boards

It’s eight in the morning, ninety minutes before the start of class for me and Ed and I are at Home Depot studying floor boards.
I want you to consider hickory – he tells me.
We need to buy floor boards for two room that are currently floorless. It’s tricky because the rooms feed into the living room, which does have a floor – of mixed wood specimens. It’s maple here, Andy tells us, and oak there.
So... why aren’t we buying oak? I ask Ed.

Too straightforward. The farmhouse floors are variegated.

I’m not convinced. The hickory is so variegated it makes your head spin.


hickory to the right


After the last class for the day I head for the construction mess at the farmhouse. Andy is there. So is his grandson. Ed’s tampering with the electricals. We convene downstairs to study the floor issue.

Isn’t hickory like having a zebra in the room?

No...

Why not?

Zebras are black and white. These floor boards aren’t black or white.

And we continue in this way. If not about floor boards then it's the walls or ceilings or closets.

My head is spinning. The crew leaves. Ed and I continue to work – or, rather he works and I pass tools, screws and track bits.





And now it’s nearly dusk. I'm longing to sit for a few minutes (hours?) in a space that hasn't a thick layer of construction dust. Finally, Ed's ready to let go and head back to the condo for dinner. We walk to the old Ford with the red tape for a fender. I reach inside to open the hatch. Hmm. Hatch opener is not working. I slam the door shut and, in response, the lock slips down into a locked position. The key is inside. Ed, the thief extraordinaire, breaks into the car, retrieves the key and hands it to me.

At the condo I reheat soup from yesterday. Ed microwaves stale bread, I add a salad.

So, hickory over red oak?
Yes, sure. Funny how at the end of the day, lines blur, and things that appeared so monumentally important just a few hours back now seem trivial and benign. Zebra like? Sure. With ginger cabinets.

mortification

If you teach large classes (as I do), you can’t allow yourself to be easily embarrassed. A few weeks ago I spilled tea all over my white blouse just before class. Eh, big deal. Today, I noticed that my top was bunched oddly in places. I noticed this after speaking to a group of 70. So it goes.

But I did feel truly mortified when I came home from work to find my door strangely locked. I typically lock it a certain number of twists – it was locked differently; I knew, therefore, that someone had been inside.

There are only a few people who have a key to the place. My daughter – but she’s at work, so not her. Ed – he’s at the farmhouse. My real estate agent – she’s in Florida. The “concierge” downstairs... Ah.

I walk downstairs and ask if she’d been in.
Oh no. But a real estate agent came by.

Say what?

With the same guy who was looking at your place last week.

Whaaaaat?

They thought you were in Ghana.

In fact, I have had a hell of a time keeping up with life since I’ve been back. The laundry, the darks, the lights, is sprinkled all over the bedroom. There are stacks of mail everywhere. The bathroom looks like ten people went through and forgot to put away their cleaning products. And so on.

It was one of those events when you do not buckle your seat belt and have a car accident. I NEVER leave the place messy. I hate messes and I insist on putting things away before leaving. (In other words, I drive Ed nuts.) But this one time I was too busy to care about anything but getting to work on time.

I felt certain that the sale was, therefore, off. Imagine if you purchased a place in pristine condition and you returned for an affirmation, a one last look before you signed your life away with a mortgage and found that it wasn’t pristine and fresh at all. That someone’s undergarments were drying on the bathroom door knob (it’s a great way to dry upper undergarments) and an electric toothbrush had (accidentally, Ed would say) spattered a week’s worth of paste on the mirror.

I call various agents and track down the offending one (I thought you were still in Ghana – she tells me). She apologizes and the guy (thank you, dear man whoever you are) still loves the place, but really, I was completely mortified.



In other news, the world is gray, wet and cold. I remember how in the old days when people didn’t pick up their dog’s poop in big cities, I hated the month of March, because it revealed every size and shape of dog crap on ugly bare patches of cold, wet earth. There is just nothing pretty about mid March in northern places.

So, let me retreat from my policy of never posting photos that are more than a day old and post one from exactly a week ago, when a small group of volunteers in Ghana plunged to find relief from the heat under the enormous Wli Falls.





I stayed on the shore and watched, enjoying their craziness and abandon. And I counted butterflies.

When do Wisconsin butterflies return from Mexico? I miss them.

ginger and chocolate

It’s late. The flight from Detroit to Madison was delayed and I’m on my last morsels of energy as Ed pulls up at the airport and I find space between floorboards and other Home Depot purchases in his little Geo.

How is the farmhouse? I’m intensely curious, of course. Not only haven’t I seen the progress of the last ten days, I’ve been so preoccupied with Ghana that I have neglected tracking construction details.

Chocolate. The cabinets you’re putting into the kitchen are the color of chocolate.

How can that be? I chose “ginger.” It’s a honey tone at the lumber yard.

It’s dark brown. The color of chocolate.

Is the order incorrect? Am I going to have to ask them to rip out what’s there and start all over again?


Blending thoughts of Ghana with the routines of work and nonwork back home continues to be a challenge, so that I toss all night amidst vivid dreams and surreal images. Maybe it’s my malaria medication plying tricks on me.

In the early morning, right before my classes, we drive over to the farmhouse. It’s cold and wet, but at least I know that this weather will pass. There’s evidence of it already. The crocus bulbs we planted last fall are poking through the cold earth. Soon -- good weather will come soon.

Inside the farmhouse, I’m astonished at the progress. The kitchen is looking like a kitchen now. With cabinets!

