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.