First Day of School, and The MagicBus

Monday, 30 July
First Day of School

I think we all were feeling a little anxious as we walked single file along the dusty road for about a mile until we reached the school. The children from five surrounding villages are transported each day in a battered tro-tro turned into a blue school bus with “Heritage Academy” emblazoned on its sides. (One reader of my blog asked what a a tro-tro is. According to travel writer Philip Briggs, “tro-tros cover the length and breadth of Ghana’s roads”; they are usually customized minibuses “with densely packed seating, a pervasive aura of sweat, and no view”. When you travel between small towns, they are the vehicle of choice, and we had many a thrilling ride on tro-tros during our stay in Ghana.
The children were packed in so tightly that the bus seemed to wobble with the weight. We later began to think of it as The Magic School Bus. A Mercedes “as luxurious as can possibly be” as Katie describes it, the vehicle had 313,439 km on it when Kwesi bought it in 2004, and the odometer hasn’t changed, so who knows how many miles it has traveled? It routinely breaks down and gets overnight repair by Alaska, the bus driver, whom Kwesi says is the most important person at Heritage Academy. He holds that position because if the bus doesn’t run, the children can’t come to school, and then the teachers have nothing to do.

On this first day of summer school, all of the children lined up in forms, and Kwesi called the names one by one, then sent the classes off with their appointed teachers. Rosie and I will be teaching three classes each morning: two who are at a level equivalent to 7th grade and one 8th grade.

We spent the morning introducing ourselves and learned about the children. Then we explained the purpose of our class, Creative Writing. Creativity is a foreign idea to these children. They are taught in the British style of education: the teacher lectures, the students take notes and then, in their testing, they regurgitate what they have learned. Nearly all of the information communicated is factual; there is no room for expressing one’s own opinion. Hence, it was difficult to get across the idea that in our class there would be no “wrong answers.”

We asked them to choose between three topics: If I were a Superhero, My Happiest Day, or My Dream. One boy’s Happiest Day had been the graduation exercises on Saturday. A girl wrote about being a Superhero: here is her composition:

If I were a superhero I will do magic things people cannot do. I will make bad people like army robbers and merders die instantly when they kill people and also when they take their good money and so many things away. And those who do any other bad things they know what they are doing is not good.

And I will protect my village from death when a war happen.
And also make them win any war they had. This is what I will do if I were a superhero.

One bright-eyed child named Sophia came up to me in between the second and third period of the morning and handed me something she had written on her own. It was called The Man Who Didn’t Wash His Dishes, and it was a real story, with a beginning, a middle, and even a happy ending! At that moment I saw a future Ghanaian writer in the making.

We rested during the lunch hour from 12:30 – 1:30 pm and ate bread spread with avocado and soft cheese. We drank the leftover Fanti (orange soda) from the graduation treats. Then we sat with groups of two or three children and practiced reading. We began with Level 1 stories which had been photocopied on colored paper. There were not enough copies for each child to take them home, and I was enormously sad when I had to say no to one child who asked if he could have the “book.”

The children are starved for learning. Their eyes are locked onto the pages, and their attention never wavers. Our job is to help them with vocabulary that is foreign to them and to insure that they are comprehending the story, not just sounding out the words.

I got a little touch of the enormity of the challenge they have accepted when (in free time after the reading class) two of the children tried to teach me the words for “one, two, three” in Fante. To this moment, I don’t remember those words.