no good deed

The main purpose of Fulbright Exchanges is cultural exchange and understanding. This is supposed to be accomplished through a variety of means, including but not limited to teaching. I am supposed to observe other classes at my school and elsewhere as part of this endeavour. My school is supposed to arrange this for me. The first classroom I have visited other than my own was this morning, and was at a local JSS (junior secondary, like a middle school) that is not affiliated with my school at all.

My neighbor, James, is a student there. We had previously talked about my going to visit his Social Studies class to talk about the US, but then his teacher (an intern whose internship was over) left - yes, the school year is not over yet, and yes that means that these students no longer have a Social Studies teacher - so the scheduled visit did not take place. Then his English teacher invited me (through James) to visit their English class as they had read a poem by a Kenyan poet about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I accepted. I spent quite a lot of time re-reading sections of the US history textbook I brought with me, practicing the excerpts from King's I have a dream speech that appear in the book, flagging photos of the Lincoln Memorial in a photo book on DC I brought from home, gathering supplies that I would donate to the teacher to use in her classroom, and finding small prizes to give to students who could answer the questions I planned to pose to the class.

After morning assembly, James took me to his classroom; it was still about 10 minutes before class was due to start. In the absence of his English teacher, I hung up the map of the US (to point out where DC is, where marches and boycotts took place, etc.) and wrote some stuff on the board in preparation for my talk. While I was doing this, James said that the class's Form Master (the teacher who is in charge of that class for things like reporting problems - no working lights, monitoring teacher and student attendance, and the like) wanted to meet me so he could allow me to teach. I thought, "I am not teaching, I am simply a guest speaker," but went to meet him. I explained that I had been invited through James by his English teacher and why, and that I teach at Achimota Secondary School. We shook hands, all seemed well, and I went back and began my talk. I explained who I was and why I was there, and started to give context to the Civil Rights Movement in the US so that the students could have a better understanding of who Dr. King was and what he was fighting against and for.

I was partway into my lesson, giving out a prize to the student who remembered that the case that had established "separate but equal" was Plessy v. Ferguson (I had mentioned it already) when two other teachers showed up outside the door to the classroom. One told me that he is the assistant headmaster of the school (like assistant principal) and told me that I should have spoken to him before teaching the class, he may have said that I needed permission (he certainly implied it). I said that I had been invited by the English teacher, and that I believed she should have taken care of all of that (i.e. even if she failed to do so, it is her responsibility not mine). She had still not shown up, by the way. No one welcomed me to their school, or thanked me for visiting. I gave away all the prizes, but no supplies as the English teacher never arrived. I carted the newsprint and colored pencils and pencil sharpeners back home; they will go with me to Tanzania where I will be visiting two schools during my travels there the end of August.

I am currently sitting in the computer lab that the students here at Achimota use. At the end of last term, March, I gave to the lab mousepads that my home school had provided to my host school. They are nowhere in sight. I asked about them, indicating that I hoped to get a photo of them in use to share with my school back home. One of the ICT teachers said that one student had stolen one and refused to return it, so they were all put away. I have been assured that they will be out this afternoon so that I might snap a picture, but have no idea if they will remain in use or will be stored for "safe keeping" after that. I tried to explain that the purpose of my school donating these items was so they could be used but, like many conversations I have had here, I feel my sentiments were not internalized. I am disappointed, obviously, but am resigned to the fact that there is really only so much I can attempt, and I need to stop beating my head against a brick wall.

P.S. for fun photos from our trip to Kumasi or the Fulbright bowling night, see Leslie's blog at http://www.leslieinghana.blogspot.com/.

Trip to the North part 1

My parents visited in May and here are some photos from our adventures.

Our guide at the Bunso Arboretum demonstrating how strong these roots are. They belong to a plant that is symbiotically living among the branches of the tree whose trunk you can see on the right. It sends down roots to tap groundwater when it gets too large to survive on water captured from the air alone.




















This gentleman has been making beads from bauxite ("a rock consisting of aluminum oxides and hydroxides with various impurities: the principal ore of aluminum" per dictionary.com) most of his life; this is his studio in Abompe. The process is long and arduous.















Mining for gold near Abompe.















