A short history of GGYN, including how the school impacts youth in the US

In my last post I mentioned GGYN’s mission statement: "The Global-Ghana Youth Network is a local-global organization working to educate, empower, and inspire youth in the U.S. and West Africa."

Someone asked me why the mission statement included “youth in the U.S.” and that made me realize that my blog hasn’t gone that into the details of exactly what GGYN is and how it’s run. There’s some information on the school’s website and in the short film “Under the Mango Tree,” but both are a bit old and the website is actually being remodeled right now.

To be honest, I feel like I keep learning new things about the school’s history and workings every day, so I’m sure from now on I’ll be updating you with stories about GGYN’s past along with the stories of me being here.  To begin, here’s a brief history of how the school got to where it is today:

Back in 2003, Mollishmael was part of a drum and dance group that began helping international students at the University practice for their drum and dance classes (rhythm-less white people represent!). As they practiced, kids would come by not just to watch the group, but also to dance along outside the yard where the group was practicing. According to Mollishmael a lot of those kids were even better then those in the group, which I definitely believe after seeing some of today’s students dance. Mollishmael and Ian, a student from Maine, decided to organize a group just for these 15 or 20 kids, and that’s how the Maine-Ghana Youth Network (GGYN’s old name) was formed.

Over the next month, Mollishmael and Ian began to help these kids with schoolwork as well, and they quickly realized that most of the kids didn’t even go to school. They recruited some other American students from the University to help with the tutoring, but of course those students had to go home at the end of the semester.

When Ian and the others left, Mollishmael continued to run MGYN on his own – dancing, academics and all – for a year and a half. Mollishmael was nineteen-years-old when the organization began, and during the first few years of MGYN he was still catching up in school himself: he had needed to take years off in his early teens to work for his own tuition money.

Mollishmael knew that a lot of the kids in the group came without eating every day, so he started buying them gari, or ground cassava. Gari is a food that you usually cook with other things like beans or stew, and although it is filling, it is tasteless and basically nutrient-less. It’s so cheap that there’s a local idiom that if someone is not doing well financially, you say that they’re “eating gari.”

Ian returned to Ghana after that year and a half and came to visit MGYN. When he saw that Mollishmael was running everything himself, Ian began to recruit other volunteers from study abroad programs at the University and then from Maine when he got home.

Ian got in touch with one girl, Erin, who came over to Ghana in 2005 with funding from her church. She stayed for about a year, and during that time her church sent money to help the organization pay for better food for the kids, books, and other resources that they needed. MGYN had started teaching the kids what they called “entrepreneurship” (basket weaving, etc.) by the time Erin had gotten there, and with her money they were able to hire professionals to come and teach the kids. Beyond the finances, she also helped MGYN immensely with its administrative organization.

When Erin returned to Maine in 2006, she helped set up what has really enabled this organization to "educate, empower and inspire" American kids – an American fundraising tour for Mollishmael. He headed to the States in late 2007 and began speaking at grade schools and high schools around the country about MGYN, education and life in general in Africa, and also about making a difference in others' lives even in the U.S.

Mollishmael says that kids in the U.S. don’t seem to know much about Africa beyond the stereotypical (for instance, they ask about problems that the school has with lions), but that they’re genuinely interested in learning about life on another continent. Schools all over the U.S. have raised money and collected supplies for GGYN, and Mollishmael has also raised money by teaching African drum and dances lessons at these schools. 

When Mollishmael isn't in the U.S., the kids at GGYN have still stayed connected to some American schools through class pen-pals and skype. However, sending letters can get pricey given the school's tight budget and the internet isn't very reliable, so those sorts of connections can't happen very often.

The film “Under the Mango Tree” was created in 2008 (Erin was interviewed in the U.S.), and shortly after that Mollishmael changed the organization’s name to Global-Ghana Youth Network. By that time the organization had grown substantially: about fifty kids who weren’t in school would come for breakfast and lunch, and after the schools let out there were up to 200 kids coming daily.

