GGYN, Yebeshia Bio

I'm writing this post while listening to "Feliz Navidad," shivering from the cold, and watching my mom make Christmas cookies.

Sigh.

I'm back.

The good news (besides seeing family and eating missed foods, of course) is that not only do I still have a lot to post about, but America has internet that's lightning fast! Woohoo! For my friends' sanity, I'll probably also need an outlet for Ghana reminiscing for a while, so this blog is perfect.

As you can imagine, it was really hard to leave on the last day of school, but the day itself was one of the most fun yet. GGYN celebrated the end of the fall term with a program last Thursday to highlight's students' achievements and talents. Credit for these pictures goes to my friend and fellow volunteer, Emma Mattesky.

James (volunteer from Canada on left) was the event's MC along with Gloria, one of the teachers. 

Class four students prepared things to do in front of the whole school. Princess sang a song.

And Ransford had memorized a poem.

One of my favorite parts of the program was a dance performed by a group of students dressed up in traditional clothing. In case that wasn't cool enough, get this: the song they chose was "Homeless" by Paul Simon. It was awesome.

After the "talent show" portion of the program, the teachers presented gifts to the top three exam-scorers in each class and various other deserving students.

The gifts presented to the students included a lot of souvenir trinkets (keychains, baseballs, pens, etc.) that Elaine had brought from her hometown, Washington D.C., as well as candy and even a few small books. The teachers put the gifts together and wrapped all of them up.

This is Esther, who won "hardest worker." She's fifteen and just started school this year, but she's made huge strides in her English and is starting to read as well.

Besides the program and the other last few days of school, I spent a lot of time toward the end of my trip finishing up the map and the other murals, which were so exciting to see completed! Well, almost completed: I unfortunately realized a bit too late that I forgot the Caribbean. Oops. Maybe I can use that as an excuse to go back? "Yebeshia Bio" (the post's title) is Twi for "We will meet again."

Sorry, Cuba.

Emma and I came up with the idea for this wall together. I love that it's not only colorful and inspiring, but also has words that will be good for the kids to learn to read.

Mollishmael asked me to add "School" to this wall to show that GGYN isn't just an after-school program like it was years ago, but that it's now a real school.

Here you can see all three completed murals! I took the picture standing on the path that goes by the school, so this is what anyone passing will see.

So far I would say that being back is best described as just weird: there's good things and bad things about it, but it doesn't really seem real yet. Or maybe I should say that Ghana doesn't seem real, like it was something from a dream. Either way, there were some other things that happened over my last few days at GGYN that would be interesting blog posts, so even though I'm home I feel like I'm not quite done. I'll also be in contact with my friends from the school, so I'll let you know how things are going when I get word.

If the past couple days are any indicator, I'll probably spend the meantime sitting here at my kitchen counter looking through my pictures. I'm sure the reality of things that I should be doing in regular life will be kicking in sometime, but until then I've found this as a pretty good means of surviving this culture limbo. Well, I guess I could also help my mom with those cookies, too.

Where in the world is GGYN?

I think this is probably the most exciting blog post I've written yet because...

Da da da daaaaaa!

The map-of-the-world mural isn't quite finished, but it's so close! I'm so, SO happy with it and I feel like it's already taught the kids a lot. For example, now they know where their country is!

And they know where I'm from!

We've been playing this game where I'll say a country and they'll all run over and hit it. Although that often results in kids being thrown on the ground in mad stampedes, they seem to really enjoy it. The map's only been up since this weekend, but many of the kids already know a lot of countries that they didn't know before. 

They were having a tough time finding China, so I told them it was red. They're getting there!

This painting project ending up being a MUCH bigger deal than I thought it would be, but I've honestly never been so proud of something in my life. A lot of us volunteers joined together to get the job done, and the results have been incredible.

I've realized that this project has real significance not just for the school, but for the community, as well: while we were painting, everyone walking by the school would stare and even pause to absorb the new mural.  Several adult Ghanaians came up to talk to us and asked things like, "Where's Ghana?" or "Is this a map of Africa or of the world?" I've never really considered the effect that the lack of such a simple resource can have on a person's world view, but how would you know those things if you never have access to a map? Maps seem to be all around us, but what if you're never encouraged to look at one?

You can't not look at this map, though. We put it on the biggest wall of the office building, which is right in view of any spot on the path that goes by the school. Also, the colors turned out so beautifully; they really brighten up the whole school yard. The placement on the wall and the colors make the map look like anything but a school assignment, and the hands-on activities that it allows has made learning the different countries into a game.

