My Future Home

This is Savelugu Deaf. My house is in the cluster in the lower left---mine is the one on the left. Two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathing room. The path across the soccer field leads directly to my classroom.

Finished Batik

Sunday morning tro ride

I want a baby goat.

bead market in Koforidua with hills in background

beads!!!

they love photos

taxi stand in Koforidua

my finished batik

just out of the de-waxing pot

de-waxing

final dying

opening assembly at Koforidua Deaf (a somewhat disorganized event)

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.)

Batik, etc.

Another video of our departure from Koforidua Deaf:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waPlqkKShFg



Just before the final dye and de-waxing


my batik in progress


me batiking


after the second color dye, drying in the sun


after the first color and waxing


bird in class (unfortunately, the students had caught it and almost killed it)


student working on paper cat

Breakdancing Video at Koforidua Deaf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdgLLECCTXg

Arrival Video

This is a link to a video of our arrival at Koforidua School for the Deaf.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbhZ8fTaQ3M

market scene in Koforidua

me in another dress I had made

(I later had it altered a bit for a better fit)

Drum roll please...

new dress made of batik fabric

coil pot project

coil pot project in progress

Scott signing with the students

my JHS class showing off their work

staring through the brick wall at me

Koforidua Deaf campus

water sachet collage project

me attempting sign language

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.’