I played soccer (football) on Sunday against a team of Ghanaian teenagers. My team consisted mainly of Peace Corps Trainees (obronis), with a couple of supplementary Ghanaians. We lost by one point, which was a much better result than we were fearing. I mostly acted as visual distraction on the field, running back and forth quite a lot but making very little contact with the ball. It was great fun, though! Almost everyone played barefoot, except for myself. The field was very uneven, with a mix of cut grass, high grass, and rocks, and a few significant ditches that caused some fantastic, face-first falls.
Notes:
--I have discovered several giant spiders in my room; they are very fast moving.
--Children follow me on the street, laughing and saying, “Obroni…how are you? Obroni! Obroni!” I prefer the quiet ones who say nothing but when I smile at them I receive an exponentially larger smile in return.
--I could live off of mangos, pineapple, groundnut paste (aka peanut butter), and sugar bread (aka white bread with sugar), but I also love “red red” (black eyed peas) and fried plantains. Beyond that, I could do without the majority of Ghanaian food---I want something crunchy for Christ sake! Not something that slips down my throat like a thick slug and requires no chewing at all. My teeth have forgotten what it was like to have to process food.
--I feel a huge sense of responsibility to the students at my deaf school in Savelugu; I feel like I will be doing the most important work of my life and using my creativity in ways that my art school education never envisioned.
Before leaving Koforidua School for the Deaf, we interviewed two JHS students, and had them answer some questions (that we had been given) about their lives and their experiences as students. We had our trainer interpret for us. The most revealing question was one that I added in myself---essentially, “What do you want to do with your life? What are your goals?” The first student seemed to have no conception of the future at all, and no knowledge beyond his time in school through JHS 3. In the U.S., kids are prompted for their life goals from an incredibly young age---5 year olds know that they want to be ballerinas or doctors or marine biologists. But this deaf JHS student in Ghana was totally unfamiliar with this line of questioning. The second student, Kelvin, was much better at answering the question (big sigh of relief): he said that he wanted to go to a university to study computers and build a big house and someday come back to Koforidua and teach at the deaf school. Kelvin is the one kid who had been 30 minutes late to my art class repeatedly, and he would roll in with some half-baked excuse for his absence and whip together the project, and it would be more sophisticated and inventive than anyone else’s piece. It’s too bad that bright students like him are held back by being in a class with kids that are at a much lower developmental/intellectual level. But I think that is part of my challenge here---to create lessons that allow ALL students to be challenged without leaving anyone behind.
Practicum is over and proper language lessons have begun. For the next week, I will be learning sign language for 6 hours a day. (Starbucks venti iced coffee with soy milk, please? Please? Oh…you only have rationed Nescafe packets? Oh.)
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