Would you believe that I would actually quite like a cold day or two – just for a change! On Wednesday, I was at the VSO office with two friends, Anthony and Laura, a vet, had her thermometer with her. She measured 36 degrees, but we thought that was probably just because she had had the thermometer in the car. So we measured again later on and it was 37.3 degrees Celsius – that’s 99.14 degrees Fahrenheit – and we’re not even finding it particularly hot at the moment. You certainly learn to acclimatise and the heat in the north is much more pleasant than in the south – much drier so it isn’t too muggy.
Work has really picked up this week – I’ve been so busy!! On Monday, which I was imagining would be a slow day, I popped into the office to “greet” everyone (Ghanaians are very in to greeting people and are offended if you don’t!). I then went to the Link Community Development office. I have quite a tenuous link with Link – the ladies who set up the Let’s Read project first came to Ghana through Link, so they help me with things like laminating resources, and taking me to some of the further away schools. We made some vague plans for next week (everything here seems to be vague!)
I then went to the Afrikids office. Afrikids is a Ghanaian charity who work on various projects in and around Bolga. They are probably the biggest charity working in Bolga and I'm really pleased Let’s Read has got me involved with them. One of their projects is a school which I work in sometimes; another of their projects is Mama Laadi’s Foster Home. I have been working with Mama Laadi’s kindergarten teacher quite intensively for the last few weeks. I went to Afrikids to meet David who coordinates work at Mama Laadi’s and Grace International School. I waited for the best part of an hour before he appeared, but I'm glad I waited because I met, Alison who has come with her husband from the UK to work for Afrikids for 3 months. She is a teacher and is interested in working in some of my schools. After a long chat with her, we set up some plans for the following week! I popped back into the office, bumped into the Director of Education (who is very hard to find/get/pin down!) and managed to arrange a meeting with her for Wednesday.
On Tuesday, I met up with Anthony, another VSO who was also to come to the meeting on Wednesday. We spent much of the day planning what we would speak to the Director about today. We also had a brief meeting with Alison, some Afrikids staff and all of the Assistant Directors at the GES offices. Everything is done so formally here – everyone shook everyone’s hand, then we went into the Director’s office and sat in the nice chairs. We then all introduced ourselves and talked about our jobs and experiences. David explained why Alison was here and what she wanted to do and we came up with some vague plans. At the end of the meeting, everyone shook hands again and wished each other a safe journey etc. It’s so nice the way things work here – the greetings and formalities are time consuming, but it keeps everyone on good terms with everyone else.
On Wednesday I went to Mama Laadi’s in the morning to do some simple games with the children. First, I wrote the letters s a t p i n on the board and the children had to tell me the letter name and the letter sound. We then thought of an action for each letter – like a snake going sss and an insect crawling up the arm going i i i i etc. I had written the letters s a t p i n on six sets of bottle tops and each child had to pick a set. One got Coke tops, another Sprite, another Shandy, etc. I then told them a word which uses some of those letters and the children had to make the word. It is amazing how many words can be formed from s a t p i n – I’ve found 49! Some of the children managed it ok, but we will need some more work on it. Finally, we used four sets of bottle tops to play “pairs” – just like the children’s game, but they had to find and remember where the pairs of letters were. Good fun! I now really need to spend some time watching the teacher teach as I’ve done a lot of modelling how to do it recently but I need to make sure she can do it on her own too.
Then in the afternoon we finally had our meeting with the director!! Part of what VSO is trying to do just now is to carry out an Organisational Development assessment on our partner organisation. This means we have to interview people/hold workshops to look at things like how effectively finances are used, how teachers are supervised and also external factors like how the national Ghana Education Service office effects what we do in our office. Anthony and I feel quite out of our depth with this but our Director is very supportive and experienced in this type of thing, so we are optimistic! It is useful for VSO too, so that they can see how they can effectively impact organisations long term.
I spent Thursday and Friday with Charlotte, Christina and Anthony in Walewale sharing our experiences – very useful and nice to get out of Bolga for a while!
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