After One of the Most Eventful Nights of My Life, I Really Understand Why We Need a School Building

Yesterday I brought my camera to school for the first time for no particular reason. Unfortunately, though, it was one of those days were very few students come to school because it had rained hard the night before. Since only four out of my fifteen-ish students showed up, I decided to try doing more hands-on things that were hard to do with lots of kids. We started the day by reading a story with first grade, then we drew pictures of our families and labeled each member with their name and age. We ended the day with a science lesson about climates, and I had students come up to the board to circle different words like “penguin” and “mango” with different colors to show what climate they belonged to.

Even though there were so few kids, it actually ended up being a good day to take pictures to show what school is like when it rains. I imagined writing a blog post about it to point out the difficulties the school faces with bad weather, but I had no idea then that those weather problems were NOTHING compared to what would happen only several hours later. So, there went that blog post, and here’s a much more noteworthy one:

A little over a week ago, a 19-year-old Californian came to volunteer at GGYN for a few months. He’s been planning this trip since Mollishmael spoke at his high school years ago, so yeah, he’s a pretty incredible person. Anyway, Mollishmael has wanted to have volunteers over to the school for dinner for a while now, and last night Fernando made a big dinner of these delicious lettuce-wrap things. It was a pretty last-minute get together, so several people who had been hoping to go couldn’t because their dance exam went too late. Being someone who rarely turns down free food, though, I headed over for what I thought would be a little bit, but it started pouring while I was there. Since the school office has bunk beds for volunteers to use and I didn’t want to have to wait for a cab, I decided to just spend the night and head back in the morning.

However, these plans changed quite a bit. I went to bed around one a.m. and woke up about an hour later to a stranger handing me my bag, saying, “The water is rising; we have to leave.” Obviously I was confused to say the least, but I looked around and saw everyone else packing bags and heading out into the pouring rain. I followed, got to the door and stopped: since the electricity at the school had been out for a few days, all that I could see were faint reflections of the moon on seemingly endless water. It was actually pretty beautiful, but the rain was only getting worse and the flood was nearly at the door’s threshold. I stepped into the water and carefully headed down the stairs that were no longer visible. When I had reached the ground, the water was literally at my waist. I pushed through the flood as fast as my jeans would allow me to go and walked through the gate and onto the path.

At this point the water was only to my knees, but navigating here was tough: the narrow, uneven and winding path drops off into a steep “gutter” on one side and into grasses and bushes on the other. Of course, the flood made the dirt path both treacherously slippery and completely invisible. I slipped a bit once, so the stranger who woke me up grabbed me by the arm and led me to the street where my friends were huddled under the awning of a small store. I’m still not sure who that guy was, but one thing that I’ve encountered many different times at this school is that there are so many people who, like him, will do extraordinary things to help out virtually anyone. We waited by the store while Siza (Mollishmael’s brother who’s teaching me to paint) and some other strangers went back to the school to grab as many important things as they could, then we headed to the intersection down the street to wait for a taxi under another awning.

What the path looks like on a normal day. The gate leads into the schoolyard.

 When we reached this storefront, I was surprised to see several students of the school standing there with their parents. They were all soaked and wearing no more than what they would normally wear, so we put our arms around them to keep them (and us) warm. It’s really hard to say how long we were waiting there (maybe 30 minutes or more?) until we got a cab. I piled in the cab with five or six other people, four of whom were kids, and we headed to where my friend Karen lives with her dad and brother. Siza and Mollishmael walked from the school and met Fernando, the kids and me at the house. Karen gave all of us clothes of hers to wear for the night and we hung up our wet things to dry. We all scattered on couches, beds and cushions on the floor throughout the house and finally headed back to sleep probably sometime around 4 a.m.

I woke up before seven this morning to find that Mollishmael and Siza had both gone back to the school to assess the damage and grab any other important things that had survived the night. I spent an hour or so entertaining the kids (we cut snowflakes out of toilet paper!) until the two returned. Luckily enough, I had arbitrarily left my camera on an upper bunk where it had stayed safe all night, so I had it to take pictures this morning. The only things that I lost were a cheap watch from Walmart, my room key (but I happen to have a spare), and my flip-flops. It turns out that the two-year-old, Fernando and I were the only three who weren’t smart enough to grab our shoes when we left, but Mollishmael insisted on buying us new sandals before we went anywhere.

