Ghana's Longest Serving Chief

http://www.ghanaculture.gov.gh/index1.php?linkid=65&archiveid=1165&page=1&adate=20/12/2007

Ghana's Longest Serving Chief is also the chief of my traditional area (Saviefe). I met the chief last year at Agokpo, and he's pretty old (now, 94) and has been the Paramount chief of the area for 74 years.

Shafted...

I've been Ghana'd. Some colleagues of mine and me were supposed to meet in a town called Hohoe to plan for our upcoming girls camp, so we set the time for 12 noon. Of course, I live pretty far away, and on a good day it will take about 2.5 hours of strict travelling just to get there (not counting free time waiting for tranports arrivals). I allowed myself an extra hour for waiting, and in case something happened (its Africa, after all). 8:30 I was roadside waiting for a vehicle. And waiting. And waiting some more. Two hours pass – not a single car going the direction I'm going (only 1 passed the other way during this time). Since as a PCV we aren't allowed to ride motorcycles, and by now its too late to walk two towns over to catch a vehicle from there – I cancelled my trip. Boo.
The sad part is, I tried to take a shortcut today, that is, take a route that cuts about an hour off transit time. After being repeatedly assured by multiple people that I would get a car going the new direction (and one person who said it was foolish to go that way), I deluded myself into beleiving that a car would come. Alas, Ghana won, Mike zero.
So a few days ago at school the students were erecting a bamboo tent, of sorts, to block out the sun (which, let me remind you, since we are on the equator, its hot!) for our upcoming sports day at the school. This by itself isn't too exciting (more a common occurance), but then all the extra bamboo they collected, poked hole to make them pipes of varying lengths, and then started to pound them on some excess cement area. The overall effect was a hypnotizing methodical melody (sounding a lot like a drum circle, but with bamboo sticks!) that put me to sleep under a mango tree. Only in Africa will students spontaneously create their own music when they are bored and develop songs to sing in response to the day.
Other interesting tidbits:
1.Playing volleyball with other teachers and townsfolk is now happening (thanks Mom!)
2.Thanksgiving is approaching, and I'm going to the northern nether reaches of Ghana
3.Went to a small town nearby and slaughtered a chicken
4.Sports day happened, and my town (Gbogame) won for both boys and girls football
5.I got sunburned for the first time in three months (thanks volleyball)
6.Starting to somehow prepare for Foreign Service Officer's Test (FSOT) to take sometime next year.

Sasadu

Sasadu is the festival involving four towns in the area - Saviefe, Akrofu, Sovie, and Alavanyo, hence S, A, S, A, or Sasa. The festival will be in the town, Saviefe, this weekend. Sasadu is an ancestral festival to remember when the people moved away from a wicked king called Agorkoli in the modern day Togo/Benin area. They use four colours to decorate the festival. Those colours are green, white, red and blue. Saviefe is green; Akrofu is red; Sovie is blue; Alavanyo is white. People will be performing traditional rituals. When they were on the way coming, the people from Akrofu, Sovie and Alavanyo will meet at Bame. Then they met at cemetery at Bame. Then they will all come together and come to Saviefe. When they are coming, and they know that they are reaching Saviefe they will stop at the way and make traditional ritual after they have finished making the ritual. They drink palm wine in bamboo cups and fetch water and pour it in basket. They wear different dresses. All the chiefs from each town will come with their queens and reach the dabar ground. They will carry all their chiefs and their queens in a palanquin and they will dance in it.
This post was created by the form 3 pupils at Saviefe Gbogame JHS.

The Internets

I received a call from someone in Switzerland who is reading my blog the other day (its okay, I know her), so this is now a trinational blog. Get it Right.
We just had our first intercontinental interconnect between students from my JHS and kids from a school in the US! Hooray! Fortunately, everything went off (relatively) smoothly. With some help from one Chris Massie, and a surprise appearance by another Bryan Dodd, we got 16 kids set up with some email accounts, and face-to-face time with some American students. Not too shabby for leaving the town at 12 noon and arriving at 6:30.
During the ride after the Skyping event back to the village (one student said he doesn't live in a village, he lives in a 'community'! Hilarious), I'm spacing out because the engine is loud and all my students are singing songs. Thats what they do after something fun: they clap and sing and have a good time; we could learn from them. Anyway, after some Ewe songs and a few improvised verses (part of the singing), I hear the following gem:
Mister Mike,
We love you so,
and when you go,
remember us!
(repeat and sing with clapping and rhythms)
There were also songs in English and Ewe, but with the rhythm its hard to hear what exactly is audibly coherent versus jibberjabber.
Good News is that I think everyone had a lot of fun, learned, and it was a 'character building experience'. Bad News is that some people in my school feel left out about not going. Too bad for them. Additionally, I'm back to teaching math recreationally (and almost like its my job!) for the boys and girls, and thankfully the social studies department is in abeyance. Yahoo. Which incidentally is everyone's new email host. And since the pupils have unique names (Approx. Ex. Komla Caeser, Osei Shine, etc.) everyone's address is like unique.newyork at yahoo.com. No Numbers, Just Letters.

