Village School

Yesterday was my first day at the village. Morris and I took a tro tros and then a shared taxi to get near the village. (It was a regular sized taxi with an extra bench seat instead of trunk space. There were 10 people in the taxi including the driver.) When we got out of the taxi we walked about 20 minutes down a dirt road that cut through thick brush that in some places was taller than I am. The village is comprised of small houses that are loosely constructed out of sticks, wood planks, stone, and sometimes tin roofs. There is no light and no water. Shirts and shoes are not necessities but amenities and thus are always optional. As I entered the village, shouts of "obruni" were intermixed with calls of "Saaaamiii," the much beloved volunteer that came before me.

The road to the village

Aboansan

Laundry

Dishes

I was first taken to meet the school teacher. Her name is Mary, and the children call her "Madame." She is 22 or 23-years-old and grew up in the village. Mary is now the government contact person for a committee health program sponsored by the UN Children's Funds and implemented by Ghana's Ministry of Public Health. Ghana's policy for education requires the government to pay for 80% of a person's schooling through the 9th grade, at which point you are on your own. She finished junior high in Accra three years ago and now works 2 jobs in order to save money to continue her education. She also has a badass purple weave. 

Mary Korang

When I arrived, Mary welcomed me to the village, and, as is custom, took me to meet the village chief. The village chief looks like he is about 80-years-old, looks like Ghandi, and can't hear very well. This came as a relief for me as I was very nervous about unintentionally flouting the laws of cultural etiquette that govern greeting chiefs and elders. I the chief is more a symbolic figure, as he spends most of his days sitting in the shade. His son is set to take over when he passes. When I met the chief's son, he made a joke about me being his wife, so if I played my cards right one day I could be the village chieftess. Ha! It's probably not as cool as it sounds though. It probably involves cooking his food and bearing and caring for his children, and I'm just not cut out for hut-wifery.

The children who I met in the village were following me around everywhere, and by this point they had gotten comfortable enough to hold my hand, try to learn my name, and try to get my whiteness to rub off on them. I mean this literally. They would rub my arm then rub their faces. They would sneak up and rub my foot and then run over to rub it on the babies they were carrying. I tried to demonstrate the inutility of these attempts by rubbing the arm of one particularly precoscious little girl named Linda, and then rubbing my arm, pointing to the place on my arm that I'd just rubbed, saying "obruni," and shrugging to no avail. So I gave up... They're kids--what can you do?

Linda

The kids are wonderful--beautiful, smart, endearing--which makes it all the more difficult to see them attending school in a dilapidated building using chalkboards with holes in them so big that they could climb through. It is not at all conducive to learning because it is located in the center of the village and the parents often stand around the wall to watch and often call out to their children while they are in school. Most of the children are dressed in rags: a 3-yr-old wearing pants with long rips in the front and back of her pants, a boy in a Lion King shirt with a tear from armpit til about 3 inches from the bottom, one boy wearing mismatching girls' pajamas--plaid flannel pants and a Frosty the Snowman flannel dress. 

The school children

Perpetual

School kids

The Village School

The mothers watching over the walls

Mary writing a lesson for one of her classes on the board

A little boy watching the older class through the chalkboard

The girls enrolled in the preschool face substantial challenges that their male counterparts do not. As early as six they play a substantial role in childcare, which means that they are restricted to whatever education they can access that's close enough to allow them to participate in these childcare responsibilities. There are no expectation of shared childcare responsibilities for their male counterparts, and the boys are thus free to attend school further away from their village home. Once girls reach age 12 (give or take) they are at risk for teenage pregnancy, which would force them to forgo all hopes of education and further personal development and devote their life to their child-to-be. I noticed that many of them also have marks on their faces and learned to my horror that these are marks carved into their faces in order to identify them by tribe. Some have just one mark or two but one girl had over a dozen carved at various angles all over her face. I've been told that this is mostly practiced by tribes in northern Ghana and among people of Islamic backgrounds. It was a way for men to tell which tribe a woman came from when tribal warfare broke out. Most importantly, is a dying practice as tribal leaders and patriarchs that it is time to move beyond a time when women should be marked like property in order to determine her owner when men war over land and water. 

Young children with their sisters at school

The girl holding the child is four-years-old

Even Mary sometimes has to take care of a baby at school

Abject poverty not only means that the children are without proper facilities, electricity, water, etc., it also means that they are hungry at school. Ever tried learning when you're weak with hunger? Not possible. The new school has plans for a kitchen to feed the kids a meal during the day if there is funding available. When kids (and adults) have health problems, there is no money for health care.One little boy living in the village in particular breaks my heart. He is deaf and not even 2-years-old. The other children couldn't even tell me his name and he wanders around the village in his little orange dinosaur t-shirt and cries from time to time. He doesn't trust people. The other kids were delighted to come and sit on my lap, he was plopped there but wanted nothing to do with it and wouldn't come near me afterward. This was the cause of a great tragedy for the village community less than a week ago. A little boy named Emmanuel fell out of a tree and maybe broke his nose; no one knows for sure. They took him to the hospital. He needed a blood transfusion but that costs the rough equivalent of $250-$300, more than his family makes in two years. Emmanuel died two days later. He was 10-years-old. 

Emmanuel

The knee-jerk reaction from some here was to remove his picture from the yearbook as it might be a trigger but when Sami suggested that PCO dedicate the yearbook to him it got everyone thinking: we are teaching about collaboration, trauma, coalition building, etc. and this event, however tragic, could serve as an impetus to bring the community together. Radical idea for community empowerment: what if the village, when in crisis, rounded up all the money it could and then sought outside help from PCO or individual donors with the understanding that the parents and, in the most recent case, Emmanuel himself paid the community back in due time. This would/will lead to a system in which the villagers are more invested in the well-being of others and have a deeper sense of community. If it saved the life of one child then it would foster an environment in which an entire generation of the peers of that child would grow up with a strong sense of community and an understanding of the tangible effects of the power of working together.

Next time I post I will talk about my plans for peace cell education to this affect. I will be teaching about power and violence, different forms of violence, domestic violence, marital rape, models of sexual consent (thank you Hannah Arendt, Jaclyn Friedman, and Jessica Valenti among countless others) and if there's time--safe sex. For now I need to extend another thank you to my donors who enabled me to lay down the money for the foundation of the school and uniforms for the school children today. All raw materials for these two projects will be purchased locally. The children's uniforms will be sewed by single mothers at the Buduburam camp in order to provide them with work opportunities to support their children.

Tomorrow's agenda: Go with PCO staff to Accra to purchase ESL and other books, recreational and other school equipment. Further develop Peace Cell teaching plans.

Tonight's agenda: Good rest.

The Aboansan Village School

Rebecca with her pencil

The whole school together