Ghanarama

Written by Eva Metzeling, GapBreak Ghana, 2009

Well I have almost exactly one month left in Ghana which is crazy - the last two months have flown. It feels like we have even less time left because we only have two weeks left teaching and then we're off for two weeks of travel with the other Aussies. We're getting pretty dang excited about it too - Seren (the Aussie I'm sharing a host family with) and I just spent the afternoon going through travel guides and with any luck our two weeks travel will include the highest waterfall in West Africa, visits to Kente-cloth weaving villages, thousand year old mosques, some national parks, a two day ferry across the Volta river, climbing the highest mountain in Ghana, tropical beaches, a sacred monkey sanctuary, millions of markets of course and probably some fetish priests. Woohoo!

It'll be so so sad to leave school though. The other teachers just make my life, they are so friendly and hilarious to talk to. Although we did have a pretty serious, actually depressing conversation with the grade one teacher yesterday - she has a class of 45 or so (which is average for our school) and was matter-of-factly telling us how impossible it is to cater to the often very pressing needs of individual students in a class so large. (Although once in a different school she had a class of 75 so she figures she doesn't have it too bad at the moment.) Of course we already knew that, but sort of the way I deal with the poverty and shocking living standard here is to figure that as long as the people are happy, who am I to judge and be so condescending as to pity them. So when you have a Ghanaian telling you that 'we are suffering' it makes it much much harder.

Anyway we are trying to do our bit with the money we raised in Australia, to build a library and ITC centre for our school. The construction is going on at the moment - hopefully it will be finished by the end of the week, so then we can paint it and fill it with books and computers before we head off travelling. Desktop computers only cost $150 here! And being able to use a computer opens up so many possibilities for the kids in terms of future work. So we're really happy to be doing that.

Funniest thing today - we had three huge bags of cement stored in our house that needed to get to the school. Seren and I couldn't even lift the bags ourselves, but the junior secondary school sent six boys home with us during break to pick them up. These guys really no bigger than us helped each other to hoist each bag of cement onto one person's head - and then off they'd walk casually as if they weren't carrying anything at all! We just watched and laughed at our own patheticness. Things like people carrying everything on their heads, I think I'm used to and then something like that happens and it's just like wooow these people and this whole culture is so insanely cool!

So really everything's cruisy and going really well. Everyone and everything here is so relaxed and yet everything gets done amazingly efficiently somehow! It's so much easier living here than I expected.