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!