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It was a scene she’d never encountered in her corporate office in Philadelphia: a handful of kindergartners squirming in their chairs while the Ghanaian rains pelted the roof of the school and made a swimming hole out of the path to the bathroom.
“I’m trying to teach a math lesson and the heavens open,” said Marianna Allen, who volunteered to teach in Ghana for one month last May. “And one of the kids goes, ‘Teacher, I go wee wee.’ So I thought okay, that’s me, and they have to pee. I was looking outside at the puddles and made them take off their shoes because I didn’t want their one pair of shoes to get ruined.”
It wasn’t long before the entire class begged Marianna for a bathroom pass.
“I kept thinking that it only takes one of them to wet their pants,” Allen said. “It was my second day there and I didn’t want it on my conscience. But then their uniforms came up over their heads and they started dancing in the rain. That’s when I knew I had been had by a bunch of four and five year olds.”
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| Marianna and her class |
What Marianna would find out later is that, in Ghana, when the rains come, studies are often abandoned; the rain is the only reprieve from the intense heat.
“I’ll never forget that sight: the kids sitting at their desks, with their tiny little bodies and their little workbooks and pencils, in their underwear,” Marianna said.
In fact, Marianna wouldn’t forget much about the month she spent volunteer teaching in Abokobi, a village outside Accra, with the Global Volunteer Network (GVN).
“I’m missing the children now because I’m around these boring adults all the time,” Marianna said. “They brought out the best in me.”
GVN in a non-governmental organization based in New Zealand that connects volunteers with communities in need in seventeen countries. The organization decided to send volunteers to Ghana because of the overwhelming need for teachers in a country where the ratio is often two teachers for every 120-200 students. Many school buildings are dilapidated and school supplies and textbooks are sometimes non-existent or in short supply. Teachers are overworked and underpaid, and children often don’t attend schools, creating a generation of unskilled and uneducated adults.
During her trip, Marianna would experience some of the same confusion and disorganization that Ghanaian teachers deal with on a daily basis. Before arrival, she was under the impression that she would be teaching French to several classes, but the school had different plans for her—teaching kindergarten.
“I was looking at these little faces and I was like, how can I refuse this?” Marianna said. “So I ended up teaching kindergarten and had a blast. But wow, was it difficult. For the first few days I didn’t have much to work with, not even a chalkboard. It was all done by mouth.”
Ghana was the first country in Africa to gain its independence from colonialism in 1957. Seen as a model country for its ability to break the stranglehold of imperialism and thrive on its own, Ghana boasted a promising future. Over the last few decades, however, corrupt governments and devastating World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies have thwarted Ghana’s progress.
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| Smarten up for the parent/teacher meeting |
Between 1983 and 1999, Ghana became the pet project for the IMF and the World Bank, who provided the country with massive loans in return for following structural adjustment programs determined by the two international creditors. These programs, now widespread throughout the developing world, included liberalizing trade, privatizing industries, devaluing the national currency and reducing government spending on social programs such as health care and education. Currently, Ghana spends $75 million per year on all social programs, less than 20 percent of its loan repayments to these banks.
Unable to close the lid on Pandora’s Box, Ghana is struggling to repay its debts to the IMF and the World Bank under conditions that make it impossible for Ghanaians to live comfortably. Without money to fund education, the government imposed user-fees, charging children to attend school and for school supplies and uniforms. Parents often have to make a difficult choice between food, medicine and education.
Through her volunteer placement, Marianna was able to witness the social and economic effects first-hand.
“I didn’t really know what to expect, to be honest,” Marianna said. “But when you see the actual level of poverty that is there, it really strikes a cord.”
Due to the lack of school supplies and text-books, lesson plans are often impromptu, resourceful and incorporate music and dance.
“Their games are very interactive,” Marianna said. “All the songs are learned by ear. You just sing it line by line, over and over again. Because they don’t always have the materials to write, everything is learned through audio and memorization. It’s not really processing concepts at this point. It’s just the basic facts. Two plus two equals four because that’s how they’ve memorized it. I got them to count on their fingers to try to visualize two. It was so hard for them to pick up. They would just recite, ‘Two plus two equals four, three plus three equals six.’”
One of the biggest struggles for Marianna was finding an effective disciplinary method that differed from the corporal punishment used by the other teachers.
“Every teacher had a cane and they had no problem using them,” Marianna said. “Because I didn’t use one, I was the softie. They really did take full advantage of this at first. And then I started raising my voice in ways that I didn’t even know I could, and we started to get things done.”
Despite some of the cultural differences that she encountered, Marianna also discovered a few universal truths about children.
“If you show them love and you give good hugs and you’re just patient and kind and tolerant, they’re the most loving, happy beings,” Marianna said.
And while Marianna was busy teaching in Ghana, she was learning a few things herself.
“It’s so nice, with all the chaos that’s going on, to feel like something positive is happening,” Marianna said. “I can feel really down. I wake up in the morning and read The New York Times and I’m like, ‘Oh, what else is going wrong.’ But then I remember that tiny little village in Abokobi and I think, ‘It’s Okay. Not everyone hates everyone. How lovely.’”
Email: megan@volunteer.org.nz
Website: http://www.volunteer.org.nz
Copyright © 2005 Megan Tady
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