Feok

Right before Christmas, I attended the Feok festival (Buli for time of plenty) in our district capital Sandema. It is the annual thanksgiving celebration of the harvest for the Builsa people. In addition to giving thanks for the abundance, it also commemorates the defeat of Babatu and other slave raiders in the 18th century with a war dance. The men wear traditional smocks, helmets with horns, and carry weapons including bows while dancing to the drumming. The women run alongside the men fanning them and making the ulily noise- a high pitched squeal I can't even begin to describe. Of course I took a ton of photos (a bunch are on facebook)and videos so wanted to start sharing one now and more later with additional details about the festival.

Burinya

Merry Christmas (Burinya in Buli) from Madam Carey and some of her students!

Girls Just Wanna have Fun!

This past week my students have been writing (taking) their exams including mine for ICT. Usually class tests are written on the blackboard but end of term exams are printed on paper but we found out too late this term that the district (think county office back home) wouldn’t be setting (creating) the questions. So we had to write our questions on the blackboard. My exams had three parts: practical, theory (open-ended questions), and objective (multiple choice). The practical for ICT includes a picture that the students are supposed to label. For example Form 1 named the various parts of the computer, form 2 the graphical user interface (desktop, icons, etc.), and form 3 a browser window. I then of course had almost 200 papers to mark (grade). At times marking papers is encouraging such as when one of my form 1 students made a perfect 100. Then sometimes it’s humorous especially because of spelling mistakes such as ouputer perhaps formed as a combination output and computer, handle divice instead of handheld device, and bragging instead of dragging the mouse. But then it can also be quite disheartening and downright depressing because of excessive spelling and grammar errors, dismally low scores, and zeros on the objective portion. As my fellow Volunteer Adam texted a group of us this week ‘I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when a student gets below what statistical guessing should score.’ Although our school won’t vacate until sometime this week I already feel as though I’m finished and can celebrate making it through my first term as a teacher here.

I keep forgetting to post about my student roommate maybe perhaps somewhat consciously because I wanted to see how the housing situation was going before writing about it. When I came to visit my site way back in July the headmaster mentioned I could decide to have a student come stay with me if I like since I have an extra bedroom and so I’d have company. I dismissed the thought but once I moved here one of the form 3 students Felicity asked me if she could come stay so she could use the lights to study at night since her house is far from the school. At the time everything was very overwhelming so after getting advice from fellow Volunteers and my supervisor I told her I would think about it again in November once I was more settled in. Long story short, after much thought I decided to have her come stay. It’s a win-win situation since it helps her be able to study more and hopefully do well on the big exam in April to proceed to senior high school. She’s 15, is quiet in class and with me but not with her friends of course, and wants to be a teacher in the future. For me it’s nice to have the company, help around the house, and maybe helps me fit in a bit more since people don’t really live alone. Two of Felicity’s friends and fellow form 3 students also spend a lot of time at my house. Gifty likes cooking, going to church, and is the health prefect at the school. Last week she showed me how to make cosi which is a local fried treat made with bean dough and served with pepe (red pepper). Diana has dimples like her sisters Joyce and Rachel who I’ve posted about previously, has a father who speaks impressively good English even though he never attended school , and wants me to become ‘obolo’ (large) before I go back home. I think I’ve gained 2 kgs since the girls started cooking for me so I am on the way. This week she wore a wig that belongs to her mother to the house and all the girls took turns trying it on. Including me…so, for your entertainment, a photo.

Last week on the way back from the Fumbisi market there was another white lady who boarded the same lorry I was on and I was so shocked that I called her ‘felika’ (white person in Buli). Even though this term isn’t meant offensively, sometimes I take offense to it especially if I think the person knows my name. So you can imagine how embarrassed I was for letting that slip out. We ended sitting next to each other and had a nice chat about life in the Builsa district. She’s from Europe and is in Sandema for 2 months working at a children’s home. When I returned home I told the girls that I saw another ‘felika’ and so there were ‘felisa’ (plural version of felika) on the lorry and they thought that was pretty funny. She and a friend went to the market and were returning with watermelons, which are in season right now. Speaking of watermelon, Friday night I was sitting on my front porch eating some and spitting out the seeds and it dawned on me how bizarre this activity is for December back home. I really cannot believe it’s a week away from Christmas! But my paper countdown chain and the calendar do not lie…

