"Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family." Kofi Annan

Kofi Annan is a well known Ghanaian diplomat who was the seventh Secretary General of the United Nations and won a Nobel Peace Prize for founding the Global AIDS and Health Fund. He spent most of his time with the UN and WHO backing HIV/AIDS education programs, but was a big proponent of education reform across Ghana. I thought the quote was fitting due to the amount of time I've spent thinking about education in Ghana over the past week.

These same 4 kids run out of the nursery
to greet me every single day 

As you all know, I’ve been spending all of my mornings at the Happy Kids Prep School. The kids are still happy and I've enjoyed really getting to form relationships with the kids there. While I came to Ghana planning on just helping out around the school, due to a severe lack of teachers I have become the classroom instructor for what I thought were students in the 4th and 5th grade. This past week, I realized that my original P4 class was really grades 3 and 4 combined and the group of 5th graders I took in when another volunteer left was actually grades 5 and 6. This means that I’ve been the teacher for the 17 students in grades 3 through 6 at Happy Kids. 

Last week brought about big changes at the school as they were finally able to bring in a new permanent teacher. Wednesday morning I arrived at the school and was immediately introduced to Felix and told that he was the new teacher for the P3 and P4 class. Definitely a bittersweet moment. I was excited to hear that they were finally able to hire someone, but realized that this meant the end of my time with the group of happy kids that I started with 3 weeks ago. The kids definitely need a real teacher who will be around longterm, so I made the move to the empty classroom right next door with the 6 kids in grades 5 and 6. 

During the school wide break at 10am, Madame Elizabeth (the headmistress of the school) thanked me for taking on the big group of older kids and asked if I could help Felix get to know everyone at the school. I of course told her that I would help him out. She also let me know that they have been trying to find another teacher for the P5/P6 class and that I could pick which class to work with once they hired someone full time. Until then I’ll be with P5/P6. It’s a really small group, so I’m excited to do more involved and grade appropriate activities with them. 

Some of the P3-P6 group

My 5 regulars in the P5/ P6 class

The lack of structure at Happy Kids has been the source of many questions for me, so I was glad to have the time this week to learn more about how schools work here in Ghana. Our past two guest speakers have been about the education system and child labor here in Ghana. I quickly realized that the child labor problem is really an education problem.

Here’s a quick overview on the Ghanaian school system:

Public Education is ‘free and compulsory’ for all children through Junior High School. (free, except for a family must provide the necessary uniform) A child must pass the required entrance exams and be able to pay tuition in order to continue on to Senior High School. I got the chance to observe classes at two different public schools on Thursday and was pleasantly surprised at how much more structured and organized they were from Happy Kids. Both schools had full time teachers that were following the outlined curriculum given to them by the Minister of Education. One of the schools even brought in students at the nearby teacher’s college to act as student teachers in the classrooms.  

Although public schools are free, many families decide to send their kids or private or prep schools. Private schools, mostly private boarding schools, are super common around Hohoe and provide parents with the option of their child living at school. Most of these boarding schools, like Happy Kids, charge families a small fee to provide all housing, food, access to water, housing and an education for their children. The fee is much less than it would cost to have the child live in home throughout the week. The kids live at the school during the week and those who are able travel home during the weekends. 

The issue with these private schools are that they are much less regulated than public schools across the country. This lack of regulation and stable funding sources causes them to not really follow any curriculum and bring in teachers without full training. For example, Happy Kids is a private boarding school in the small village of Gbi_Wegbe, right outside of Hohoe. The school opened in 1995 with the mission providing a quality education and housing for children of needy families. At the time, most of these children were orphans. Due to both lack of funding and the poor regulation of private schools, Happy Kids currently is severely understaffed. I mean I’ve been acting as the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th grade teacher for the past 3 weeks. 

