Due to popular demand (i.e. Coral wants more info about what I've been up to!) I’m going to recap on my last few weeks.
Ruby, a volunteer from Essex working with me on Let’s Read stuff, has been here for well over a month now. She is staying at Mama Laadi’s Foster Home (see previous entries!) and is here to work with the kids at ML, and also help me with workshops etc.
Poor Ruby has been sick, so we’ve been to and from the hospital several times. Malaria is sometimes over diagnosed in Bolga, so what’s made her sick isn’t entirely clear, but she does seem to be on the mend this time, fingers crossed! The hospital we go to is nice enough. There are always HUGE queues of people, but we tend to get seen quickly (as in less than 3 hours) due to the work we’re doing. After rather public weighing and blood pressure measurements, you are then seen by a doctor, who normally sends you for blood tests (so long as the sink isn’t blocked – the most recent reason for not being tested) and then after waiting an hour or so, you are seen by the doctor again to tell you the prognosis. It’s not the most efficient of systems, but much better than a lot of hospitals. Ghanaians are meant to have health insurance, and if they do, they do not need to pay to see the doctor but have to pay for all drugs, no matter what’s wrong with you. (insurance costs about 10 cedi a year, which is about gfice pounds – and is a lot of money for the poorest people who might not earn 1 cedi a day.) In the case of cancer or other such serious conditions, that can mean forking out hundreds or thousands of cedi for treatment, or going without.
Other than that, we’ve been busy setting into place all the arrangements for 10 days of intensive head teacher and teacher training. My Let’s Read ladies from the UK arrive on Wednesday to work with me in Bolga for a week and a half. We are splitting into two teams of two and carrying out various workshops training head teachers in leadership management issues and training P3-6 teachers on the use of phonics resources and effective teaching methods. So I’ve been a travel agent/secretary/accountant and all round general dogs body getting things ready for their arrival. We are arranging some of the workshops with Link Community Development and some with Afrikids (a charity based in Bolga) so I’ve been racing around laminating, shopping, enquiring and delivering!
We were meant to do the last in a series of 5 workshops at one of my schools last week. The workshop was helping the teachers – all 30 of them – to make teaching and learning materials from card and other simple materials. After confirming with the head last Monday that everything was ready to go for Tuesday afternoon, we arrived in my office 30 mins before the start of the workshop to discover that all the teachers were at a different workshop elsewhere and so would not be present for ours! This was after spending most of last Saturday afternoon making things and spending much of last Monday preparing. However, now rescheduled for tomorrow so hopefully it will go ahead.
I rode my bike all the way to Paga and back on Wednesday. Paga is about 40km from Bolga, but with all the stops and starts and detours (intentional – I DID NOT GET LOST!!) it was more like a 110km round trip! I was very pleased with myself and was able to deliver invitations to my 5 Kassena Nankana schools. (KN is a district just north of Bolga).
Other than that this weekend has been unusually busy. On Friday night, Sam, a friend from Navrongo, came to our house and cooked us dinner which was AMAZING! We had sausage casserole and mashed potatoes (mashed potatoes are such a treat here!) and ice cream with peanut brittle for dessert! Wonderful!
On Saturday we had the regional meeting, and I was elected as one of two new regional reps. That means that volunteers in the Upper East can come to me with any queries about problems with the programme office or things that they’d like help in sorting; that I am in charge of the distress fund for volunteers who have lost or had items stolen; and that I will go to Accra to meet new vols as and when they arrive. Stephen, my co-rep, is in Zebilla, so we will work together on all these things.
Last night, we had a night at the “cinema”! There is a compound in town where Nigerian films are shown on a tv, and for 30peswa (about 15pence!), you can watch. We watched two films, Left Alone and Left Alone 2, and they were up to the usual Nigerian standard – lots of screaming, shrieking, very loud sound effects, very bad special effects, and the usual mix of romance, juju, Christianity, gun fights, police bribery and confusion. We plan to make our very own for viewing at a cinema near you soon!
We then went to Celebrity, a local night club, and despite there being no music or other customers for the majority of the night, we had a fab time singing and dancing!
Other photos I hope to attach are of the Hairdressing and Seamstress graduations which we went to last weekend. Janet, one of our neighbours and a hairdresser, had one of her students, Teni, graduating, so we went along to watch. We turned up just 3 hours late, which was perfect timing to catch the start of the ceremony (a very long prayer) followed by a procession of all the graduants and their teachers, and then presentation of certificates. We were then given minerals (fizzy drinks) and snacks by our hosts.
We are now coming to the end of the rather lengthy school holidays – three weeks for Easter. Being a teacher working in schools but not with teacher holidays, this could mean a somewhat quiet time. However, I’ve managed to organise a couple of painting projects in schools.
The first was helping to touch up some painting done in Logre Primary 18 months ago. This was a bit of a baptism of fire! As you may know, art is not my strongest subject, so freehanding with drippy, sticky gloss and trying to draw complicated diagrams of flowers and fill in boundary lines in maps of Ghana proved to be fairly challenging. However, we managed in 2 days with a lot of help from the headteacher (Gana!) and 3 other teachers.
Our second project was painting 12 classrooms at one of my Let’s Read schools, Preparatory. We’ve been doing workshops here every week and so decided it was a good school to start painting at. There are 24 classes in the school, 4 at each stage, and 1200 children in the primary (and 400 in kindergarten!) (That averages 50 per class, though there are classes here with over 60.) We painted the alphabet in the infant (P1-3) classrooms. I had a super team of VSOs helping and also some children Ruby is working with at Mama Laadi’s, so we managed 10 classrooms in the first 2 days (and 2 days to do the last two, which were painting on wooden partitions so a bit trickier!)
Here are some of the results...
