Ghana Team Journal

It was another typical morning in Ghana – an egg and toast, morning meeting and loss of power – however, when I walked out of my room at 7am, I was greeted by a much welcome cloud cover and cool breeze. This was a nice change from the 100 degree heat and high humidity. We broke from our meeting and went our separate ways to teach in the various local schools. Thankfully, at my school, B. Akotu, my teacher showed up and decided to basically recap everything I did on my own with the class when she was absent yesterday. We reworked round-estimate quotients first for math, then continued on to English. The class reread the excerpt from the English book on natural disasters and proceeded to answer the exercises in their homework books. We took a long break around 10am and ran around the fields outside the classroom. I was being chased by KG kids yelling “obrone” and trying to get me to make funny faces while the older students pestered me again for a soccer ball and my ipad – saying over and over– “we need ball – play games?”

The bell rang and we all reluctantly meandered back to our classrooms to continue the mornings work. For my class, this meant more reading and then on to some science. We discussed again the difference between transparent, translucent and opaque objects – a concept that I apparently succeeded in teaching them yesterday. I left the class doing work in their exercise books and walked Monique to her old classroom to deliver a book.

The two of us wandered home, attempting – unsuccessfully - to step from rock to rock as to not fall into the mud on the path by the main road. We all met for a quick lunch of black-eyed peas, chick peas and rice. Soon after lunch, the majority of the group went off to the Cidi Bead Factory up the road and watched the manufacture of glass beads – a process of crushing glass into basically sand, forming the grains together into a bead-like form, cooking and melting the beads to form and then finally the painting process, where they became the final product for the bracelets and necklaces shown off by the group over dinner.

Dinner was one of my personal favorites, spaghetti and meat sauce. Soon afterwards, Kathryn and I went down to Adam’s Pub to meet Samuel, Francesca, Ernest and Mikhasis for a beverage and a chat. We hung out for a couple of hours talking about local politics, music, movies and teaching each other native words and traditions. A very good time was had by all and I think we all learned a bit about the other’s culture during our time together. We cruised back home by the ungodly hour of 9pm and went to our rooms spent. Sleep came quickly as we recharged out batteries for the remainder of the work week