The walk from Karen’s to the school was pretty devastating: the stream was now a raging river, mud was everywhere, and there were even small houses overturned and sheds thrown in the middle of the street. We couldn’t get all the way to the school because it was still so flooded and muddy. I had class this morning at 9:30 and was already late at this point, so we got into a cab to get back to Karen’s quickly. However, within two minutes we were dead stopped in traffic. We got out so we could just walk, but it turns out that traffic had been stopped for a pretty interesting reason: the president of Ghana, John Atta Mills, had come by apparently to see the damage from the flood. Not many people seemed happy to see him, though, I guess because the government had not paid attention to the area’s regular flooding problems until such a severe instance.

The stream by the school that makes the flooding so terrible. It's normally a fraction of this size.

A view of the stream from the other side of the bridge.

Community members observing the change in the stream's size.

An overturned house near the stream.

Damage from the rain.

Upside-down food stand.

More over-turned houses.

There isn't supposed to be anything in this street. These sheds are small stores that are normally on the side of the road where you can see some other buildings.

We ran into Katie (on right) when we went to go see the school. She's studying abroad with my program and teaches at the school, too. Fernando's in the white shirt and Mollishmael's in the blue hoodie.

Fernando, Katie and I tried to get close to the school with a random boy who was hanging out nearby.

This is about as far as we could get toward the school until we decided that the water was just not safe to walk through. This is the path leading to the school, and the school is in the distance to the right.

Siza (pronounced like Caesar) was responsible for getting us up and out of the school and he also saved tons of important documents and electronics. We decided that he's today's hero, and this is apparently his hero pose.

President John Atta Mills is in the white and pink shirt behind the guy in the purple stripes on the left. After I took this picture someone told me to put away my camera or the guards might take it.

When we eventually got back to Karen’s, she had gotten together a bucket of water, soap and a towel for me to wash all of the mud off of myself (the house, like the one at the school, doesn’t have running water), and our excellent hostess also made all of us breakfast. While we ate, Mollishmael told us that when he had gone back early to go to the school, he saw the kids’ parents with the other people who we had left under the awning when we got the cab during the storm; none of them had left that spot all night because they had no where else to go.

The kids who stayed at Karen's with us, all dressed in Karen's clothes. Left to right: Dennis (age two?), Kobby (age 9), Princess (age 11), and Prencilla (age 9). Kobby, Princess, and Prencilla are siblings.

Leaving Karen's house in the morning. Princess was carrying Dennis and Karen said she was jealous, so Fernando gave Karen a lift, too.

Buying Dennis shoes.

Princess and Dennis.

I eventually made it to my class about an hour and a half late, clad in ill-fitting gym clothes and still fairly muddy. I’m exhausted now, but I’m so glad that I got to experience the sort of struggle that has really been putting this school back. I’m not sure how much has been destroyed or when school will resume again, but I’m hoping to go back as soon as possible to start help cleaning things up. I’ll try to keep the blog updated on what happens next. 

Basic Reading: Probably the Most Challenging English Class I'll Ever Be a Part Of

The more I teach at GGYN, the more I struggle with the fact that my primary school experience was so much better than that of these kids. Of course this is unsurprising given where I live and the resources available to me, but actually interacting with these students has made real to me how much the Berenstain Bears, Madeline, and LeVar Burton really affected my life. I feel that with each day I learn more about the problems in Ghana’s education system and I notice more clearly how far behind some kids are in my class. This is especially true when it comes to reading.

All of the students at the school spend a lot of time copying words off the board, and a while ago I noticed that two boys in particular had an extremely difficult time copying letters correctly. They would often skip parts of words, join words together, or repeat phrases where they shouldn’t go. I realized that they must not know what the words or even the letters really were, but that they were just copying the shapes of what are basically meaningless symbols to them. I tried to give them individual help and encouragement, but since the rest of the class seemed to write the words much more easily, it’s hard to slow down to the pace that those two need. One of the boys is actually twelve years old, so sending them back to first grade wouldn’t be an ideal option either.

