Jordan here: This week Sarah and I were in Wa to bring students to a camp that was run by a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer. The theme of the camp was learning about the importance of volunteerism (I just about wrote volunteership which according to Microsoft Word and my wife, is not a word). We arrived on Thursday evening and Sarah and I treated our 4 students to a Fan Milk. This is like a little pouch of ice cream that is sold in bigger cities. Since 3 of the 4 have never even passed through Wa in their lives and have not gone farther than their village or Tumu an hour away (which is because Sarah and I took them there for the ICT lesson) we thought the Fan Milk would be pretty cool. If their mind’s were blown, like we’d hoped, they didn’t show it too much. Sarah and I have been trying to develop a delicate balance with the students of “teacher at the school, friend and confidant outside of school”. This camp would give us a chance to try to establish a bit of that relationship.
So we proceeded off to find the camp site at a very nice training facility where the students got their own bed and mattress and this crazy thing called a shower where the bucket bath comes from the ceiling!! Having that as their room probably blew their mind J. The camp lasted until Monday morning when it ended with a small program congratulating them on their achievements and charged them with continuing volunteerism in their communities. Volunteering is so foreign of a thought here. You could understand that everyone is confused why you would do something for free and try to get others to do it when you already have no money in the first place. On Saturday, we arranged to have supplies to do a service learning project in the Wa market. The organizers failed to think about the instance of it being market day in the regional capital before scheduling it, so there happened to be probably thousands of people there in a very cramped unsanitary place. Their job was to take a garbage (here they called it rubbish since there still the ancestral British influence) bag, a face mask and gloves with their partner and pick up litter. We also made signs to place at shops and to draw attention to the message we were trying to educate to shop owners and just anyone in the market. Its amazing the difference the difference a group of 60 kids can make in an hour or two at cleaning up a huge, dirty place when they work at it. It turned out to be the cleanest I’ve ever seen it! But of course we all know that we could come and clean the place every day for free, and tomorrow the place will be dirty again. The key was telling people about keeping it clean themselves. Sarah walked around with one sign on each side of her body like sandwich boards and eventually had a group of little kids marching behind her chanting “Keep Wa Clean!” Too bad none of those keeps know what the words mean. Anyway, it was definitely an experience!
The students heard messages from other Ghanaians about being a volunteer and also thinking about their future. We’re trying to convey the importance of their education, so we asked a guidance counselor to come speak which worked out very well. And eventually we got to see a side of our students that we wouldn’t have seen without having this kind of time with them. The last afternoon, our goal was to sit with our community group (Sarah, our students, and me) and discuss a project we wanted to conduct with our community and then paint a sign to take back with us to hang when we do it. Personally, I gained a great amount because I learned that at least 2 of the 4 students, without my prompting, think that our community needs to grow more trees and that chopping them down is a bad thing that needs to stop. So now I know that people think it’s a problem, they just may have no idea they can do something about it.
Overall, I think the students became a bit more empowered and we just hope they can take it home and keep it going. Its difficult to do that in a place where you can just tell Salvation Army you want to ring a bell for a couple hours or serve soup on Thanksgiving. They’ll have to be leaders and do a little organization. But I think that’s the challenge that these kids need to realize their potential.
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