places it between two rounds of a bread that is somewhat pita-like. Most volunteers wont eat street food here (for good reason), but we break the rule for this. Delicious.


By Saturday morning, most of the volunteers have left to catch early flights. Only four remain. We’re booked for evening departures.

Saturday in Hohoe is laundry day and as I walk one last time to check email (my condo is sold! closing in May!) and pick up some last things that are still with the seamstress, I see the lines and fences draped with wet garments. Many have to draw water from wells and use basins outside and I am reminded of laundry days at my grandparents’ house in the Polish countryside, where my grandmother used a scrubbing board and well water too to do her laundry.





And now it’s time for our last meal at the base. I’ll miss having someone cook good food and clean the dishes after all the meals. It’s a tedious task in Hohoe, especially since there is no warm tap water. Our cook is not terrifically bothered by this, but I know it can’t be easy preparing food and scrubbing it all clean afterward.





I finish packing. All to the sound of loud music that appears to be playing steps away from the base.

There is a church there – one without walls, so that sound carries easily. We walk over to watch the dancing...





...and this is our final moment in Hohoe. But let me end the Hohoe page with a photo from my last walk through the village. Yevu, yevu, they cried out. And waved. And posed.

 


At three in the afternoon, a van takes us to Accra. My flight takes off at ten in the evening and I am so tired that I fall asleep as we take off. I miss everything – the food service, the sound system -- all of it. I wake up a number of times, but immediately doze off again.

By seven I am in Amsterdam and by nine I am in Paris. Just for a night. I need a good long walk. I just wish it wasn’t so cold. The fifties. Completely disconcerting after the heat of Ghana.

and again, from Ghana

(Thursday) the orphanage

Elizabeth, the headmistress, is proud of the new building for the older kids at the Happy Kids orphanage in Hohoe, Ghana. Indeed, this past summer, Cross Cultural Solutions volunteers helped with its construction, including the painting of the interior.

You reach it by following a path from the school, past grasses and a church, and a fair amount of rubbish.

You have to develop a sense of indifference to rubbish here. Markets use black plastic bags and though people reuse these again and again, eventually shreds wind up in the fields. There aren’t grocery stores in Hohoe and markets don’t sell goods in cans or plastic containers and so this cuts down considerably on what you may find in the gutter. And, poverty is a great force behind recycling. But still, you’ll find litter. Less on the road, but abundantly behind houses and in vacant lots.

Any campaign is focused more on getting kids to wash hands and prodding parents to take them to the doctor at the first sign of malaria than on picking up shreds of plastic bags.

The path continues past the mud and thatch huts, past goats, chickens -- the typical Hohoe animals that you find everywhere here.





And now we are at “The House.”

Boys’ quarters next to girls’ quarters. The boys’ quarters are neater so I’ll show you those:





All your possessions (what possessions?) in a room.

Elizabeth is justifiably proud. The bigger kids now have good, solid beds.

And an outside faucet for water. And a separate house where Elizabeth’s daughter, with the help of another woman who comes in from the village, cooks three meals for a pile of kids each day. Right here, in this pot.





In the classroom, I have lesson plans and we work through everything at a solid pace. New songs, new words, and tough concepts like opposites, and similarities and differences, and even if the littlest ones do not fully understand, they pick up bits and pieces.


We rumble back in the van in the heat of the noon hour.



(as seen through van windshield)



In the afternoon, the CCS volunteers have one more brief introduction to Ghanaian tradition: that of batik fabric printing. We visit a seamstress who makes her own batik fabrics (so many women do that here!) she teaches us how to dip the carvings in hot wax and then use dye to infuse the whole piece with color.



(on the walk over to the seamstress shop)




 
(this, too, on the walk to the seamstress)





(the printing blocks)


And so quickly, it is evening. A handful of us walk to the Internet café – me, for the obvious emails and posting. I am negotiating a sale of the condo and this is just so strange to do, from this village Internet shop in the Volta Region of Ghana.


I walk home alone, late as always. It’s dark, but every bend in the dirt road is so familiar now that I don’t bother with the flashlight. When I come to this house, I know I am almost there.





It's well past midnight now and a small group of us stays up at this late hour, even as we’re up by 6:30 each morning, ready to rumble over to our placements soon after. We laugh hard now. Such a welcome release.

[Post Scriptum: another storm, another struggle to connect. But, I'm about to begin my last day in Ghana. Internet will improve after I fly out Saturday night to France, and then the next day to Madison. But will anything improve for these kids here? More thoughts on that later.]

more, from Ghana

(Wednesday) kids and burning wood

[Digression]

A technical note: it’s clear by now, that Internet access is not a guarantee in Hohoe, Ghana. In the spare hours (late, after dinner), I can walk to the village. If it’s not violently storming. But it’s a toss of a coin whether the power, or Internet will be functioning.