When I put words on the board now, I usually have the class spell out what’s written up there in the hopes that this would help the students that are behind to practice recognizing individual letters. Although the majority of the class can verbally spell and copy words pretty well, over the past few lessons I’ve also become increasingly aware that even these more confident kids can’t really read what they’re writing, either; they just know how to copy the letters.

These students are great at memorizing, which makes sense as it definitely seems to be the main form of learning in Ghanaian schools. Many of the kids can recognize words when they have encountered them several times before, but they don’t understand the concept of “sounding out” letters. When a new word is on the board, a student will often guess something that might share a letter or two but isn’t anything like how the letters of the words sound. For example, we were learning about animals and I wrote “chicken” on the board. I asked for someone to tell me what it said and a student shouted out “hen,” which was then everyone else’s guess. After many experiences like that I would encourage the students to “sound out” the word along with me, but I only recently realized that they don’t understand what I mean by “sound out.” I’m planning on having a couple hours tomorrow just devoted to talking about different vowel sounds, but I’ve realized how difficult it is to teach someone to read since I can barely remember not being able to myself.

One of the biggest problems that I struggle with when teaching is that these kids don’t ask for help when they don’t understand, and from what I have seen and heard, it seems like admitting confusion isn’t encouraged in Ghanaian schools. The teachers at GGYN are absolutely phenomenal: they are being paid very, VERY little to work at the school and it’s evident that they’re teaching here for the sake of these kids. The usual methods of teaching here that I’ve seen (lots of memorization, copying from the board and few or no hands-on activities) are probably both the result of a lack of resources and an established form of teaching that’s practiced around the country. Even the university where I’m taking classes supports my assumption that this is how most schools here operates: my standard university classes are huge lectures where students just write what the professor says and where tests are just reciting that information back. Even my fourth-year level English class makes me feel like I’m re-learning to write a book report. Don’t get me wrong – I have definitely learned much more in Ghana than I would have at one semester at Georgetown and I do have classes run through my program that have been challenging and meaningful. However, it’s discouraging to see that upper level classes at the best university in West Africa are definitely less thought provoking than some classes that I took in high school.

I think that my students’ struggle with reading is also partly the result of them learning to read in English. Although these students speak Ewe or Twi at home, I doubt that a single one could write in those languages, as they certainly haven’t learned it at school. Schools in Ghana are taught in English, which has been the country’s national language since it declared independence from Britain in 1957. My friend Karen is a high school student here who’s going to school thanks to money from donors that Mollishmael organized, and when I asked her about learning to read and write in Twi, she said that she was taught it as a second language just like I’m being taught now, even though she already spoke it fluently.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to learn in a language other than that which I think and conceptualize in. I guess it does make sense, then, that students rely so much on memorization when they’re learning in English. In my Development Studies class we’ve discussed how only learning to read in English must stifle reading for fun, which is something that apparently is a rarity in Ghana (of course this is also a result of not having the money to buy fun books). On a more positive note, it’s amazing how these kids and all people in Ghana can speak so many different languages. I’m sure that most of my students are proficient or fluent in at least three languages, and I know a lot of people here who speak more. That’s a form of intelligence that I don’t think I’ll ever reach.

Now that I’ve thrown out one positive note, I want to apologize for having a post that’s such a downer. As hard as it is, I’m gaining so much from this experience and I absolutely love the time that I spend at the school. I’ve also seen those two boys and other students improving, and that is so encouraging. I’ve been asking people who have had experience or have studied teaching for advice, but if anyone reading this could offer any help (maybe on how to teach reading?) it would be greatly appreciated!

An attempt at explaining a typical day at the school (and pictures!)

I want to give a bit of a summary about what a normal day at the school is like for me, even though it's hard to say what "normal" is since it can be so different everyday. Each Tuesday and Friday morning around eight, Mollishmael picks up a few of my friends and I in Susan, the black Suzuki 4x4 that rarely makes it through the week without breaking down. We ride about fifteen minutes to get to the school, picking up people walking in that direction along the way (according to Mollishmael, a car should never have empty seats).

To get from the street to the school, you must walk down a dirt path and across two “bridges” made of flimsy 2x8 boards that go over channels in the ground meant to divert rainwater. We are hoping to build actual, permanent bridges there at some point this semester because the boards tend to break or wash away, and also partly because my ASP experience gets me really excited about building anything. Anyway, when the kids see you coming, they start screaming your name. As soon as you’re through the gate, there’s suddenly somewhere around five to fifteen kids attached to your legs or climbing on your back. Teaching at GGYN is definitely one way to boost your ego.