This span of 4 grades at Happy Kids still only left me with less than 20 students because most students don’t make it to the higher grades, especially in a small village like Gbi_Wegbe, for a variety of reasons. Both our speaker on education and child labor stressed that it is common for families to pull their child (especially girl children) out of school at a young age to focus on learning the family trade. If children do make it through Junior High School, many choose to begin working to help the family instead of paying the high costs of continuing through Senior High School. While this obviously was disheartening to hear, I instantly thought of the career paths of some of my happy kids. Two of the girls in my class want to be seamstresses when they grow up. Many of the boys want to be farmers like their dads. Keeping this is mind, I know that after completion of 8th grade their parents will be left with two choices. They’ll have to either find a way to pay the high price of upper education in a less than favorable school system or remove them from school and lead them down the familiar path of the family trade or local business that will help bring in money for the household. In a huge understatement... I strongly believe in the value of education and think that a quality education should be easily assessable for all children. While I’ve dedicated much time to spreading my belief in education to those around me, I can’t help but wonder if the financial strain of high school in the Hohoe area would be worth it to prepare a child to be a Ghanaian seamstress or cocoa farmer.

To take it back to my Happy Kids... I’ve become more purposeful with my daily english and math lessons. I’m hoping that the structure of my activities like the ‘day at the market’ word problems or grammar games will help develop skills they will find necessary as they move on. I will continue to try spark their creative thinking, reward their inquisitive nature to ask about the many things in the world they have never been exposed to and encourage them to always hold onto their desire to learn. 

The P3/P4 girls playing during break

Thinking longterm, I briefly talked to Felix (the new teacher at Happy Kids) about working to establish a set curriculum or some sort of standard guidelines for the school. Felix grew up in the Hohoe area and recently graduated from a nearby teacher’s college and was excited that I also saw the need to bring some more structure to the classroom. The hardest part will be adapting a traditional public school curriculum to fit a school that is used to grouping grades together. At Happy Kids, the P3 and P4 students share the same classroom and same teacher, same goes for P5 and P6. Also, I’m hoping to have a girls only class sometime this week. Madame Elizabeth gave me a book of materials for women’s empowerment and girls health activities that she would like me to do with the girls. I’ll have to talk to Felix to see if he would be willing to take my boys in exchange for his girls one morning, but he should be ok with that. Madame is all about it so I’m hoping myself and future CCS volunteers can make this ‘Girls Circle’ type thing a regular occurrence at Happy Kids. I'll be sure to keep everyone updated on my time with the kids!

    

Mr. Wisdom Wise from P5

Moda and me in the main office

 --

Kamilah

In one of my first posts I had a picture of a not so shy girl named Ruth. Turns out she's quite the ham and her real name is Kamilah. She frequently makes her way into our yard and charms her way past the security guy on duty to find someone to play with. The weekend I learned that she loves to take funny pictures of herself and has completely figured out how to use photobooth on my laptop. She now has her own album of pictures on my computer, so I figured I'd share one.

Things I’m still not used to:

• Cold Showers - It’s hot and I spend a good portion of my days walking around in the sun, but I’m still not used to the whole cold shower thing. It just seems wrong. Even if I come home super sweaty after walking around town all day, I just want a nice steamy shower.
• Lizards - My classroom at Happy Kids has two large windows (really just two open holes in the wall) with no screen or cover to them. These windows are nice for letting in an occasional breeze, but also allow the biggest lizards I’ve ever seen to freely roam around the room. Even if the class is super focused on our word problems or geography lesson, a huge green lizard with an orange head crawling up the wall is enough to completely throw me off.
• The Yobo (or Yovo) call: Kids in Hohoe are used to seeing CCS volunteers, but still instantly shout Yobo or Yovo (which means white american or white man) whenever they see anyone in the group walking around. Recently we've learned of a special song that they sing to say "hello white person". They still call me the black american, but I get the song sometimes too. 
• Vultures - They’re gross and everywhere.
• The combination of consonants in the Ewe Language - I just can’t pronounce words like dzigbzoudi or gbi correctly. The kids tell me that my tongue just gets in the way and I have to learn how to keep it under control.  
• Sleeping with a mosquito net -  I never really thought I was claustrophobic, but sleeping with a mosquito net in the bottom bunk is just weird. I feel like I’m trapped in a cage and it doesn’t help with the heat either.