Almost a Month!

So, time for another post! I’ll try and keep this one either shorter or better organized. I’m sorry that I write so much. I just love talking about my experiences so much!

The past two weeks have been crazy homework-wise.  We’ve had to read Nine Hills to Nambonkaha, The Blue Sweater, Sundiata, a number of chapters from The White Man’s Burden, and a number of chapters from our African Politics textbook. We’ve also had to write three journals, a reflection essay, and do a number of exercises in Twi. Not only have we had all this to do, we haven’t had a lot of time to do it either. We spent the weekend in Cape Coast, and had no free time to catch up. I’m finally caught up now, but I’m waiting for the next wave to hit!

Our trip to Cape Coast was very interesting. We started out by visiting Fort William, which was a former British slave fort. Right now, it’s an active archaeological site. We were toured around by one of the people in charge of the site, and we talked to some of the students working there. Most of the slave castles and forts were converted to other purposes after the slave trade. Fort William, for example, was a youth centre for a while, and then was converted to a prison. Now, the archaeologists (the leader of whom actually looked like Indiana Jones!) are working to restore it. It was fascinating! Next, we visited Elmina Castle, which was much larger. It was taken over by the Dutch in the 1600’s. I hadn’t realized that the Dutch had such a large involvement in the slave trade. One of the hardest parts of the tour was walking through the Dutch Reformed Church, which was located directly above some of the slave cells. It seemed so unimaginable to think that the people who go to basically the same church that I do had no problem selling people into slavery. It was also hard to go through the ‘door of no return’, but mostly to come back through it. Our guide told us that there was a ceremony where two bodies of slaves, one from the States and one from South America, were reinterred in Ghana after passing back through the ‘door of no return’, and that the door has now been renamed ‘the door of return’. It was such a strange and interesting experience to see slavery from the other side of the Atlantic.

After seeing the awful conditions that slaves were kept in (some of the cells still stank after over a hundred years), we went to our hotel. We stayed in beautiful rooms right on the beach. They were air-conditioned, we had hot water, there was a TV and a fridge, they were clean and quiet. It took us two minutes to walk down to the beach, which was well-kept and restful. We ate lobster, calamari, and cassava fish for dinner. It was amazing, and such a different situation than we had just been in. It was wonderful to relax and rest, but it felt sort of strange and out of place. I did enjoy the break though. We’ve been going and going and going for basically our whole time here! I can’t believe it’s been almost a month!

Today, we had a very interesting Peoples and Cultures lecture. It was on education in Ghana. Although Ghana is one of the most stable countries in Africa, it still has so many issues with education. The southern, more developed part of the country has relatively  good education. Private schools are much better than the government-provided free schools, but they’re expensive and very competitive to get into. In the rural north, the school system is failing. No one wants to go work in a place with no electricity (and therefore no TV or Internet) and no nightlife when they could stay in the south and still have a job. Teachers are also not paid very well, so no one really wants to become one. The ratio of teachers to students is supposed to be 1:35, but the actual ratio of trained teachers to enrolled students is 1:214. Even where there are trained teachers, the quality of instruction is not particularly high. The biggest problem that I’ve noticed is that reading is not taught with phonetics. Children are expected to memorize what a word looks like and figure out how to read all other words somehow. Reading is such a vital part of school and learning that when a student does not have strong reading skills, they will most likely struggle in school. As a result of this quality of instruction, the pass rates from primary school (grade 6) into junior high school is between 50% and 60%. This is what breaks my heart. The teachers who are teaching now are teaching the students the way they were taught as children. It is so difficult to change this cycle. Yet it must be done. Especially in the north, many parents are illiterate so not only are children growing up without books and other literature in the house, their parents don’t appreciate education as much as they could. One of the other problems with education in Ghana is something called ‘brain drain’. If a student is successful in their studies and becomes, say, a doctor, they try to get out of the country. For example, there is a city in Germany that has more Ghanaian doctors than there are Ghanaian doctors in all of Ghana. There are many opportunities in Ghana, and there is desperate need for professionals, but there is a far stronger draw from more developed, richer countries. I struggle with these issues because I feel like there is not very much I can do. The job of fixing these issues is so daunting, and I have no idea where to begin.

So far, my time in Ghana has been incredible. There is such a mixture of tradition and modernity. It’s very interesting to feel this tension, especially as an outsider who doesn’t really understand all that much. It’s a combination of malls and markets, plumbing that supplies non-potable water, Montessori schools and reading taught by memorization, washing things by hand and having conveniences like air-conditioning and Internet. It’s a very strange and intense life I’m living here, but I love it and all the challenges it brings.