Still Alive

Well Harmattan is over and the rains have started, though not enough for my taste. The amount of dust and dirt that covers my body has diminished, although not by much. The dirt and dust will never fully escape us over here. No one wants to see what a baby wipe looks like after wiping my face after a car ride. I’ll settle for the natural and sandy earth tone “makeup” on my face if it means I can stick my head out the window in hopes of lowering my body temperature. We had a wonderful storm last night. Fork lightening started in the distance in the early afternoon as the dark clouds rolled in. We can always tell when we’re due for a storm because the big tree in the center of my housing compound starts blowing and creaking – a signal to the rest of my family to start frantically running around, covering their cocoa and wood burning stoves. It’s quite a sight to see. As much as I love thunderstorms, I don’t love that the electricity usually goes out…and no one knows when it will return. The waiting game begins. The past week probably holds the Afere record for non-interrupted electricity. It would go off but come back immediately. Apparently it was too much a good thing, and the electricity finally went out for over 12 hours.  When you’re living in “Posh Corps,” 12 hours is a long longggg time – especially when your kindle decides to break on you and your phone and laptop are dead. After dealing with the ups and downs of the Electricity Company of Ghana, it is safe to say I am very familiar with the ceiling of my bedroom.

At the end of the month I will have officially been at site for one year. I can’t believe how fast it has come. I can still perfectly remember receiving my Peace Corps invitation back in November of 2010 and now I’m a year into my service. That’s cray. I would like to say that I have accomplished everything I had planned or my first year, but sadly that is not the case. Instead of doing projects I had envisioned, I ended up doing ones I have never thought of, but it all works out in the end. You learn to roll with the punches in Peace Corps. Flexibility, patience, and a sense of humuor are three things every Peace Corps Volunteer learns…say that to a PCV and you’re guaranteed and eye-roll.

I’ve worked on a lot of projects but I won’t bore you with the details of each and every one of them. I will, however, tell you what I am most proud of….my English tutouring group. I’ve said it many times before, and I will continue to say it…the education system in Ghana is very worrisome and discouraging. I have done a fair amount of English teaching and tutuoring, so it is rather upsetting to me to see these students struggling with simple English. At the end of the year, the Form Threes take their BECE (Basic Education Certification Exam – I believe that’s correct). One component of the BECE is English, so I am really hoping to help the students with their English skills before the term comes to an end. I have been meeting with about 15 students, sometimes less if some decide to skip out, once to twice a week. The English teacher at the JHS has loaned me the current English textbook and I have been using that to help the students. Each chapter in the book has a reading comprehension section, so our group focuses on that, as their overall reading comprehension is pretty appalling. The students take turn reading paragraphs from the story and at the end I have them answer questions about the reading. None of them can fully answer the questions without looking back at their books. Their ability to read isn’t much of a concern; they do it quite well, they just don’t understand what they are reading. Ideally, this will stop and they will be able to understand what they’ve read without cheating. I am just very glad that this group has managed to make it past several meetings and the future outlook is promising. The students seem really dedicated and I believe they truly want to improve their English. Some of them even showed up on time today. Either way, I am really proud of my students and it’s such joy to watch and teach them.

Well my birthday was last week – I am officially in my mid-twenties…uhhh…where has my life gone? Don’t worry mom, you don’t look nearly old enough to have a 24 year old! I spent my birthday with some PCV friend up in Kumasi at one of our sub-offices. It was a wonderful birthday. A close friend of mine celebrated her birthday a few days after mine, so we had a joint weekend party. We brought back the fanny pack!

Next week is our All Volunteer Conference in Eastern Region. Once a year, every volunteer in Ghana is required to attend this conference so we can discuss extremely important Peace Corps issues, like grant writing and project ideas. I’m looking forward to “All-Vol,” as I’ve heard it’s quite a good time. All the volunteers in my area, about seven of us, bought matching batik fabric and we have all had outfits made so that we can match on the first day of All-Vol. It will be rather cute.

That’s all for now. I’ll try and be better about updating this.

Take care