1) School started Tuesday... but there was no teaching. In fact, there were few students in classrooms. Most students were outside, either playing (elementary school) or cleaning the grounds. This includes:
- cutting the knee-high grass around the school buildings with machetes (boys, ages 8-18 were partaking in this)
- sweeping the classrooms, corridors, and sandy areas with hand brooms (girls of all ages were doing this)
- cleaning up the litter (the waste management system in Ghana is still developing... thus waste is commonly tossed on the ground)
- organizing desks and classrooms
In Ghana schools, there are no custodians: the kids are the groundskeepers. I will reflect more on this aspect of Ghanaian culture in a future post, but let's just say it is a pretty ingenious structure to build life skills and a sense of responsibility for these kids and their place of learning. However, that does not negate the fact that learning wasn't actually happening on the first day...
Anyways, all of this was readily occurring with a gentle roar of children uniting after 2 months of vacations. They were all in their pink and green uniforms (which coincidentally match the colors of the school buildings) and seemingly all hard at work... until it rained.
2) Major differences also lie within responses to weather. In the U.S. (Wellsboro) we have snow days. In Ghana, we have rain days. Because 95% of the kids are walking to school and 80% of those kids don't have rain coats or umbrellas, school doesn't happen when it is raining. How hard must it rain for a rain day? Well, I would say if it is any heavier than what we would consider a steady "spring" rain, students aren't expected to be at school. There is no notification system, but they handle things well: if it is raining at 8 AM (school start time) and stops at 9 AM, you should come to school ASAP (i.e. 1 hour delay). If it keeps raining past 10 AM, you aren't penalized for not coming to school that day (i.e. more than a 2 hour delay). The weather here is about 75 degrees and pretty humid. I will note that it rained pretty hard for 1 hour this morning, then mildly hard for 3 hours this afternoon. It got pretty cool this evening (72 degrees) so I wore a jacket to go out... mind you, this is nothing compared to the -15 wind chill that welcomed me in Wellsboro this past January. :)
3) I didn't have much to do during my first day. Teachers were running errands/registering new students. Kids were all over the place. My colleague/fellow 4-H advisor left me for several hours... so I just chilled in his classroom with some of my 4-H girls for the majority of the day, teaching them some songs and looking at pictures. I know this was to be somewhat expected due to the Ghanaian culture and sensitivity to time, but I would have hoped to do a bit more. Classes are actually expected to start next week (after a Monday holiday) so I will hopefully see some pedagogy then.
While my first day of school in Ghana wasn't anything like my previous first days of school, I have had some awesome successes over the past week! Now all moved in and a week-long resident of Oseim, I have been able to engage with 4-H and the community almost every day.
Last week I visited some more farms with Dustin, a fellow AgriCorps member, as he came to visit my village. We also helped set up the first "home entrepreneurship project" of the year! Samuel is the 4-H lead secretary and he set up his project on a small plot of land outside his house (which is about 300 yards from mine). We constructed about 8 raised beds for carrot production, with the 4_H advisors, Dustin, and the larger kids sharing the hoe and pick axe. Because everything is about community in Ghana, we had about 30-35 observers at all times. We put the small children to work picking trash out of the garden, and I got distracted by some of the babies... but it was a beautiful success!
Later in the week, I met with my 2 other 4-H adviors to review some key aspects of the club and some major goal areas for the year. I am super excited about what is to come! While I know it will be hard to stay on track with some of the dates I designated for goals, I know there are motivated and supporting people here to make things happen.
Saturday was the Sabbath at Savior Church (the church that founded the school) and it was also my prepared "Community meeting." AKA about 80% of my 4-H members and their families go to church and were present among the 500-600 people at the service where I introduced myself. I spoke to them a bit in their local language (they laughed), said that I loved their food (they clapped), shared about my 4-H and farming background, then stated my purpose for being here for the year (they seemed to fall asleep a bit...). Overall, however, I think it went well! The community is seriously very welcoming and gracious - I already feel at home here.
On Sunday evening, we worked in the school garden for a bit... then continued into Monday morning: weeding, cutting, clearing the land. Based on a recommendation from myself about the mass amounts of green cuttings/weeds they were pitching, we made a COMPOST PILE on Monday! My first ever 4-H "lesson," to about 30 students, was a success! I shared that compost = air + water + nitrogen + carbon + microorganisms then, after they all correctly answered the "quiz" questions to check understanding, we got to making a 8 ft by 4 ft compost heap! It's pretty massive... I hope it turns out well!
Wednesday was quite a bit more productive compared to Tuesday - we had a 3 hour staff meeting for the teachers to be assigned their classes, then a good 4-H executive meeting! I am getting excited for Friday's general member meeting, the first of the year! More to come later!