Social Studies Teacher

It's true! I'm now teaching social studies for form 1 and 2. You may ask extraneous questions like "But Mike, aren't you teaching Math?" and "Are you qualified to teach social studies?". The answer to both is no. But why not try my hand at teaching different subject? If I don't teach it, no one else will (lack of teachers at the school and people just dont want to teach SS). Also, I'm trying to start a penpal program of sorts, where students in my school will make a trip down to Ho (destination: Internet Cafe) and skype with students from the US. Hopefully this week or next week we will start implementing our action plan. Halloween is fast approaching, and I will be traveling for a bit to enjoy the holiday, albeit on a bad road to the destination.
Vodafone modem inoperable (to connect to the Internet from my town), and Voda is refusing to give me cash-back (only vouchers to spend at Voda). Lame. So it may be another few weeks before I can get access for my ICT students to the Internet from the village. Woe.
This about sums up the weeks. 10 months to go, but time is going by quickly!

Year Two. Begin!

Its the start of Year Two for my service. How do I feel about it? I'm a little ambivalent about knowing that everything is over half over: I will miss the people here, but I'm also a little frustrated with 'the system' as a whole (educationally speaking). It came to me after reading about an experience Richard Feinman had in Brazil. The education isn't teaching real, tangible things in subjects like Math and Science. It teaches how to change numbers in base ten (our number system) to base two (binary): what on earth is the point? How many school kids will be honestly asked, in real life, to physically change numbers into different number systems? Also, the word problems are completely extraneous as well – Tell people how to say such and such a number in a different language you will never hear. For ICT, I have to teach about some information processing cycle and how it pertains to a computer, when most children have no idea how to even use a mouse to point and click. Is this Information Cycle what we want to pass on in our tests? Its as if someone in the education service decided "Our kids need to learn computers". "We should test them on if they know computers or not". "Let's make a test to test knowledge, but it has to be on paper". Then there is a feedback loop where tests are based on textbooks and textbooks are based on the tests. It ends up that the mundane and worthless information is what is memorized (In what year was email invented? Name one advantage of the Internet. What does CPU stand for?) as opposed to more relevant topics (Typing, Navigating a computer desktop). Its like those who are in charge set questions, but what real world is knowledge is transferred? Only how to memorize and regurgitate facts, and not critical thinking (in very short supply!). People get degrees in education, but that only enables them to move to a higher institution to teach and earn more, all the while practicing the same techniques of information transfer – memorization! If someone has an abundance of knowledge in irrelevant information, and teaches it to a younger disciple, what can you say the disciple is educated in? Perhaps 'learning the system'.

On a different stream of consciousness way of thinking, I decided to do P90X to get into shape. Not that I was in bad shape, but when villagers comment "Kofi, you are looking large!" or "Obolo Kofi", its time for a change. My fellow teacher just called me "extra large". So, every morning for 90 days (almost, except for saturdays which is a rest day) I get up at 5:30 and exercise for an hour. As I am only about 2 and a half weeks in, I can't comment on the effectiveness yet in the weight trimming area, but I can see an upper body difference. Also since I've been here for a year, people are used to seeing me. Consequently, and nearly every night I walk around my town, I get invited to people's houses for drinks and sometimes food. Not that I don't like the local moonshine to drink, but last night there was an exceptionally strong (70%?) drink that I had. Even the locals made faces at it: that's how you know its good.

Vacation!

So I took about a month of to travel to Kenya, around Ghana, and chill in Accra to take a break from site, and to see family. I'm still composing a complete correspondence of the months travels, so I'll wait on that. But, school will be starting next Tuesday; also no other teachers are in my town. I showed up at my town and people asked "Kofi, where have you been? And why are you here? School doesn't start for another week!". At least I'm getting back in the groove of village living. Vacation was good though... the food alone probably added about 10 pounds to my frame. So to counterbalance that, its time to exercise!