Excerpt From One Volunteers Journal
Yesterday, I took Constant*, a visiting boy, to the eye clinic and read him a collection of Harold and the Purple Crayon stories at least 4 times, and prodded him about letters, words, and maps of Ghana, anything to pass the hours or waiting. Later, M. and I went to market and bought some fabric for dresses, and more pineapple which is fantastic. I finally had Banku for dinner, though the matron made it extra mild for the new auntis. It really wasn’t bad. S. describes it as a sourdough raw bread dough taste, though the texture makes it clear there is cornmeal involved. Regardless, my best accomplishment (in my book), was taking Israel to the internet café. The proprietor kept grinning at seeing a little boy learning to use the computer. He gave me a discount “for bringing the boy.” We looked up pictures of Stephen Appiah, his favorite football player of Ghana’s Black Stars, and found a few images of the Kpando Lions. Charmingly, when we lost our connection he was just as excited about word processing. We learned to type the names of everyone in the home.
Names seem to be the best teaching tool. I can get Kafui to remember letters that he is forgetting by naming people whose name begins with the same letter. Speaking of which, today, there was much excitement because he passed ALL his final exams with HUGE improvements. We are discussing buying him a hard-boiled egg (considered a special treat) and maybe some Fan Milk (frozen milk popsicle) as a special reward. Love these kids, so much. Earlier little Emma (3yrs, pr. EE-ma) carefully directed me to which Band-Aid I must put on his booboo, saying no to all until I found the foam sports strips. I might not have indulged him, but it was clear he was right that the other types came off too quickly. That quiet insistence, as well as his having the biggest eyes I’ve ever seen, seems to accomplish a lot for him.
Today has been extremely domestic. I started writing this earlier, but got interrupted by counting activities. One of the girls who had zero education and was severely ill and malnourished before she came to the Home is still learning to copy numbers and letters along dotted lines, but she is so incredibly sweet and eager to learn, it’s amazing. Junior, one of the littler boys, after he got bored with copying the alphabet from a book all on his own, drew me a picture of a gingerbread man and wrote my name on it, because it was for me, clearly. I made him sign it too. Juliet, whose eyesight is extremely poor due to an illness as a baby, was happily writing out lines and lines of numbers and letters even though she can barely see them and must hold her face within 3 inches of the page. Two of the older boys were sentenced by the patriarch to cut the grass around the home for squabbling at school. Mal and I wrote down all the chores they are supposed to do every morning so that we can police them a bit more. We made three of the boys who had not been sweeping the boys room do it as a group today, though they have not quite finished all the corners. M, E, and I also talked to the carpenter about our plans for cubbies to organize the children’s things and some shelves to store extra supplies on so we can all easily see what we have and what is most needed.
I find myself with more projects than time sometimes, and other times it is quite quiet. I have to track down one of the older girls to work on advanced reading and find a time to help one of the older boys work on writing stories, as well as continuing reading and writing lessons with Kafui. He did quite well on his English exam, so the goal now is to try to get him to use what he knows. He shuts down very easily when asked a question or put on the spot in anyway, which makes it hard to make progress.
I’m looking forward to the football tournament to promote HIV prevention awareness on Sunday, and to plotting how to distribute HIV prevention information and offer testing to women as the educational component to a huge bra giveaway. (Which reminds me- we should work on a pamphlet, maybe a flyer…) Bras are considered an extreme luxury here, and free, fancy US bras are fantastically popular with the local women. Some other volunteers collected bra donations before they came and amassed hundreds. They had to leave early so M and I are hoping to carry on the program for them, giving bras as the inducement and education as the point. I really hope we can organize it well. Getting anything organized here, if you have to clear it with some authority or another, is like pushing molasses uphill. We are cancelling our trip to the city since it wasn’t working out to put us there on days M. can do bureaucratic filming permission stuff, and we don’t want to miss the football game education sessions. I also really did not want to spend 4 days away from the kids when we have all these small-small projects going.
HardtHaven, Ghana