Where’s the chocolate?

Looks like chocolate to me.

Ginger. The official name of this is ginger.

Such a funny choice of color analogues. Ginger and chocolate. The flavors of west Africa.

coping in Paris

I didn’t attend the parting debriefing – the session where the Cross Cultural Solutions Ghana director talked to the group about our volunteer efforts in Hohoe. I was, at the time, finalizing the sale of my condo at the village Internet Café.

Perhaps I missed, therefore, the discussion that surely must have taken place about reentry issues that arise for returning volunteers. I’ve heard about such issues for Peace Corps volunteers, but I thought – I’m not going to become undone after a week in Hohoe. Peace Corps is for two years. That's a jolt. Hohoe time was one short week (oh, but we all learned so much!)...

But it became clear the minute I stepped off the plane in Amsterdam (my first stop after Ghana), then Paris, that I was going to have issues with suddenly stepping into affluence.

I love Paris more than any other city on the planet. It is my balm against a rocky world. I feel content just watching people attend to daily life there. Their demeanor always has elements of confident joy, perhaps indulgence – yes, that, but still, when I need a break, joy is a good thing to touch and admire.

But the very fact that Parisians – at least the ones in city center – are so content drove me nuts today. How can it be that Porsha, my enthusiastic student at Happy Kids, will have none of the freedom of play that these kids (my daughters too, indeed, all kids born in places where schools are good and there is indoor plumbing) have from day one?

Removal of children from their impoverished surroundings, even from orphanages such as Happy Kids and sending them far away is not, in most instances, the way to go. I have always weighed in class, at a very theoretical level, the pros and cons of international adoption. And now, as I see the richness of the culture of Ghana, plucking kids from a way of life that is so full of Ghanaian custom and placing them in a customary vacuum on the other side of the ocean gives me even greater pause.

I could not live in Ghana permanently. Ever. It’s too different, too embedded in religion, too traditional -- everything that I am not. For Ghanaian kids coming to America, the same must surely be true: we’re too different. And what about being black? In Ghana, minority status comes not with being of color but being of no color. Meaning being white.

Well, yes, but the opportunity in the America! Surely it is better to go on to study and eventually land a job that pays decent wages and allows you to travel freely – surely all that is better? I don’t know. Who am I to say.

Darn that Paris! It’s always so beautiful! And I have a near perfect March day here. Happy spring indeed!

I walk and walk and walk some more. Six hours of walking – from the eastern fringes to the west and back. From Luxembourg to Eiffel, to Les Champs and the Louvre, to Pompidou, Marais, Bastille, Notre Dame, hoping that by the end of this energetic spin, life would feel good again.

And in fact, it happened before the end of the walk. I pause to take a photo of flowers in a flower shop in the Marais (I took only a couple dozen photos, and most I will post here in a minute). The shop owner – a gaunt, pleasant looking fellow came rushing to me. Madame, madame, what are you doing? I’m used to the occasional shopkeeper who is opposed to photos. I’m sorry – I tell him. I should have asked. (That’s a canned response. Typically I do not ask for permission in public spaces.) He goes into a French rant: these flowers of mine they are beautifully presented (they are actually just thrown into buckets)! I am an artist! I cannot have my art stolen from me. I nod and put my camera away. But he slaps me on the back and bursts out laughing. I’m just having fun, Madame! Go ahead, take your photos! I was not serious!

It was a moment of humor and camaraderie and it made me laugh.

The cloud lifted. I began to relax.

Okay, photos form “une grande promenade” – the walk through Paris. I apologize for the postcardy nature of the beast. Virtually the only time I took out my camera was when I approached a “major sight.” Beats me why. Oh, and children. French children who live with families, not in orphanages, children who play on Sundays and then eat big meals with family, then take a parent’s hand and walk to school Monday.

Sigh, it was a complicated day.



first minutes in Paris are always at the Luxembourg Gardens






a Sunday family walk... sigh...






spring in Paris comes at the end of March






the good life: children playing with boats






idle time






THE flowers





...and cakes






Bastille






and the sky turns golden






then mango orange... the most beautiful sunset I'd seen here...




Monday morning. My flight leaves after noon. I take a quick jaunt to the food halls of Bon Marche, pausing for an espresso, watching the kids go off to school (there are no strollers in Ghana; from back sling to fend for yourself, kid)...


 


I want to pick up a few jars of mustard. Weird, I know, but I love their mustard with mushrooms and I can find it nowhere else. It’s cheap and wonderful for a lazy person who cannot be bothered to make sauces for a meat dish.

At the Food Halls I walk the aisles admiring all the wonderful foods that are for sale. It’s a splendid place of cheeses and fruits and olive oils, of goose livers, smoked salmon and stewed duck. And then I come to the shelves of chocolate. And I see this:





Ghana chocolate. Oh yes. I know Ghana produces superb cocoa. At the Internet Café I routinely listened to commercials on how to keep the mistletoe from attacking your cocoa trees. There is a government office (The Cocoa Board) devoted to cocoa production even in remote Hohoe.

The trouble is that most kids in Hohoe never get to taste chocolate. The families harvest cocoa and out it goes to the west. It reminds me of post-war Poland: apparently we made great ham: Polish ham was on the shelves of many American markets. But we could never buy any of it back home.

The Paris skies are brilliant. Blue as can be. I pull my wee suitcase and sling the bag full of Ghanaian fabric up past the Luxembourg Gardens and take the train to the airport. I’ll be home tonight.

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.