Until the summer of 2010, GGYN had been sponsoring up to over forty kids to go to different schools in the area. Since there was never enough to pay every kids’ tuition, Mollishmael decided to put that money toward teacher salaries and books for a new school, the GGYN of today. The meal program stopped this past August due to a lack of funds, which unfortunately means that a good number of the kids come with no lunch.

So that’s a very general overview of an organization that’s obviously undergone a lot of changes over the years. There are currently three Americans that Mollishmael met in the U.S. who serve as the board by organizing a lot of the American side of GGYN, meaning that they help set up an itinerary for the fundraising tours, find donors and volunteers, and plan the budget for donations. Mollishmael will be coming to the States to fundraise again this upcoming January through most of spring. He’s still in the beginning stages of planning where he’ll speak, so if anyone knows any venues that you think would work (schools, churches, colleges – really wherever), a contact would be really appreciated! American fundraising has had a powerful impact on GGYN's success, and based on what I've been told from those who heard Mollishmael speak, hearing the story of this school from the founder himself can have a powerful impact on an individual as well.

Friday Games and Sunday Painting - The School Back on Track

Sorry about not posting in a while, but I’ve had some bad luck finding working internet here lately. It’s been over two weeks since the school has been back in action, and I fortunately have a lot more time to teach since I just finished classes! Things are close to being relatively back to normal at GGYN, but I do realize that “normal” isn’t all that comprehensive of a description for those of us on other continents. Therefore, I feel that I owe this blog a bit of an update.

The extra time that my friends and I now have to help out definitely couldn’t have come at a better time, as one of the teachers has just had a baby. The count of professional teachers is now down to four, then, and there really should be at least 6 classes. If there aren’t any volunteers on a certain day, one teacher will have to essentially go back and forth between two classes, lecturing one while the other does an assignment on the board. The two kindergarten classes (which they call nursery and KG2) have to be combined, which is difficult when their ages range from two to about nine. The KG2 class is learning how to read (and many of them are pretty good!), but it’s hard when the classes are combined; all of those forty-or-so little kids are a lot for one teacher to keep an eye on.

As you can guess, these teachers are pretty amazing people. They’re clearly teaching at GGYN purely for the love of the kids, as they receive less than US$70 per month for teaching at least six hours a day, five days a week. Last week I had mentioned to them that my favorite Ghanaian food was “red-red” (a dish made of fried plantains, beans and ground cassava), and on Thursday one of them brought in a big bowl of red-red for all of us to share. My friend Katie and I told them we would make them an American dish in return, so on Friday we showed up with guacamole, which, of course, isn’t actually really American. It was the best we could come up with what we could find at the market on campus, and when I think about it, I don’t really know many foods that you could consider “purely” American anyway.

Even though some of them were afraid, a few of the kids tried the guacamole. I told them that it was from Mexico and asked if they knew where that was, but it then occurred to me that I had never seen a map at GGYN. My friends and I had been thinking for a while that we would love to paint a mural on the home/office walls, so we decided that a big map of the world would be perfect! We started working on it yesterday morning, and a lot of the kids came by to help out. The school has a donated projector that we’re planning on using to paint the map, but unfortunately the power was out (which happens randomly and often), so we didn’t get started on the actual map. We did get all the paint we need, though, and we started painting backgrounds on other walls. Hopefully I’ll have pictures of the finished product to post within the next few days. In the meantime, though, here’s pictures from school on Friday and painting on Sunday:

On Friday morning the school had classes as usual, but the afternoon started with a game-show type competition between the top three students in fourth grade and the top three students in third grade. The rest of the school watched. It was the first time GGYN has done this, but it went really well! Even the younger kids were pretty engaged in what was going on.

Third grade fiercely awaiting their questions. 

And third grade won by one point! The other kids went crazy celebrating for them, which is funny because I'm pretty sure they would have done the same if the fourth grade had won. They got candy as a prize, but since it was so close, fourth grade got some candy, too.

