Testing the waters...

Tuesday was a Public Holiday in Ghana. It is the second year that they have recognized this day and the country was informed that it was going to be a holiday again this year on Monday night. The day is Founder’s Day and is named after the first president of Ghana after he gained their independence. It is much like our President’s Day in America. So, since it was a public holiday all of the schools were closed. We traveled about fifteen minutes away to a rural community to teach them about personal hygiene. When we first arrived the kids were jumping up and down, singing and dancing. They were singing in Ewe, “Come to me Jesus.” Makafui our program director called the whole community to assemble and he told them in Ewe why we were there. We had them split into three groups and we broke ourselves into three groups and talked about: hand washing, clothes washing, nail cutting, bathing, and preventing the common cold. I was in the group that discussed bathing and clothes washing. While we were discussing the importance behind bathing and washing clothes, we constantly had to adjust our speech in order to be sensitive and realistic to their culture. They all had great questions about prevention and seemed very interested in what we had to say. At the end, we handed out toothbrushes and toothpaste and it was like a mob scene. Someone finally had to make them all get in lines. They did not speak any English and everything had to be translated into Ewe by one of our program directors. It really was an amazing day and I’m so glad that I was able to have that added experience. One of my favorite parts of the day was having a little girl just follow me, sit on my lap and hold my hand the entire day. It seems that everywhere we travel there are always children so willing to just be close to you. I was even a little sad to say goodbye to her after I had spent the entire time with her and knowing that I would never see her again.
School has definitely been a great improvement. I have bonding with the other male teachers and I think that they respect me enough now to not pass judgment on my teaching methods and they actually respect my efforts instead of thinking that I am here to take over and change everything about their school. I adore the kids and we are having a wonderful time together. One of my favorite moments from earlier this week was when we were focusing on writing simple complete sentences paying special attention to capital letters and “full stops.” One of the girl Charlotte wrote as one of here sentences “I like to learn.” It just made my day!

Today at placement I attempted what I thought would be the impossible. Now that I am into a routine and over the shock of the structure, resources and attitude towards school I am not 100% prepared to do what I came here to do and that was to teach children. I decided to start really building in some of my active learning and differentiated beliefs and I spent all of Wednesday night preparing for class today. It was my goal to have them participate in centers while I conducted a small guided reading lesson with the oldest student in the class. I knew that it could possibly be a complete flop or could be one of the greatest things that could happen to the classroom for the next twelve weeks making my life and theirs enjoyable! All of the centers were reinforcing skills that I had been teaching over the past two weeks: a rhyming cube game where they had to make words and put them in appropriate columns, ordering the days of the week and the months of the year and then putting sentences back together that I had cut up. Since there are no materials here, I spent Wednesday night creating paper cubes with word families and consonants on them, and papers that had the sentences and day/months that I cut up. Now here is where my personality is being completely tested because I love creating materials like that however, I would have loved to have been able to put them into zip lock bags or paper clip them together or something to have them organized instead of just thrown in the bottom of my backpack! It worked and was a complete success. The kids absolutely loved it, I was able to bounce around the room and work individually with some students. The teacher was even participating in the centers. It was a wonderful day!

Things continue to challenge me every day but in a wonderful way. One of my favorite things to do is just ride in the car and look out the windows at the small villages, mountains, or just jungle!

This weekend we are traveling to a small little island near an turtle conservation where we are hoping to see some sea turtles! If not, we at least will have spent the night on an island!

Hope all is well at home, I think of you every day!

Lots of love from Africa,
Steph