Once I do have a signal, it takes forever to load a photo. If I want to read email and upload pics, the process of uploading just ten photos will take two hours. The Internet café (café by name only) closes at 9. Yesterday, the owner sweetly kept it open for me for another half hour. He enjoys watching the TV there and his assistant spends her idle time on Facebook (in Ewe?), so I don’t feel too bad. And, I pay by the hour. But even so, I could not open all my messages and I could only load a limited set of photos for the day. (I write the text at the home base, when most everyone is already asleep, so at least that’s ready to go. But if I make a mistake, there’s no opportunity to make corrections. So you have to live with my mistypes.)

Is it all a nuisance? No, not really. The Internet café late at night is a special place. People drift in to watch the Ghanaian sitcom and hearing their laughter in the room is precious. As is watching the young women – the few lucky ones who can afford it – get on Facebook and stay on it for one, sometimes two hours.

The café is very open – the front of the building is completely exposed to the street and the bugs in the evening can be ferocious. Not mosquitoes. Those are evil and much more discreet here, but other tropical nuisance bugs that love crawling across my MacBook as I load photos. I’ve learned not to care.

The walk home, around 10 p.m. these days (and a tad of a violation of home base rules, which are: stay out if you want, but if it’s late, walk in groups, just in case) – I have come to love that as well. Hohoe becomes calm. Not quiet – the cabs still cruise the main road and look for passengers, but there are fewer people, fewer open shops, fewer sounds. The goats are the biggest noisemakers.

Last night, as I was about to turn away from the main road to walk along the dirt track home, I passed a group of five people of various sizes. The tallest – a man with a tub on his head, asked me who I was and where I was from. He knew I was yevu but he couldn’t tell from my back if I was a man or woman (I wore below the knee pants and my hair was pulled back) so he asked first -- are you a woman?

Women really do not wear pants here. It’s not frowned on (as above the knee skirts would be, for example), but it’s just not done.

The man introduced me to his wife and his three children. Older kids. Two of them had tubs on their heads. Empty tubs. They must have been coming back from a successful day of trade.

It was such an insignificant and yet deeply satisfying exchange. After, I walked home, for the first time, by the light of the bright moon. I did not need to flick my flashlight. I could spot a snake, were one to pass in front of me.



[Morning]

Wednesday morning is spent teaching and I have a geography lesson, a math lesson and an English lesson prepared, ready to roll.

But I digress so often in class, that I worry whether pedagogically this is wise. (I consult with one of the volunteers, who’s president of the school teacher’s union in her district in the States. She reassures me to keep contextualizing. That life is not lived in compartments and neither should all the lessons appear that way. It feels good to have the support of someone who is actually trained in teaching methods.)

The headmistress at Happy Kids asks if I could take school photos. Great. I’m happy to do this. I promise to make for her a book of school photos when I return.





I talk to her at length during recess about the orphanage and school. She started small – to give kids a chance to develop a love of books, she tells me. Happy Kids is a private school, funded entirely by small contributions from parents who can pay. It grew. I ask how is it that there are so many orphans. (And hers is not the only orphanage in the district). In the class that I teach, out of twelve, she tells me, six have mothers but no fathers. But the mothers could not afford to care for them any longer. Two have no parents at all, two come and live there for the week, returning to their parents, who are quite far, for the week-end. The rest (two) have parents who have chosen Happy Kids because it is a private school.



the preschoolers come over at recess


What’s with all these private schools in Ghana? So that even Hohoe has at least a half dozen up and running?

There is a predictable answer. Ghanaian women have lots of children. And you can see this. On the street, kids outnumber adults by far! Both tradition and imported Christianity have affirmed for the people here that it’s important to reproduce.

Public school teachers have low wages and so they supplement teaching with other work – private preparation of students for level examinations, for example. They have scattered commitments and their teaching suffers. Not to mention that the class size is large. And so the parents feel that at least in private schools (charging, as Happy Kids does for the few paying kids, fees of, say, the equivalent of $230 per term) their children will have more of the teacher's attention. And, in private schools, you are hired or fired at the discretion of the director. Presumably if you can’t teach, you’re out. I get the feeling that the director is still keeping an eye on my rather freshly hired regular classroom teacher.

In class, I talk with the kids about letters, words, numbers, counting, adding, subtracting – the usual rabbits that you can imagine I’m pulling out my hat.