Enjoying the guacamole! Left to right: Me, Katie, Gloria, Gifty, Precious (three of the four teachers) and Emma.

Mollishmael with one of the really young kids at the school holding her lunch of rice, a huge staple in the Ghanaian diet.

Since there's no running water at the school, if anything needs to be cleaned the kids get water from the well and carry it on their heads in these buckets.

After the game show, we spent the last hour of Friday afternoon playing games as a whole school. Madame Precious taught us how to play "There's a fire in the market," which is basically a much more energetic version of "Duck, duck, goose."

Katie trying not to get tagged. 

Since the kids are far more active than I could ever be, there was no need to go easy on them. I was trying hard and some still caught me.

There's only a small fraction of free time at the school when there's no one playing with my hair.

There are seven kids in the Ossei family, and six of them go to GGYN. Only Emmanuella has a uniform for GGYN yet, so most of the other kids wear uniforms from the school they used to go to. Forsen (in the back) is the oldest but he had never been to school before GGYN. Forsen, Bridget and Bright (twins in the blue shirts) are all in the second-grade class.

The rest of these pictures are from Sunday. Here's Emma and the kids painting what will eventually be the wall that says "Global Ghana Youth Network" really big, as it can be seen most easily from the path going by the school.

Andrew, Will and Bryan painting the background for a wall that we want all the students to help paint on later. At the top of the mural we're going to write the school's mission statement: "GGYN is a local-global organization working to educate, empower, and inspire youth in the U.S. and West Africa." The kids will paint underneath.

We brushed off the walls as best we could before painting. This is the wall that will have the big map of the world on it.

Me and some of the kids.

Koby, a second-grader.

We took care of the high parts on the wall and the kids did the low parts. Teamwork at it's finest.

We had to wait for the background paint to dry and couldn't get started on the world map, so we spent the rest of the day playing games. Arm-wrestling is a favorite.

I still can't really believe these pictures are real. Some of the students were literally just running and doing flips in the air.

Why I wish I were Ghanaian.

Emma with girls who came to help.

The neighbor's dog likes to come by the school, and I'm in awe of its ability to stand the attention of up to twenty grade-school kids at once. We've been calling it Obama (or Obi for short) because when we originally were trying to come up with a Ghanaian name for it, we figured that naming it after Ghana's favorite politician would be close enough.

Emmanuel (second grade) went to get us what are called water sachets ("sah-chayz"). Since you can't drink the tap water in Ghana, they sell these little plastic bags of purified water that you drink by tearing off the corner.

The Ossei family owns this first-grade American social studies text book which my school definitely used when I was in grade school. It was fun to have something to read to them, but of course all of the stories were about Thanksgiving, the Revolutionary War, etc. and referred to the U.S. as "our country."

The book had the "America the Beautiful," and Mollishmael asked us if we could sing our national anthem for the kids. We did with the full vigor of true patriots.

Will and Mollishmael in the mango tree. Some of the mangoes are finally ripe!

Pictures of the school from the day before the flood

School started again today, but I realized that I forgot to put these pictures from before the flood up earlier. It had rained in the early morning of the day that I took these pictures so many students did not come to school.

Although it had stopped raining, the ground stayed wet all day.

We started school late to decide if school should be closed or not, but even though there were so few kids we had classes anyway.

Mollishmael shoveling water out of dips in the ground.

Anything that fell on the ground was done for.

Mangos on the mango tree!

The four from my class who could come! Left to right: Happy, Hannah, Emmanuel and Kobby.

We drew pictures of our families and labeled each member with their name and age.

The first grade wanted to draw pictures, too, so I ripped them some pages out of my notebook.

Hannah wants to be a teacher so she decided to correct the first graders' work.

Gloria, a local teacher, with the fourth grade.

Elaine, a friend from my study abroad program, teaching third grade.

Second grade presented their drawings to first grade.

The kids and me showing off our work!