My site was announced yesterday, and at the beginning of September I will be heading to my permanent location in the Northern Region in the town of Savelugu, a mere half hour outside of the large city of Tamale. My school is called the Savelugu School for the Deaf, and I will live in my own small house on the campus compound. I will have running water, a toilet, a bathroom, and some basic furniture. I will get to visit my site for the first time near the end of July, about a month from now. Until then, I will learn a lot of sign language and do some more teaching/observing at the Koforidua School.
I keep thinking that the ‘big’ moment has arrived--- I arrived at Staging in D.C…but then I wanted to arrive in Ghana…and then I wanted to arrive at my home site…and then I wanted to know my permanent site…and now I just want to SEE my permanent site, and be there. This process is continuously unfolding, and will continue to develop for months to come. Although I will learn primarily Sign Language in the next two months, the main language of Savelugu is Dagbani, so I’m going to need to get a tutor once I get to my site in order to catch up with the local language. I’ve heard that it’s very easy to get by with English as well, though; the Northern region has so many languages and dialects that the common language among the people tends to be English.
I have had a lot of success with my JHS students in my practice teaching. I did a project where I dug clay dirt out of their schoolyard, hydrated it, and used it to make coil pots. It was a huge hit with the students because they had never handled clay before—they have an immediate facility with the material, and although they like to copy my example, one of them came up with the idea to make a lid, and then they took off from there, making a cell phone, spoon, and a mortar and pestle to accompany their pots. My one problem is getting my students to stop working at the end of class because they just want to continue making things, instead of going back to their Math or Worship classes (It seems that if the System doesn’t believe in a deaf student’s aptitude and the right to a quality education, it at least makes sure that the students are trained to be religious lemmings. One can never underestimate the power of God to suppress dissent). (The boys’ ‘House Mother’ told me that she likes her job because she will be rewarded in heaven for her work with the deaf. Perhaps she will instead be rewarded during every moment of her day at the school.)
In other news, I had a beautiful, simple dress made out of batik fabric, and I love it, although I don’t have a mirror, so really it could look like a paper bag on me, and I wouldn’t know. It’s a smidge tight to the point where I have to suck in before I can get it to zip, but we’ll just say that it ‘fits like a glove.’
After formally meeting the chief of Kukurantumi on Sunday afternoon with all the PC trainees, my art ed group and I returned to Koforidua to stay for two weeks at a teacher hostel while we complete our practice teaching at the school for the deaf. It’s great to be in a bigger city for a few nights because we can go into town and explore the market and buy fabric and other fun things. I bought a voltage regulator, which is a monstrosity of a contraption that will save my computer during voltage surges. It weighs about 10 lbs or more, and I’m really not looking forward to lugging it to my site in a few months. But it will be an important device for me during the next two years to use with any important equipment, including a refrigerator.
I have now completed my first day of real practice teaching, and I’m pretty jazzed about it. I taught two small groups of junior high school students the same project for 70 minutes each. I taught them how to make water sachet pom poms, which is a totally made-up object that I figured out while I was playing around trying to manipulate the water sachets. The sachet is the African equivalent of a water bottle. All clean water here is sold in a small square bag, and you bite a hole in one corner and drink from that. These empty sachets are the main source of litter in this area, and it is a free, readily available material. At this point, I’m only beginning to learn about what materials are easily available to students, but I would like resourcefulness and environmental sensitivity to be important components to my teaching. I envisioned the pom poms as a unique way for them to manipulate the material in order to make something that they could use while dancing. It was a big hit, particularly in one of the two JHS classes. The students became very competitive while making the pom poms, and worked incredibly fast, cutting the sachets into strips, rolling them, and taping them together. At the end of class, we all got up and danced around the room; I had them show me how they would dance, and then I followed along. As a reward, I took their photos with the pom poms, and they were very excited about that. The second group of students was somewhat less enthusiastic, but they still worked hard on the project. They had a bit of the American too-cool-for-school attitude, but I didn’t let it bother me. I just made sure I was the biggest fool in the class.
We will spend the next two weeks teaching and observing at Koforidua all day long. There is a batik teacher at the school, so I’m hoping to sit in on her class and begin to learn the batik process so that I can teach my own students when I’m at my site.
Did I really come all this way to a remote Ghanaian village to hear American country music being blasted from radios and on buses? I can’t imagine what the appeal could be, but it seems to be the most popular style of music.
