It’s a beautiful morning in Accra and I’m in my rooms after attending morning assembly with Osman. I just finished copying a few key Twi phrases into the field notebook that I always carry with me, something I’d just not found time to do before leaving. One of the faculty members who I met yesterday and again this morning is trying to get me to speak a phrase or two of Twi each morning, so I thought I’d better practice a little. The Bradt guidebook to Ghana provided about a dozen phrases and a few numbers. I pulled a couple more out of the Twi/English dictionary that I came across by chance this past spring, but it’s not really the best source for the types of phrases I need. Far better were the surprise notes from Nadia and Linda Jo that I found in the dictionary along with one that I discovered from Josephina yesterday in my suitcase.
I wish I’d been able to learn more of and about the language here before traveling. I am the least linguistically prepared here that I have ever been for foreign travel, at least if I consider how much Twi I know. Twi does not seem like an easy language to learn, being both tonal and with vowels that change their sounds based on location/usage. This was made abundantly clear to me in my class today when I was teaching the Bantu Migrations lesson and trying to compare Twi with Swahili. When I pronounced “Twi” pretty much as it looks, giving the “i” a long “ee” sound, the students giggled a bit and corrected me, pointing out that the correct pronunciation is more like “tchee.” Similarly, my discussion of the tsetse, which I pronounced “tsee-tsee”) evoked a student correction of something like “tcheh-tcheh. It certainly is great to learn from one students, but I’m not sure that even given the large number of students I have, that they’ll be able to help me learn much Twi in the short time I’m here.
My lack of Twi certainly won’t keep me from doing anything I want here, though. Knowing that English is Ghana’s official language made the decision to spend my pre-trip time and energy on something other than studying Twi an easy one. English is all I need here at the school, being the language of instruction, and should be sufficient everywhere else I go as well. There are a lot of other languages that I hear being spoken, though, or maybe just a lot of another language, since I can’t tell if what I’m hearing is all from the same language or a number of different ones. Much is probably Twi or some Akan dialect, but there could also be Ga or Ewe, and with Osman being from the north as are so many others in his neighborhood, I’m not sure yet what all the different languages spoken there are, or what he switches into and out of. The one other language (actually a dialect) that I have heard and recognized is the Ghanaian street English or pidgin.
Last night, I was invited to Osman’s home for dinner. His home is larger than the one room I’d been received in the couple of previous times—centered around a courtyard that is also part of a pass-through walkway for others. Kitchen and washing facilities are outside in the courtyard. Just as with my suite of rooms at the school, all of the rooms in his house are not connected, having separate entries off of the courtyard. It makes much of life more public and brings one into closer contact with neighbors than can be imagined in the U.S. There just can’t be the concern with personal space here that some of my students and many Americans, myself probably included, have. I suspect that this is also reflected in how closely together all the students at the school stand at morning assembly as well as how they are packed into the classrooms, neither of which seems to spark any problems among them.
Osman and Jonny and I ate in his living room, served by Amina, who did not eat with us. The guys are still a little surprised that I am trying to do things in Ghanaian fashion, like taking off my shoes to enter Osman’s house, and eating with my fingers like everyone else (they had a fork and knife set out for me). Naturally, we wash hands before starting, and only use the right hand to eat with. Amina had prepared banku, a corn flour and water mix that is boiled to form a soft dough. You scoop a bit of banku, dip it into the okra/tomato sauce that is put on the plate and eat. We also had fish. I did my best, but couldn’t finish quite all, after having had a large late lunch of rice and fish at Papaye Fast Food in Osu near where we went to get the phone card registered in the afternoon. After dinner, we had watermelon and apple slices, eaten with a toothpick, and Malta Guiness and water to drink. Amina brought Shaida to play with Osman afterwards. He originally trained as a primary teacher, and it is easy to see how he would be very good with younger students from the way he plays with Shaida.
I did my first teaching today—the lesson on the Bantu Migrations with the third form students went very well—this is the class with around 50 students. We accomplished everything by using the whiteboard, including making a map of Africa using the grid system, that I would usually do by other means. Students participated very well. We didn’t quite get finished, and so will have to do work with the ethnographic map and make our comparisons with the physical map in the first fifteen or so minutes of our next class. I enjoyed myself greatly and think the students did, too.
I also met the second form class for the first time today, but for a single period only. This class had right around 90 students. I decided to begin by having them write down five things they know about the U.S. This produced an Interesting mix of results—President Obama, belief in American expertise, high quality of our education, federal system of government, Abraham Lincoln as 16th president (!). I’ve decided that I need to take advantage of the opportunity here to collect some data like this that I can use/compare with my students in the fall. Again, I had great questions from the students during the remainder of the hour’s Q/A session: America’s history, what we do to combat drugs, how did individual states feel about their power (or something like that), what is the best way to get to U.S. for an education? Several students stayed after to speak with me more. One in particular was very concerned about Ghanaian education consisting of much the same approach—the lecture method—in most classes.
These conversations with the students, as with the staff, are giving me a lot of insights into Ghanaian education. AGISS is a very good school here, as anyone can tell from speaking with the students for even a few minutes. As a result, there are a lot of students-1200-1400 when all four forms are present. That’s actually a lot more than the facilities can currently handle, so there is a good deal of construction around the school. This includes a new classroom building near the entry gate and right next to the existing classroom building for my first and second form students. The school would like to be able to accommodate more boarders—because of the nature of the secondary education system here, students at AGISS come from all over the country, admitted based on their junior high grades. The shortage of housing on the school grounds precludes many of the Accra students being boarders. This can be a problem for those who must travel substantial distances each day to get to school because the Accra traffic in the mornings can be quite densem and some students are delayed in arriving at the school. To accommodate more of these students who might like to board at the school, two new blocks of student housing are under construction—one along the walls at the upper rear corner of the school, near two of the existing student blocks, and another largemulti-story unit just across road from where I am. The existing housing blocks are known as Ayree, Buckman and Gipson. Each block has its own distinct evening uniform, consisting of long pajama style pants and a shirt, the greater body coverage compared to the regular daytime uniforms being for the purpose of protection against mosquitoes. Each block has its own color, pink for Ayree, which is near my rooms, and blue and purple for the other two.
Osman took me back to Papaye, this time for take away, also dropping off Mr. Lah, who lives in the Osu area. The traffic jams along the main road there, which I believe is Oxford Street, are quite bad. In the late afternoon like this, with only one lane going in each direction, and other cars trying to back out of or pull across traffic into the narrow set of parking spaces that sit between the street and the storefronts, it’s difficult to go for more than a hundred feet even at a crawling pace without having to come to a complete stop again. Adding to the congestion, along with the usual complement of pedestrians, is the large number of street vendors here. The selection of goods they offer is much different than in some areas, and the hawkers of mini-drums, masks, etc., as well as the roadside kiosks with more of the same, plus various types of beaded necklaces, mark Oxford Street for the tourist area it is. It is mentioned prominently as an Accra destination for visitors in my Bradt book, and the number of white faces here, while still a small minority, is notably greater than where I spend most of my time in Zongo, where I don’t think I have seen another person of European descent.
Ms. Akopolo has steadily been stocking me up—portable lantern, ironing board and iron, kitchen utensils—evidently they expect that I will be doing some cooking—along with shower sandals, bread, matches, etc.
I went by the computer lab today, but there won’t be an internet connection until tomorrow, so that’s when I’ll get these first few blog entries uploaded. Instead I’m here in my rooms trying to keep up on my notes, and listening to Ghanaian television for the first time. There are five or so channels--Despicable Me, a Ghanaian movie channel (drama), music videos.
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