Story reading is always so popular, but I can’t tell you how little relevance our books (including the ones I am using from the small library at the home base) have for the lives of these kids. Rather than explaining: in America, it is this way, I change sentences and read what is not really written there. I do have one good book about Goldilocks – she’s white and blond and she visits a house that is fancy as hell, but she at least has dreadlocks and the bears eat porridge and that’s a chunk better than all those books where the kids eat pancakes and maple syrup for breakfast and have cubby holes in school and who have sinks and bathrooms and rubber boots when it rains and warm coats when the weather gets nippy.

At Happy Kids, the young children go off to the side to pee and the little ones don’t quite make it and so you watch them as they stand and the pee trickles down to their feet. In the toddler room, the cement floor gets washed down periodically because otherwise, the smell of urine is too strong.

For breakfast it’s porridge, for lunch it’s rice and beans, for dinner it’s... rice and beans. The headmistress tells me feeding twenty-five orphans and a handful of borders is a challenge.

And then the morning lessons end and they go off to their lunch and we get picked up and have our home base meal.


[Afternoon]

If you are a tourist in Ghana, chances are you’ll want to see the Wli falls. They’re the tallest in Western Africa and they are majestically beautiful. The CCS (Cross Cultural Solutions) staff always plan an outing to them for the volunteers. The falls are about an hour from where we live and work. There are a few shop there, as well, where men carve ebony and mahogany and other timbered masks and figures.





But even as it is a tourist destination, there's only one pair there this afternoon – a man and his son, and they are from Germany. It’s a return trip for the dad and he wanted to bring his kid to let him see this very fascinating, very different culture, but we can see that the kid is freaked by it all, so that when the dad walks away for a bit and he is left alone, he cries and cries and does not let a single Ghanaian come to his help. He’s okay with our volunteers.

It reminds me how for the littlest ones at Happy Kids, the immediate reaction to seeing me, yevu (white one), is trepidation. But there, very quickly, as in all aspects of their young lives, they pick up their cues from their friends and if their friends want to touch yevu, they’ll follow suit.

We hike up over bridges through dense forests  until we are at the falls.


 


Our volunteers plunge into the pool to rinse off under the crashing water. I’m happy just to catch the spray and to look at the hundreds of bats that fly in and out of the caves high up in the cliffs...











... and the rainbows that form at the side.





I didn’t write much about the volunteers here, on Ocean, in the same way that I would avoid writing about colleagues or students back home. I will say this – each CCS person has her or his own reason for volunteering in Ghana, but really what counts is that they are volunteering and working so hard in their placements. That's impressive.






Butterflies. Did I mention the butterflies? The cocoa and the butterflies, the African lilies, the ferns. But mostly I'm thinking of the butterflies. Childlike and impatient. Scattering quickly if you approach too quickly or get too close.












The van is working well again. We rumble back to the home base, away from the high cliffs and the villages below, where people cut bamboo and gather sticks, carrying them deftly overhead.


















The sticks are for the evening fire. Ghana at night has the scent of burning wood.

from Ghana, continued

(Tuesday) more lessons

I feel more confident, more prepared in the hot little classroom outside Hohoe, Ghana. I graded all their “paintings” (all got star stickers and comments of the type we all are so used to giving back home – nice work! good job! My impression is that teachers are less carrot-y here. I don’t think the parents would like me for a permanent position; they favor tough discipline.)

I also have a lesson plan for today: a list of songs, some arithmetic ideas, reading games, alphabet scrambles.



these three always try to understand and do what is expected of them; only one lives at home.

Most kids are strong in one way and weak in another. The littlest one is always quiet at the beginning. She never engages until at least an hour into the morning. The young boys are terrific drawers. Three kids are math stars, understanding the tricks I put to the problems instantly. Writing is tough for most everyone. I wonder if I should do more writing with them. The teacher surely has her own teaching agenda, but she uses this week as time to back away from it. She is curious what I do on my own.

The headmistress sits in for a while and now I have the teacher sharing a seat with a child and the headmistress too, squeezed next to a little boy who seems quite used to sharing space. (Did I mention that they can easily squeeze a family of ten into one taxi?) Everyone participates. My age range has suddenly grown: from 4 to 52.

I write a lot on the board and I notice my hands are becoming completely black. Why is that, I wonder. The chalk, after all, is white.

Oh, I get it. The eraser. It’s a small, hand sewn pillow and it has seen many many dirty little hands. I ask the teacher if there is water to rinse off the black. A one word command from her and a boy is up and running. In a minute he is back with a pail of water and he pours it on my hands, a little at a time so that I can rub them clean. Or cleaner. I smile and tell him thank you, that’s fine, but he keeps on pouring, small spurts, until the bucket is dry.

