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!
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