So we are over halfway now and I am very proud to say that we have left behind the Dora the Explorer/Bindi Irwin look for African goddesses with our beautiful tailor made clothes in bright African colours! I must admit that I feel like I do not stand out as much now as we did before... YES!
Well, most people know Adelaide as the city of churches, well then Ghana is the Country of churches, I am talking everywhere you look there is a church! On wednesday nights we get a service to 10 pm at night, but 2 weekends ago when we stayed home for the weekend, we were so lucky to experience a loud loud LOUD service to 2am in the morning! Apparently we were lucky as Linda, our host sister, says it normally goes to 4 am. what a pity we missed out on 2 hours of "AMEN, AMEN, AMEN"!!
So we all decided to have a weekend in Swedru as the travelling can become too much especially when you are on a so called "big bus" (which is the size of my mums tarago) for 9 hours.
Maja and I decided to take Linda to Winnebea, a 30 min tro-tro ride to the beach. On first site I thought the beach was very nice, with palm trees and no people, until i saw the sand crabs, and they were everywhere, definitely one of my biggest fears. In the water i spent the whole time following Maja's footsteps scared to step on a crab!
Iona and Eliza spent the saturday painting their school. They are making a mural on one of the walls with the children's hand prints over it! Iona also got her hair braided, it really suits her!
Ma and Erin had a very exciting weekend as their host sister, Gloria, finally gave birth after being over due for nearly a month! so they now have a little addition to their family :)
On the sunday, we met the Ghana girls at Seth's house to visit Mickel, Seth's 5 year old son that we spent the first week with in Accra. It was so nice, Paulina the cook had cooked us all a feast for when we arrived, it was our favourite too, Johl of rice!!!! it was so funny, Mickel had shaved his eyebrow off after watching an add on TV, so Seth now called him Mickela :)
Now onto the school update........
We had a very first lesson in our new classroom which was so great, the kids were so excited, jumping up and down yelling "thankyou madame"!!!! when they found out that they had a white board. Just watching how appreciative and excited they were really made walking that 50 km worth while :)
I must admit, I will not miss teaching under the palm tree with chickens running through our classroom and sprinting into a little room to teach when it rains! This time we beat the rain YES! We have painted the classroom rainbow, it looks so amazing, actually like a primary school classroom :) I am so proud of Maja and I that we established a better learning environment for these gorgeous children! It is funny though, even though the classroom is brand new, the doors still do not close and the window locks literally broke straight away...but hey, It's Ghana :)
The biggest achievement happened yesterday, Oscar, the 12 year old kid who could not write past F in the ABC, wrote the whole ABC's yesterday without needing any help. I have been giving him some one on one tutoring while Maja teaches english to the rest of the class, and I am so proud of him, we have seen an improvement!
Iona and Eliza have established a system at their school where they take the children who really need help and give them some one on one time. They said that they are really seeing improvements in the children and that the children are really benefiting from this.
Ma and Erin are taking the kids from the orphanage to the beach today. Yesterday when we were there, they were so excited, and could not stop saying "we are going to the beach, we are going to the beach". Their classrooms that they are building are coming along really well and should be finished soon so they can teach in an enclosed area. Erin told me yesterday that when she was teaching body parts, she drew a cartoon on the board and the kids started yelling, "you drew Ebbinesa, it looks exactly like him" ( he is one of the boys in the orphanage) the kids could not seriously stop laughing!
So that is basically it for the groups update!
Me and Maja have also been practicing walking with water etc on our head! She is a gun, walked up stairs with a whole bag of water on her head, but i definitely think i will not master it before i come back :(
Love Shan x
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