And now I talk concepts. Pretend and real. Five legged unicorns. Cows that fly. Imaginary animals. A lead-in to reading them a Dr. Seuss book. Man, I love Dr. Seuss books! Left foot, right foot, high foot, low foot.

I ask them to draw pretend animals. I tell them to put feathers on goats and ten legs on cows if they want. Against my better judgment, I draw some examples on the board. It’s an invitation to ignite the copying instinct rather than to set the imagination rolling, but drawing animals had invoked, for the first time, concern. Teacha, I can’t draw animals. I show them how easy it is to draw a sitting cat. Two circles. Even the youngest one can do it and she does. The ornamentation she gives that cat is something else!

Recess. I breathe a sigh of relief.

Put away your drawings, we’ll finish them later.

But recess becomes interminable. My teacher has gone off on her break and my little class is filled with even younger kids, preschoolers, who have come to touch yevu yevu.



the preschoolers at Happy Kids do not wear uniforms; too much money.


They all want the hug, and I switch them to high five so that we don’t trample each other down all recess long. Some of the little ones pick up the drawings tucked into the desks of my own class group and they fold them and scrunch them and I am thinking – I have thirty kids here, some of them quite rambunctious. A young girl (11 years old) comes over and introduces herself. Ah. She is a recess monitor. She is charged with “looking after things.” She is one of the orphans here (she describes herself as living at Happy Kids) and she knows all the kids very well. She helps with the youngest, I redirect the preschoolers, but really, I would very much like recess to be over.

In Ghana, time floats. 

The fifteen minute recess is now reaching close to an hour. I nudge the helper, and she finally nudges the toddlers' Madame and we return to our class spaces.

Stories, colors on paper, complicated addition, easy reading games.

And by lunchtime, we’re in the van and heading for home base.


Yes, it's true, there is an afternoon plan today as well for the volunteers – it’s to go to the Tafi Atome Monkey Sanctuary. Troops of mona monkeys live here and they are so sacred to the people of Ghana that they have survived for centuries, even as other herds failed. They had the luck that the locals saw in them their ancestral spirits and this, for years, made them untouchable. When imported Christianity eroded the traditional beliefs, the troops of monkeys dwindled, causing them, by the end of the last century, to be virtually extinct. Only in the last decade, in part as a result of contributions and encouragement from the international community, the forests were preserved and the monkeys were left to reside in peace there.

There is a burst of rain on our drive over to the forest, but it disappears around the bend in the road.





We buy bananas and we are told how to feed a monkey should we see one emerge from the forest: hold the whole banana! Don’t peel it! They want to do this themselves.

We are so very lucky. Sometimes they hide so perfectly in the forest that a only a several day visit can guarantee a sighting. But our staff knows the good hours, and well, we’re just lucky. The monkeys come out to the clearing and, attracted by our bananas, they saunter over to snatch them away, scampering off to eat them up in the bamboo trees.



































It's an intensely beautiful sight.

The village here is a traditional one, where people make a living out of agriculture and kente weaving.





We see many of the mud and bamboo huts in this region. A few of the better huts have spaces outside to shower, much like here:





We pack into the repaired volunteer van. Or maybe not so repaired: it breaks down seven times on the return trip. Ah well, it gives us a chance to get out and take a look around at the scenery. This, just outside Hohoe:





One of the (older) volunteers and I are dropped off at our own village’s kente weaving hut to look more closely at the densely woven strips of fabric that is so much identified with West Africa and especially Ghana. I wish I could always keep in my head the rhythmic clacking sound of the skilled weavers moving their threads back and forth. (Note the rubber band on his briefs. Obama and Oprah are commercially important in Ghana.)





And now it’s time for an evening meeting with an invited guest to our home base – a social worker who monitors child labor practices and child trafficking in Ghana. I am immensely interested in this and the hour is so very well spent, even as it reaches a stupendous crescendo outside as another storm gives a violent sweep through the region.

The power has been out for most of the day and though the home base has a generator, it, too fails now and then. Lights flicker, but at least we have that. Water is unavailable as well and we’re all used to it. There is a barrel with water from a well and you can carry some in with a bucket to take care of the basics.

After dinner, I do my now routine walk in the dark night to the village, to make sure all electricity is off there as well. It is. The street is shadowy and people walk aided by the light from cruising taxis.

No internet tonight. Maybe the next day. Or maybe not.