It's been a full week since we landed in Ghana and overall it hasn't been as jarring as I expected. I'm not sure whether it's because I'm older and wiser (ha!) or whether the distance between countries like Ghana and Canada is diminishing. Whatever the reason, the week has gone smoothly and we've found something approaching a routine.
We leave every morning around 8:15 for the school where we're volunteering (Happy Kids -- don't know whether it's the power of suggestion or not, but with one notable exception (a little boy who I've never seen do anything but cry) the kids at the school are very happy, and always happy to see us!). We spend about 3 hours there working with the kindergarten kids (KG, as it's called here). Rather than take over and teach a class, we've set up literacy circles and we work with groups of 3 or 4 students and help them work on the skills they need to move to the next level (for instance, some are still at letter recognition and acquiring English vocabulary (they all speak Ewe as their first language) whereas others are emerging readers and still others are already reading). We just put it into practice Friday and it seemed to work pretty well. The many conversations I've had with WHS's ELD teachers over the years have certainly helped us structure the activities for the kids.
We're back at homebase for lunch and then during the first week the afternoons were generally pre-planned for us (I think Alice has posted about some of those activities). Friday afternoon was the first afternoon that there wasn't anything specific for us to do. Trying not to lose sight of the fact that this is a holiday, we opted to take it easy and hang around the house (and the fans) while others went into town (Mondays and Fridays are market days, so there is a little more variety in what you can purchase on those days.
The heat has probably been the most difficult to adjust to. It feels like those two or three weeks of Ottawa summer where the temperature reaches the mid-30s and the humidity is crazy. To my winter-synched body it feels relentless. There is some reprieve early in the morning and in the late evening, but there is a whole lot of sweating going on in between. Last night the power went out (not an uncommon occurance) but there was no generator as back up so we were without our precious fans. It was uncomfortable and sticky and at about 2 a.m. I wasn't sure whether we were all going to make it through (Sylvie was particularly uncomfortable -- or at least she was more vocal about voicing her discomfort) but we did, though we might all need a nap this afternoon.
This morning we went down to the tro-tro station (tro-tros are the vans that people pile into in order to get from town to town -- sort of a half-way point between a taxi and a bus) and had a breakfast sandwhich and Milo. There is a woman from California -- Brittany -- working at Happy Kids and this is favourite Saturday morning routine and invited us to join her. We sat at a rough-hewn table on stools while they fried up the egg (with cabbage and peppers -- apparantly vegetables are scarce at other stalls, which is why Brittany prefers this particular stand) and add the bread (huge slices of white fluffy bread) and toast/fry it all together in the frying pan). By about 8:30 or 9:00 the sun is high enough in the sky so that there is no more shade and the first round of tros have left for there destinations (Ho, Accra, etc). The husband and wife pack up the stand and store it away in a locked wooden storage container, making way for someone new to come and set up to sell something else later in the day. It was the closest thing that we'll get to a greasy spoon breakfast and it was perfect.
So much more that I want to talk about (Kente cloth weavers, Fan Ice, the elusive seach for a really cold pop, Sylvie's new friends next door and her reading buddies at school) but I will have to leave it there and come back to those topics later (we're fortunate to be using one of the other volunteer's lap tops while she is away this weekend visiting Lake Volta, so I might try to squeeze out another entry this evening).
We're are enjoying seeing all the pictures of winter, but it's so far from our experience right now that it's almost impossible to make sense of it (is that what they call cognitive dissonance?).
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