Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Marisi (Writing)

This photo of me with my APCD (Peace Corps supervisor) JoeBee was taken on Wednesday during his visit to my village.  JoeBee has worked for Peace Corps for 14 years but is retiring at the end of this month.  This trip to the Northern regions to see Education volunteers is his last one.  He will definitely be missed!  I’m always happy to have guests so I enjoyed his visit.  Plus he was very gracious and brought up my luggage in the vehicle thank goodness.  Travelling with bags all the way back to the Upper East would’ve been such a hassle.  Even without bags, my travel motto here is to expect to be miserable on travel days and then it can only improve from there!
We had our staff meeting for the term on Friday and it was pretty much business as usual.  I’ll be teaching ICT for the whole school and then also Math Form 2 again.  This means that much of my lesson planning is already done so that frees up my time to work on other stuff.  I’m also the health madam again and now officially the library madam.  Last year I helped with the ‘library’ but wasn’t really in charge of it.  Speaking of the library, in the afternoon on Friday after the staff meeting while Madam Diana and I were working on totaling marks for the promotion (yes we waited until the third week of school to promote our students- o Ghana) in the office tons of students were walking through to get to the store room where we have the library shelves.  Our poor library prefect Ruth was overwhelmed with people wanting to borrow dictionaries and story books.  I asked her if she’d made an announcement about folks getting books and she said no.  I’m not sure why all of a sudden students decided to go library crazy but I like it! And I hope it continues…
My children have returned to keep me company after school and on the weekends.   I have a basket full of toys in my living room so that’s the real draw.  While I was home, I picked up some small dry erase strips and tiny markers (at the dollar spot at Target- love that place) for them to practice their writing.  I still have coloring pages for them as well but want to get away from that a little bit because I end up just burning all the pages later since that’s what we do with our garbage.  The writing has been a big hit so far (Madam mi a yali a marisi- Madam I want to write) and hopefully it will help them in school.  I think I’m readjusting pretty well back to village life though it’s still difficult sometimes especially with challenges at school.  But I just keep reminding myself how quickly the time passes here and now I’m on the downhill slope of this journey.  Hope everyone back home is enjoying football season, the cooler September weather, and pumpkin spice lattes.  Drink one for me!

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