One difference between Ghana and the U.S.that I've found interesting is the focus on learning about the whole world: I know that my grade school made learning about different cultures a priority, and besides that I'm exposed to a lot just by my family and friends' ethnic backgrounds. Here, though, you don't have much exposure to other countries apart from the remnants of British colonization (for instance, the country's official language is English and Christianity is HUGE here) and modern western influence (hip-hop, Obama, styles of clothing, etc.). Even other African countries don't seem to be studied much, so it was especially fun to show these two kids, Ishmael and Adjo, where Togo was, as Ishmael was born there and Adjo's parents emigrated shortly before they had her. I'm hoping that the kids can understand that where they are right now corresponds with the country they see on the wall, so we'll be painting "North," "South," "East" and "West" in their respective locations around the school yard.

As we're wrapping up work on the map, we've started painting other murals, too. Since this post is getting long, I'll save the explanation of what we'll put there until we actually finish it, but here's Princess (class four, age 11) standing in front of what it looks like now:

 

And since I finally found my missing camera charger and was able to take these pictures, we tried to get a nice group photo of a bunch of kids (the whole school is much bigger). After about twenty minutes of picture-taking we had one beautiful shot, but all of the others turned out with kids pushing each other over or jumping in front of the camera, or someone wasn't smiling because they were telling others to stop moving. When I showed the pictures to my friend Emma (who is also a volunteer teacher), she pointed out to me that the whole set of pictures really captures the spirit of GGYN: things go right, but never the way you originally want them to. In light of Emma's wisdom I put up a bunch of the not-so-perfect pictures as well. This isn't all of them, but the speed of the internet here makes uploading things a bit of a battle. You'll get the idea, though.

So here's the really nice one. You can see lots of faces, most people are smiling,  and it's still pretty funny. The guy with the baby in the middle is Mollishmael.

I think Mollishmael was telling kids here that if they push someone over, they can't be in the picture.

After this we tried to tell them to keep their hands down. That didn't last long.

More kids started coming into the picture which was great, but a bit more chaotic. The guy who stands out on the right is James, a volunteer teacher from Canada. He's been here since late November and is staying until Christmas. He decided to come volunteer literally two weeks before his plane left, and he's been such an incredible help to GGYN. He studied education in College, but I think that his evident love for the kids is what makes him really indispensable. I wonder what he'll think when he sees that I'm introducing him with this picture.

Some kids in the back fell off the bench. Don't worry: they recover quickly here.

And then Fernando joined in the back right. I like this picture a lot.

When we took this picture, Mollishmael had all the kids say "CANADA!" Apparently Lovina (blurry in front) likes Canada a lot because she started jumping in front of the camera for the next several photos.

CANADA!

CANADA! CANADA!

CANADA! CANADA! CANADA!

CANADA! CANADA! CANADA!CANADA! CANADA! CANADA!CANADA! CANADA! CANADA!CANADA! CANADA! CANADA!CANADA! CANADA! CANADA!CANADA! CANADA! CANADA!CANADA! CANADA! CANADA!CANADA! CANADA! CANADA!CANADA! CANADA! CANADA!CANADA! CANADA! CANADA! 

Ishmael (front, blue shirt) is from Togo and has possibly the best smile in the world. Lovina, Maxwell (red striped shirt) and Adjo (on left in uniform, also mentioned earlier) are giving him a run for his money, though.

Despite all of the fun above, it is still (bum bum bah!) exam season at GGYN. Standardized exams are a huge deal in the Ghanaian school system as they determine where you go to junior secondary school, senior secondary school, and beyond, so they start taking them really young. The tests this term are just to get students used to taking exams like the standardized ones they'll take later, meaning that the teachers wrote them in notebooks and I copied them into Microsoft Word. The clip art is what makes them really professional.

There usually aren't the resources at GGYN to have worksheets or written tests, so most kids have never had a real typed-up paper for their personal learning like the kind that I had in grade school. Normally tests are held like this, where kids copy questions off the board into their notebooks:

Anyway, this post has been super long. If you've gotten this far, I feel like I need to say thank you so much for your interest in GGYN. It's become such an important part of my life and I can't believe I'll be going home in a few weeks. I'll be trying to post often until then, but as I've said, the internet isn't really my friend here.

In other news, the GGYN website is currently being remodeled! It'll soon have a lot more information about the school, including a spreadsheet of the november budget and expenses. I'll keep you updated!