Well it looks like I've got a lot of ground to cover in this post! I'll start with our library projects. We're having a couple of setbacks, the biggest one being the construction project underway at the Sumbrungu Women's Center, the building that currently houses the library. It has become unsafe for children to be near the area, so the library has been closed until the project is completed. Fortunately, we have access to the adjacent women's community center, so we were able to complete our two-week Reading Session with our 5th-grade students. We think the class went really well, and that the children enjoyed the class and learned new strategies to improve their reading comprehension. And, perhaps most importantly, we taught them how to play WAH! It will become an international phenomenon someday, I just know it.
We've been thinking about a lot of new ideas for activities to do with various age groups that will be different from the reading strategies taught in the summer camps. We're looking to organize two-week after school mini-camps with 4th-graders that will focus on the mechanics of reading words (phonics, pronunciation, syllables, etc) so that they will have a solid foundation for learning the comprehension skills that come later. We do have a lot of constraints that we need to work around in organizing these camps though - for example, our number one priority right now is doing inventory at all three libraries, a process which takes 2-3 days per library. We also need to renew our visas before the end of the month, so we are planning a trip to Burkina Faso for the 3rd week in March to visit some of the libraries there. So right now, we are looking to start up three evening programs with 5th graders, 6th graders, and 7th graders, respectively. We hope to combine reading activities, word games and puzzles, arts and crafts, phonics, creative thinking activities, and writing in these classes. We have so many ideas and not nearly enough time to do them all! We also need to figure out a way to recruit students for these activities - we were originally planning to visit the schools and talk to the headmasters and teachers, but it seems the teachers will be staging a protest on Tuesday, and it remains to be seen whether they will commit to a long-term strike over wages, benefits, etc. I'm having flashbacks to my time volunteering in Santiago, when I showed up for three weeks to volunteer at a high school, only to find the students and/or teachers on strike.
So this past weekend was our trip to Mole National Park, a sanctuary renowned for its elephant population. We had an amazingly easy trip, by Ghanaian standards - even when we found all the seats sold out on our bus to the park, we hitched a ride in an air-conditioned pickup truck from an entrepreneurial local and arrived 5 hours ahead of schedule, without having to stand the whole way. We met a lot of volunteers from different parts of Ghana, mostly German and British, which was fun. Despite our best efforts, we did not see any elephants. We planned our trip for the dry season, since this is when elephants come to the watering hole near the hotel, but the rain came early this year, and the elephants had already scattered. But that's okay - we had a lot of fun lounging by the pool with a vista of the watering hole and warthogs wandering around, drinking 'pito' (a local alcoholic brew somewhere between a wine and a beer) from a calabash, and getting caught in a freak rainstorm.
The bad part of the weekend was that Elena and Trisha, who were traveling from Spain and Takoradi respectively to meet us, had horrendous travel luck (bus broke down at 1AM and stranded them until about 10:00) so they didn't arrive at the park until after we had left. But that was okay, because we were able to give them insider tips, and then they came and spent a couple of nights in Sumbrungu with us. They helped out with our class, which was great, especially since Elena has a lot of experience with ESL kids. They got to witness 'Rasta Coco', a friendly local with a guitar-like instrument and pito on his breath, serenade Lauren with a song that featured the words 'Lauren', 'United States', and 'Barack Obama'. (Have we mentioned how Obama-crazy this place is? We ate 'Obama biscuits' a few nights ago, passed several 'Obama hotels' in Accra, see children taking with notebooks bearing his face, and routinely see shirts with his face (boys) or 'Obama's girl' written on them.)
Well, that might be it for now. Some things we're looking forward to are: attending a Frafra class tonight (the local dialect), attending a wedding tomorrow, and celebrating Ghana's Independence Day this weekend. The celebrations started this morning with a marching demonstration by all the school children of the area, complete with drumming and streamers with the Ghanaian colors.
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