I usually spend each day teaching the second grade class, so I’ll head over to their tables and benches and say something like, “Good morning, class! How are you?” to which the class responds in perfect unison, “I’m fine, thank you. And you?” From there, I just start teaching whatever I think should follow the last lesson that I taught. Although I know that some help is better than nothing, it’s really hard to know that the students can’t have a more competent and consistent teacher than me. There are five teachers at the school for classes one through four and a nursery. If one teacher can’t make it some day, then teachers need to alternate between classes. Since this happens pretty regularly and all of the students are far too much for five teachers anyway, it feels good to know that the other volunteers and I are definitely helping out.

Even though I’ve never really felt drawn to teaching before, I love it more everyday. That’s probably primarily because I had no idea what I was doing at first, but it also gets more fun the more I get to know the kids. They have such hilarious personalities: the kid who makes jokes and can’t sit still, the other that always makes a huge deal out of handing out notebooks and pencils, etc. As I teach each class I also keep remembering little things (songs, pictures, etc.) that my first and second grade teachers did to help me learn.  Teaching at GGYN has really made me appreciate just how important primary education is as the basis of everything else, and also how tough it is to teach a class like this something as simple as subtraction. That being said, I want to say thank you to any teachers who are reading this. You’re saints, for sure.

One particularly tough aspect of teaching that I’ve found is keeping everyone engaged when some kids get things very quickly and others won’t tell you when they’re lost. Even though most of the kids primarily speak the local languages, Twi or Ewe (pronounced like “tree” and “ay-way”), Ghanaian schools are all taught in English; this makes it particularly hard for those who just started school to keep up with what’s going on.

Occasionally it will rain, meaning that our class will have to pause to stack the benches on tables and get notebooks and other belongings under shelter. If it's a really light rain we can just move the class closer to the mango tree where we're protected by it's leaves, but otherwise we get under the shelter of a nearby shed and wait it out.

From ten to eleven there’s an hour-long break, which is definitely one of the best parts of the day. Kids from all of the classes love to play games with the volunteers, and we’ve had fun teaching them all different things (arm wrestling was a particularly big hit). They’ve also taught me some patty-cake type games, and they love to play with my hair and copy pictures that I draw on the white board. Many of the kids bring traditional Ghanaian banku and soup in big thermoses for lunch, some kids buy food from roadside stands nearby, and unfortunately some kids don’t come with any lunch at all. GGYN used to have meals available for kids (as seen in “Under the Mango Tree”), but the budget couldn’t handle it as the school grew.

After break we get back to teaching until school ends at one o’clock. From there the other volunteers and I might talk to Mollishmael about budget things or future plans for the school, or we might just hang out under the mango tree and enjoy the beautiful weather of shaded Ghana. We’ve all gotten used to staying later after school just to hang out, which always leads to a lot of fun. For example, yesterday I got a painting lesson from Mollishmael’s brother! And last Friday, two of my friends and I got to be in a Ghanaian inspirational Gospel music video. It’ll be on youtube, so yeah, get excited for that post.

Although I haven't gotten around to taking pictures myself, Joshua gave me some of his to post, so enjoy!

A view of most of the school.

The nursery (seen on far left of previous picture).

Leaning the difference between one snake and two snakes. Good thing I'm not teaching something more complicated.  I really just love drawing on the board.

Kids excited to be uniform models.

Me and my friend Katie (yellow shorts) teaching second and fourth grade, respectively.

The famous mango tree.

First grade. Kids don't bring their own pencils; we have that box at the school that you see on the table.

My class!

Lotsa lil' kids. 

New uniforms!

And the current kids who still need new uniforms. More are enrolled almost daily.

Teachers trying to clean up the school after it rained.

Where construction on the new school building has stopped.

This building is next to the new school and will eventually be the office and a place for volunteers to sleep. 