My mom learning to stamp adinkra symbols onto kente strips. The adinkra symbols all have meanings and these stamps are carved out of calabash (a large gourd) rind.















My dad with the caretaker of the Besease Shrine (it is an UNESCO World Heritage Site) wearing a skirt used by a fetish priest for ceremonies.




















I am feeding a mona monkey at the Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary.















The young man (on break from school) who showed us around Kintampo Falls. He looked like he was having fun.

My mom pretending to hitchhike after our vehicle broke down on the way to Tamale (pronounced ta-ma-lay).

A woman adding mud to the outside of her hut.

We visited a village near Tamale where we saw shea butter being made, I tried my hand at native pottery (not giving up my day job!), and the villagers drummed and danced for us. The girls dance, I was told, commemorates one performed in celebration of something (sorry, my memory fails me - but it had to do with a kind) and they bumped butts together in celebration. Watch the video!

This man and the little boy are also performing a celebratory dance. Enjoy!

More photos to come in a couple of days.

Molly, Indiana Jones, and me

I am more a fan of the 1st (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and 3rd (The Last Crusade) Indiana Jones movies than the 2nd (Temple of Doom) and 4th (Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). I do not intend to discuss the relative merits of them, just to say that several events that we experienced during the visit of my friend Molly resembled things in Temple of Doom.

First: We went to Kakum Park (see photo of canopy walk/rope bridges under the entry "In country" posted on 9 September) where we both mentioned that we were thinking of the scene in Temple of Doom where Indiana Jones cuts the rope bridge with a sword while Shorty and the whiny female lead are on it.

Then we took a wrong turn on our way back to the Visitor's Center, not so that we got lost, we just took a less used path to get there. On the way, however, we encountered this:


















when I almost stepped on him while wearing sandals. He was up against a sort of step in the path, hence why I did not see it until I was literally almost on top of it. Molly hurdled over him with a running start.

Exciting in a different way was our batik lesson. There is a great organization here called Women in Progress (http://www.womeninprogress.org/) that offers, among other things, cultural workshops; you can learn drumming and dancing, cooking, batiking, or work with local fishermen. They are affiliated with a cooperative/shop known as Global Mama's (http://www.globalmamas.org/). From the Global Mama's shop in Cape Coast, we went to Eli and Emma's batik studio. Molly and I selected stamps made from foam, the two women pictured below helped us with our part of the process which was to dip the stamp into the melted wax and apply it to the fabric.















Once we had done our small part (the stamping), the women dyed the fabric per our request. It was neat to watch the color develop - my cloth started out looking as if it would be a dark purple or black, but as it dripped and started to dry the color changed to a grey and finally to the sunny yellow I wanted.














After the color developed, the cloth was mixed in a pot of boiling water to remove the wax. It is dipped in and out of the pot with a long stick, the melted wax is skimmed off the top, and finally the cloth is removed, wrung out, and hung to dry. It was a really neat experience, and we both got to take a piece of Ghanaian culture with us that we had a hand in creating.

Scenes from Molly's visit: bananas to market in Accra.
















The mango tree outside my house.

Ketchup and Magazines

During class on Thursday a student came in to say that the Class Prefect was to go to the office of one of the Assistant Headmistresses. He, and several other students, returned bearing school magazines and about 100 individual packets of Heinz Ketchup wrapped in groups of ten in plastic baggies. I was reading "Holes" to the class, so when we finished the chapter we were working on, I asked about the ketchup. It was to be distributed to the students. It expires next month (this the Class Prefect informed his classmates after examining them). I have no idea where it came from, why it was distributed in class rather than the dining hall (not just the issue of appropriate place for ketchup, but why interrupt my class time to distribute KETCHUP?!), and what the students were to do with it.

I was recently talking to a woman who has children in a private school elsewhere in Ghana who told me about a representative from a local beverage company who visited her daughter's class to distribute drink boxes (i.e. not fruit juice, but water and sugar) that this sales rep told the students cures malaria and other diseases! Not surprisingly, the daughter returned home asking her mother to buy this product, and cited its (fictional) curative powers. Maybe the ketchup is Heinz's way of imprinting that product onto the minds of young Ghanaians, or maybe I am being influenced by the other situation. However the ketchup distribution came to be, it remains a mystery to me.