Quite a lot has happened in the last 10 days or so. My group arrived in Accra after an 11 hour flight directly from D.C. We disembarked right on the tarmac and were herded toward the baggage claim and then across the street, where we threw our luggage into the back of a giant, rusty old truck. We climbed onto some posh, air-conditioned buses and were police-escorted through the dense traffic of Accra and out to Valley View, a college that would be our home for the next week. Living at Valley View was essentially like attending summer camp, complete with talent shows, raging hormones, and afternoon Ultimate Frisbee or soccer games. Peace Corps is easing us into Ghanaian life by starting us off with showers and running water, and then perhaps weaning us off of those first-world luxuries. (Although I’m fairly certain that I will have running water at my site since I’m an Art Ed volunteer.) Did I mention it’s hot here? It’s the rainy season, so in general it is much cooler than during the drier months, but when the mid-day sun is blazing, it is oppressively, mind-meltingly hot, to the point where we all start lethargically falling asleep in our seats during lectures.
Our first few days in country were filled with introductions, medical interviews, vaccinations, malaria meds, flip chart/PowerPoint presentations, safety meetings, and Twi language lessons. We ate a giant meal every couple of hours, consisting mainly of fried foods—plantains, onion rings, donut-type things, French fries, veggie balls, (and for the meat eaters, fried chicken and fish). A spicy tomato sauce, like a curry, generally accompanied these fried foods.
After a few days of meetings, they let us loose to find our way in groups back into the capital, Accra. We had an assignment to find a certain landmark, which was just a way of getting us to start exploring. With my new friends Jim and Sara, I took a “tro” (modified mini-van) into the city. We easily found our landmark destination, the Nkrumah Mausoleum, by asking a series of people to point us in the right direction. Ghanaians were (and are) incredibly helpful, often leading us blocks to the correct bus stop or intersection. As a group of three, I felt very comfortable engaging people on the street, and many of them were very excited to talk to us. The Mausoleum is only few steps from the ocean, so we walked a bit further down the road, and found a beautiful cliff overlook that allowed us views of the coast in both directions. I had my heart set on finding an internet café, so we walked quite a distance to the main intersection in town, nicknamed “circle,” where we found what is touted as the fastest internet connection in Accra. I spent a few minutes letting my family in the U.S. know I was alive before we jumped onto another tro and headed back toward Valley View. In the course of the day, I received several marraige proposals; one man in particular was quite insistent, and when I told him I am married (a lie), he proceeded to ask me if I had any single friends.
Before leaving Valley View several days later, we received our medical kits, which include everything from anti-diarrheal medicine to dental floss. I was also issued a mosquito net and a stool sample kit, in case at any point my poop needs to be rushed back to Accra for testing. On Tuesday, we took the bus to Kukurantumi, about an hour outside of Accra in the lush, gorgeous tropical forest of the Eastern Region. Kukurantumi will be our training site for the next three months, and it is where I will live with my homestay family. This is a small town of about 5000 people, and we are able to walk to our training hub and easily navigate the entirety of the area. My homestay is particularly nice, I’d say---I have a shower (no bucket bath yet!!) that I share with the family, my own room (no fan, though) with a locked door, and a screened-in porch where I can study and eat my meals. I have access to something approximating a toilet, but that is essentially a raised cement hole with a black plastic seat on it. My homestay house is like a compound, with a courtyard and four buildings surrounding it. I am in one building, and my ‘mother’ lives in another adjacent to me.
My host mother, Doris, lived for a year in Cincinnati with her son who works for Toyota, so she speaks excellent English. She is also the caterer for the Peace Corps hub site, so she knows how to make a great, clean meal. I think they paired her with me because I said that I am a vegetarian, and she is familiar with what that means, and can offer me a variety of protein alternatives (i.e. eggs, peanut butter, and black-eyed peas). While at Valley View, the ‘vegetarian’ dishes contained zero protein, and were less hygienically prepared (I spent a great deal of time on the toilet). I feel SO MUCH better now, though. In addition to my host mother, I also have a host brother, Kwame Prince, who is a 21 year old student, and a sister, Maggie, a high school student who insisted on washing my underwear despite my protests. I also have an Auntie named Comfort who is essentially my second mother, and who is doing most of the work of caring for me. It’s like I’m a child again; my family boils my water for morning coffee, buys and prepares my food, packs my hot lunch into a tiered thermos, and wants to know my whereabouts at all times.
Tonight I walked home from the hub site with a group of PC trainees headed into Kukurantumi to find an internet café. It started pouring rain, and all the locals went running indoors. They laughed at us walking in the rain—we were drenched and loving it. We are living in Africa!