Stories to Tell

My friend Chris has been working on molding bricks with the help of some of the students recently since he’s planning to build his own small house instead of so he doesn’t have to stay in the teacher’s quarters any more. Last week we walked out to the well near where they’re doing the work to find out if there was water in it he could use. When we walked up there was a very old woman there who was very appreciative and talkative when we greeted her. She told him (and then he translated for me) that she was the only person to survive an automobile accident that killed nine other people back in the day. To which I exclaimed ‘She’s a miracle!’ It was clear she had more stories to tell and I hope we will go back to her house one day to hear more. I was feeling rather sorry for her since she seemed kind of lonely and was fetching her own water despite her advanced age. I wanted to know why someone wasn’t taking care of her and commented so to Chris as we were walking away. He told me that she lives alone and does have family who come by to bring her food stuff and check in- and mused that perhaps that fact had lengthened her life. After all, she only has herself to take care instead of being bothered by other people. It was an interesting perspective and made me think once again (happens often here) about the influence on culture on the lens in which we see the world. While we were walking away, she had her arms raised praising God for having seen us. I was delighted to see and be able to greet the woman from the well again when I went to church Sunday. For a host of rather uninteresting reasons, It was my first time going since I’ve been living in village this past Sunday and I attended the Catholic one which is led by woman from the nearby village Wiega. Thankfully parts of it were in English and it only lasted two hours.

Training was so busy and my internet was less than regular so I have stored up some stories to tell. When I first arrived in Ghana and someone would give me their number they’d ask me to ‘flash’ them! My gut reaction was always to respond ‘No, you creeper’ but I quickly learned this meant for me to call them without them answering. Besides used in exchanging phone numbers, this is a common practice here if you’re running low on credit since you only pay for outgoing not incoming calls. I told this story to some of the teachers at my school and they thought it was pretty fun and it sparked a whole explanation about cell phone plans and service providers in the States.

Another story is from home stay. After washing my clothes I’m sure with the help of a host sister or maybe even nephew, my clothes would often be on the line but invariably the rain would come since it was rainy season. So my family would move my clothes inside the living room to finish drying. One day when my dry clothes were returned to me I discovered a pair of pants was missing. In British English trousers are what we Americans call pants and pants are what we call underwear. After missing my pants, I proceeded to tell my host brother I was missing a pair of pants (read: he heard panties) to which he asked what they looked like. ‘Black with brown stripes’ was my reply. Had I know what was being discussed and then searched for at the time I might have been mortified. When the search for the missing pants was fruitless, one of my sister’s Cynthia offered to buy me a new pair. I was moved by her generosity but assured her that eventually they’d turn up. The next day she gave me a new pair black of black and white panties- at which point it finally dawned on me I’d been saying pants when I meant trousers. I explained the same to them and my black trousers with brown stripes were promptly found. At least I got a new pair of undies and a story to tell out of my silly and slightly embarrassing mistake.

Six Months

Today marks the six month anniversary of my arrival in Ghana. I cannot believe it. Also I have now lived in my village for as long as I stayed with my home stay family in the Eastern region. It's bittersweet though because right around Christmas I will reach the mark of the longest I've ever been away from home. When I did study abroad in Thailand, I was gone for six and a half months. I'm sure a rather intense bout of homesickness is in my near future.

As promised, check out the photo of the Religious & Moral Education teacher Madam Diana, her son Nathan, and me sporting our red ribbons. I taught my last lesson for the term today and it was a health lesson on HIV/AIDS with my form 2 students. They could answer many of my questions because it's not an unheard of topic for them but they had so many questions too that it reminds that their is plenty of education still to be done. I will revisit it with them next term when we discuss the internet and computer viruses. The exam schedule for next week has been set and the students will 'write' my ICT exam on Tuesday afternoon. I'm happy about this fact since this means I have plenty of time to mark the papers and then I will be free (as is said here quite often) sooner.

