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.
I love the re-purposed pom-poms; there's something ecstatic about marrying a mindful scavenging of your surroundings to kinetic spontaneity. My neighbor in Benin was in love with country music, too - had me translate every one of the songs on a cassette he'd procured. He loved the sentiments, the forlorn love ... someone else told me it's a musical form taken up with particular fervor in Ethiopia.
ReplyDeleteGod almighty, that fufu looks amazing. How does it compare to Veronica's kitchen?
That picture of you with the kids is great!!!
ReplyDeleteAre we talking hank williams or garth brooks?
Garth Brooks, for sure.
ReplyDeleteMy homestay aunt asked if I wanted my fufu soft, and I said 'sure,' but I don't think I like it soft. It was the most bizarre sensation consuming it, much different than Veronica's Kitchen. I'll take Red Red (black eyed peas) and fried plantains instead. Oh, fried plantains, how I love you!