The other item distributed was the school's magazine "The Achimotan." It features photos and summaries of the houses (dorms) on campus, pictures of all the Prefects (most are gone as they were Form 3s), and photos from Founder's Day (I will be posting my own photos soon). I was interviewed for the magazine, I guess for the June 2010 edition, since the results of the interview did not appear in this edition. Hopefully someone will send me a copy.

Since I am on the subject of food again, I thought I would provide some more interesting finds.

This is pronounced "sheeto" and is served with numerous foods here, including rice, as well as the samosas and spring rolls on campus. I photographed this in Shoprite, a South African grocery store outlet at the mall. Yesterday, I also saw and photographed a container of pistachios for 35 Ghana cedis (about $30). It was maybe 2 pounds of pistachios. Ground nuts (peanuts) are the nut of choice here, and much more affordable.

For those who live near me: Maryland cookies! I like these (chocolate chip with hazelnut) over the chocolate with chocolate chip ones.

Very descriptive and persuasive naming. These were purchased at Game also at the mall, Game is the local equivalent of Target.

Also found at Shoprite, and I have seen them being hawked on the roadside; I could not resist taking this picture. In case you cannot tell, it is a box of tissues, I do not believe them to be made from hemp.

Punishments

Punishments here are different than at home. Caning in schools exists here (corporal punishment). I decided to write about this today because we just began our unit in Social Studies on "Responsible Parenting." We spent some time in each of my Social Studies classes today talking about traits parents should have.

The students contributed such things as honest, fair, faithful, responsible, loving, disciplined, etc. In both classes, disciplined was mentioned and each time I asked for a clarification: did the student mean that the parent is disciplined or that they discipline their children? Both times, the student told me they meant the parents were disciplined in their lives.

The students were given 10 minutes to come up with a scenario and script for a skit that demonstrated one of the traits in our list on the board, and the class should be able to figure out what trait they were portraying. My first class went swimmingly. My second Social Studies class, however, was a little different. One group chose "disciplined" and it involved two young men caught smoking (tobacco or otherwise was unclear). The "parents" responded by slapping each son across the face (I could hear the sound from across the room), to which the class laughed. I should have stopped it there, but was quite unbelieving of what was happening. Then the parents hit the children with a ruler, and then a belt. I am unsure how hard these other strikes were, as they were much less audible (the belt was striking the belt of the child, so that created noise of its own). The class was roaring with laughter.

I continue to believe that corporal punishment is not a deterrent to bad behavior and in fact can make people more violent.

When students act in a disruptive way in class, I throw them out - not literally - they are told the leave the classroom. They stand outside and can hear the lesson but cannot participate.

Last term, I had an extra day with one of my Government classes, and in order to not get too far ahead of the other class curriculum-wise, I decided we would do some team-building group activities. I took the students out to the lawn in front of the administration building and had the students do human knots. We had been out there only a little while when someone from the Headmistress's office came out and told me that we could not be outside because the weather was bad (in fact it was a sunny day, no chance of rain, but not too sunny as to be hazardous, and since the classroom windows and door are the only source of ventilation they must be kept open all the time, so if it is poor air quality he was referring to it hardly makes a difference whether we were inside or not). Anyway, later that day I saw three boys kneeling in the sun on the concrete in front of the administration building, as punishment. I don't get it.

The students are made to kneel if they are late for prep, talk in class, etc. However, I do not find it a deterrent to repetitive behavior.

I have written before about punishing students for habitual tardiness by having they spend time alphabetizing books in the library. Last week, there was a group of girls near my house who were weeding. I asked what had happened. The response: they had not given their math teacher a desk to sit at. Yes, that's right - most teachers here sit to teach. And they had committed the apparently unpardonable sin of not having a desk ready for her/him when she/he arrived in class. Frankly, I am appalled - both by the sitting to teach and the punishment which is out of line with the infraction.

Last term, I saw several of my students trying to break up a termite mound with cutlasses (the machete like tools used for cutting weeds). They had been talking in class, and this was their punishment. FYI - the clay that termite mounds are made out of is so hard it is used for molds to fire beads in kilns, and they were to destroy the entire 5 foot tall structure in 2-3 hours.

I give penny-ante punishments, and I am okay with that.