MY NEW PLACE

Ejura is a country town about two hours north of Kumasi in the ashamed Region. It is the best place in Ghana and maybe West Africa for growing Mangos. My reason for being there is a school which is run by the same org as the one I came with. My intention was to come and just hang out for a few days with the volunteers there. This has since changed to basing myself there until next weekend.

one of the classrooms

The school runs from nursery to JSS (Jnr Secondary School). The teachers all teach subjects rather than a class so after every period you move on to another class. There are about 250 students at the school. Oh, yeah the school is run by a Dada from India who only wears bright orange. A Dada is a male who belongs to the Anada Magra (while they don't say it, its kind of like a nice cult). Compared to my last school the children are way more behaved and the bad classes are better than my ok ones back at Cosmic. The school has so many resources for the teachers to use and past volunteers keep sending resources back here after they leave.

I live in a house, its really more like a building with connected rooms. Everyone has there own room. We all have electricity. The kitchen has a fridge and oven!!!!! And even a blender. Plus there is running water. We share the complex with 5 orphaned boys (some have parents though they are unable to care for them) who are between 10 and 15 years old. They are very polite though still very young boy and children like which means there is always noise. Since Dada is never really at the house the children generally have a free reign and are able to do within reason what they like. It is sad that they have no parental figure really in their lives.
While being at the school I have been fortunate enough to be attend seminars on how to write lessons plans Ghanaian style. This however also involved other things which included child discipline. Me, being me, I was unable to keep my mouth quiet on some of the things the man from the Education Commission was saying and to the other volunteers delight (not sure what the teachers there thought) spent about 15mins challenging his beliefs on physically punishment and discipline in general.

The result of my debating however was being invited to go round and see how some of the public schools in the area work. I did this yesterday morning. It was really overwhelming to see what some of the conditions children learn in and teachers are forced to teach in. The govt introduced free education for all last year. Since then the rolls at public schools have doubled, though the govt has not given the school any resources to cope with it and there are not enough teachers to cope even if there were more classrooms. The country is short of about 20,0000 teachers a year. There are classes that are smaller than those at home with 100 plus children in them. Though the teachers are all qualified I really don't know how they cope. Many of the classes especially the ones for the younger ones are not even in rooms. The whole experiences was a real eye opener for me.