Hazards of Harmattan

Flexibility. It’s a trait I hope and probably will possess more of by the end of my service here. On Thursday morning I found out that teams from a nearby village would be coming to play football and volleyball matches with our students at the same time that the nurses had planned to come to the school to talk about CSM and HIV/AIDS. I’d also planned to teach a lesson on HIV/AIDS to my form 2 students. I wasn’t a very happy camper but at least most of the other teachers were also out of the loop. Sometimes I just feel out of the loop since I am still learning the language and often times the teachers communicate with each other in Buli. Of course once I calmed down, rescheduled with the nurses, and got over the change of plans, I enjoyed watching the matches and snapping photos of the students playing plus of the cutest AIDS awareness advocate in Gbedema (photo coming soon). I distinctly remember writing in my application essay about one of the biggest challenges I expected to deal with was in being flexible. Core Expectation #3 for Peace Corps Volunteer reads ‘Serve where the Peace Corps asks you to go, under conditions of hardship, if necessary, and with the flexibility needed for effective service.’ It is not easy but I did anticipate it would be an enormous hurdle for me personally. Yesterday I became frustrated at school again because I didn’t end up teaching at all. I couldn’t help my form 1 students revise for their upcoming exam (this week is ‘Revision Week’) since they were sent to a community member’s farm to doing work. Then another teacher entered the form 3 class during my assigned period so I didn’t get to teach them either. This week is ‘Revision Week’ and I want to help my students prepare for their upcoming exam but it seems that they are expected to study on their own mostly.

As previously mentioned, Friday was a school holiday for Farmer’s Day which I ‘celebrated’ by going for a bike ride, eating pumpkin pancakes, and doing a craft. I made a Christmas countdown paper chain with the help of some of the kids and students. It’s my sole Christmas decoration- I think I’ll have the least commercialized Christmas ever here. About that bike ride…. First let me explain harmattan. I forgot to mention last week that around Tuesday I started feeling a cold coming on, probably in part because of traveling from the humid south of Ghana because to the dry north. Right now the season is changing from rainy to dry and it is also harmattan which means that winds blow from the Sahara so it’s dusty and hazy. The best part is that at night the temperature drops at night and can be quite chilly (for example I recorded a low of 70 degrees last week on the thermometer on my clock) in the mornings. But just like back home people tend to get coughs and colds. Here they call it ‘carrtah’ which I think is the Twi word for a cold. It took me a while to figure out what people were talking about when they said they had ‘carrtah small.’ Now I understand because I was fighting it last week. Back to the bike ride, I set off with a fellow teacher not quite as early as we’d planned and the ride to the nearby village that was our destination only took 35 minutes or so and was quite enjoyable. Then we headed back- against the wind. I didn’t even dawn on me until we were struggling against the wind uphill how easy we’d had it on the way. Especially because of my cold I got out of breath pretty easily. At one point my muscles were hurting so much that I got off and walked while pushing the bike. It was a rough ride and took about 1 hour and 10 minutes to get back- so twice as long! Needless to say, I spent the rest of the holiday relaxing by reading, watching Megamind, and falling asleep early despite the last loud (speakers were used) revival service that was held in my ‘backyard’ (aka the park) three nights last week.

Here’s another funny story for the week. On Saturday I went outside to dispose of my orange peels like I always do into the ‘bush’ next to the neem tree in front of my house. Well this time when I threw them I heard something rustling in the brush and discovered it was a snake! My first snake encounter and I was surprisingly calm. In fact I didn’t even scream or really run away. I saw that it was black skinny guy as it was slithering away and though I don’t know if it was venomous or not my rule of thumb here it to assume all snakes are poisonous and avoid them. It was a good reminder to be on the lookout for such critters. My nephew Will likes to ask about the animals I see here so I was happy to report the exciting news to him that I saw a snake since to date my other reports were just about the farm animals: donkeys, chickens, goats, pigs and guinea fowl. A couple of days ago I was out on my evening walk to the dam and there was a whole crowd of people. Usually there are a few around often times bathing or washing dishes in the water. They were catching fish (look like catfish to me) and so of course tried to sell me some. I was wary plus didn’t have any money on me but one of the kids decided to bring a fish to me and try to hand it to me. To which I squealed…. yes I am more afraid of a fish than a snake apparently!