A school that could really use, well, a school

The second grade students were copying words into their ten-cent notebooks when I saw that Isaac was not writing anything. When I asked him where his notebook was, he told me that it was his brother’s turn to use it that day. I tore a piece of paper out of my own notebook for him, but a short while later I saw that Isaac was again not writing when he should have been. I told him that he was supposed to be copying the board and he replied, “My paper is finished.” He looked down at the sheet on his desk that was now soaked in mud: the wind had blown it right into the puddle next to his bench. This is one very small example of the many problems that come from operating a school without a school building.

The first day I visited my new internship with the Global Ghana Youth Network, a completely free primary school in one of Accra’s poorest neighborhoods, the organization’s founder and director Mollishmael Gabah brought me to two different places. First we headed to the school’s current location: a fenced-in yard under a mango tree. Each of the school’s five classes consists of a few benches and tables facing one small white board on a rickety easel. After I got to look around the school and meet the kids, we went to what will eventually be GGYN’s first actual school building. Nothing had been built yet besides the concrete foundation, but Mollishmael showed me around nonetheless, pointing out what every classroom would eventually be. The school building today looks exactly like it did then; construction on the school had actually stopped during the summer when GGYN ran out of funds.

Of course, there are far more severe consequences to not having a school building than the daily problems like Isaac’s paper falling in mud. When there is rain there is no school, and if the school yard floods, which isn’t uncommon, school can be canceled for days. The school has experienced several severe floods that have caused lasting damage, including one particularly bad one last spring whose consequences are still felt at the school today. That one flood destroyed essentially all of the school’s resources – according to GGYN’s website, “Every book, every piece of paper, every bench and table had been ruined.” Given that the school is so underfunded that the director isn’t even granted a salary, the damage incurred by that one flood set the school basically back to square one.

One of the things that I find the most difficult, though, is that the lack of a school building means that the kids are constantly surrounded by distractions. There are no physical barriers between the classes except a few feet of space (if even that), so it’s always a struggle to keep the second graders engaged when there is a kid from the nursery wandering into our area, a teacher comforting a bawling student, another class singing, etc. The students are also squeezed into the too few benches and tables that GGYN has to offer them, so I have to spend a good amount of time mediating fights over personal space. Additionally, there is a path right next to the school that sees a decent number of pedestrians that are accompanied by a decent number of cows. When the cows pass, my students all run over to the fence and yell, “MOO!” It’s adorable, but getting them to settle back down can be difficult especially on a day like today when the cows somehow got into the yard.

Despite all of these challenges, GGYN is an amazing organization that does make a true difference in these kids’ lives. Many of the kids would have no other choice for school, because even though Ghana’s government promises free education, many areas only have schools that still charge for uniforms, books, and sometimes even under-the-table admission. Some of the students come to GGYN without ever having been in school before or knowing how to read and write, even though they are old enough to be in middle school. There a short video on GGYN’s website (www.ggyn.org) called “Under the Mango Tree” that has some of the students talk about what difference GGYN made in their life. One of the boys from the video, Joshua, is now eighteen and volunteers daily at the school. He said in the video that he didn’t like school at first, but at least judging by how hard he’s trying to teach himself Spanish, he now has an evident passion for learning. The video also goes into a lot about the background of the school, from what life is like for the kids in that neighborhood to how Mollishmael started the organization from almost nothing in his late teens.

I wish that everyone could see what an inspiring organization this is, so I guess that’s why I’ve decided to dedicate a blog specifically to my time that I spend volunteering here. There’s so much that goes on daily at the school that I feel is worth attention, and I’m lucky enough to have had a great education to teach me how to write about it. I promise that most of the posts won’t be about the school’s problems like this one has been, but seeing that I’m incredibly bad about blogging on a regular basis, I felt that I should get some of the most pressing things out first.

I’ve named the blog “Striped Purple Uniforms” for a couple of reasons. You’ve probably guessed this already, but one is that the kids wear striped purple uniforms. Second, the uniforms are nothing like what you’d see in America, which definitely can be said of the school, too. The purple and white stripes are also very happy looking, which is fitting given how ecstatic the kids looked when they received them on the first day that I volunteered. The most important reason that I chose this title, though, is that the uniforms are one of the many steps that the school is taking toward giving these kids the best school experience possible. Unfortunately the uniforms are more of a step in progress – only about 50% of the students have them yet – but they’re a step nonetheless.