Wednesday, 15 June 2011—Accra

Wednesday, 15 June 2011—Accra

It was raining this morning, so assembly was held in the dining hall, and that is where I gave my farewell speech to the school.  Although I still have a full week left in Ghana, tomorrow everyone will be thinking about the mid-terms that begin in the afternoon, then the students will be gone for five days, and by the time they return next week, I will need to be focusing on my departure (which is not Thursday as I’ve been thinking, but Wednesday night).  Here is what I told them:

Ten days ago I stood here looking out at many friendly, but unknown faces.  Today as I stand here looking out at the same faces I see friends, colleagues and well-known and well-loved students.  It is hard to believe that in just such a short time, I have come to feel myself a part of the Accra Girls’ community.  Ten days, or 110 days, would not be enough time to spend here at Accra Girls Senior High School, or in Ghana as a whole.  For every thing that I have learned in my brief time here, and that is a great many things, there are many more things that I would like to learn about the school, and about the wonderful people and country of Ghana, but those will have to wait until some future time when I may be able to return.  That I have learned as much as I have in my time here, though, is not surprising, for while I have only been a teacher to some of you, every one of you here has been a teacher to me, and with so many fine teachers, how could I not learn?

Even though, as I have said, ten days or even ten days plus the additional days that I still  have remaining, is not nearly long enough to spend in Ghana, my time here is coming to an end.  As you all prepare to leave for your mid-terms, I will miss seeing you on a daily basis in my classes and around the school grounds.  I will see you when you return, but only briefly since my return flight to the United States leaves next Wednesday evening.

That makes this morning my last and best opportunity to express to you my gratitude for all that everyone here has done for me to make my stay in Ghana one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.  I can only hope that through my time and teaching here at Accra Girls I have had just a small portion of the impact on some of your lives that you have had on mine.

I must begin by thanking my colleague, and my friend, Mr. Osman bin Umar, without whom none of this would have been possible for me.  I know that many of you already recognize and appreciate, as I have come to do, what a singularly dedicated and talented teacher he is, and that his personal qualities are in every way as fine as his professional abilities.  I look forward to a long and ongoing collaboration with you, Mr. Osman, and one that encompasses as well everyone else here at Accra Girls’ Senior High School.

Next, I want to thank my students.  You are the reason that I came to Ghana and you have rewarded me many times over for my efforts here.  I knew before arriving that Accra Girls was one of the best high schools in the entire nation of Ghana.  I tell you now, though, that I must drop the words “one of” from that statement and just say that Accra Girls is the best high school in the entire nation of Ghana.

My first form students—I regret that I did not have more time in the classroom with you, but your enthusiasm and your interest in speaking with me whenever we did have class is greatly appreciated.  My second form students—you have shown me an extraordinary degree of effort in attempting new ways of thinking and learning.  I appreciate the dedication and intellectual curiosity that you brought to each class and each lesson we shared.

My third form students.  I am at a loss for words to tell you how much you have taught me—about teaching, about learning, about Ghana, and about yourselves.  Beyond just our time in the classroom, coming to know you better outside of school as I was able to do on our excursion to Kakum, Elmina and Cape Coast has given you what will always be a special place in my heart. 

To the rest of the Accra Girls students—I thank especially those of you to whom I had a chance, however brief, to speak.  While I may not know all of you as well as I know my own students, through them I know something about you, and that is that as a group you surely have the same ability to be the kind of fine students in your classrooms as they were in mine.

Faculty and staff—I thank you for the immeasurable small ways in which you have helped me during my stay, whether by attempting to teach me a few words of Twi, directing me when I seemed lost, or simply by the way you greeted me and made me feel welcome all of the time.  In particular, I would like to thank you Ms. Akorlor for all you did to look out for my welfare and comfort. 

Finally, Ms. Akapame.  We know well in the United States, and it is obviously also true in Ghana, that the success of schools that achieve their mission of providing a high quality education to their students, begins at the top with the head of the school.  It can be no accident that Accra Girls succeeds in this mission under your leadership and direction.  I would like to thank you first for encouraging Mr. Osman to apply for the Teaching Excellence and Achievement program, for without that first step taken by you none of the rest of this would have happened.  I would like to thank you for all the arrangements you made so that as much of my time here as possible could be spent doing what I came here to do, teaching, knowing all the while that you had already planned for meeting my other needs well before my arrival.  And I thank you, finally, for allowing an American teacher to come into the classrooms of your school in Ghana, to experiment as it were on your students, by trying out new and different methods of instruction on them, and for your confidence in feeling that I could do so successfully.

In addition to my words of thanks, I have several tokens of my appreciation that I would like to present to you, Ms. Akapame, on the school’s behalf.  First, I would like to present you with several books for the Accra Girls Senior High School library, for the use and reading pleasure of both students and teachers.  Second, I would like to present to you, in remembrance of my stay, with a model of the Gateway Arch, the best known landmark from my home town of St. Louis, Missouri.  The Arch commemorates the time when the still young United States began to expand westward across North America on its way to becoming the nation it is today.  Though it is known as the Gateway to the West, to me the Arch will also now be a Gateway that faces east, toward Ghana.

Next, as a reminder of my country as a whole, I would like to present you with a small American flag in token of the friendship between my country and yours.  Finally, in order to help everyone here at Accra Girls remember that although Ghana and the United States, St. Louis and Accra, Accra Girls Senior High School and Berkeley Middle School, may seem far apart, we are as Mr. Osman keeps reminding me, fellow citizens of the same world with the duty to learn about, understand, and help each other, and thus I present you with this [giant inflatable] globe to remind us of that fact.

As a teacher, I would like to direct my closing words to the students of Accra Girls Senior High School:  Students, you are the future of Ghana—the businesswomen, the doctors, the lawyers, the wives, the mothers, the politicians, and yes, like us, the teachers.  Under your future leadership, I must say that Ghana’s future is one of great promise.  You are also, however, though you may not know it, the future of my country, the United States, for in the world today, with its ever increasing connections, what happens to you here in Ghana will affect those of us in the United States as surely as what we do in the United States will affect you here in Ghana.  So I exhort you, work hard, study hard, pay attention to your teachers and do as they ask.  Help each other to succeed.  I wish you a safe journey wherever you travel for your mid-terms.

Thank you.  Asante sana. Merci beaucoups.                 Meda ase. 

[The final line is four ways of saying “Thank you”—in English, the language of instruction at Accra Girls, in Kiswahili, which I studied as a graduate student and during my first visit to Africa in Tanzania in 1994, and which I taught to my students here as part of one of my lessons, in French, which is taught as a foreign language at the school and is quite important because of its use in neighboring Francophone countries, and in Twi, the most widely spoken African language in Ghana.]

Lessons went smoothly again today, as I have come to expect.  I did have to mildly reprimand just a couple of students in both the second and third form classes who were not recording what we were doing in their exercise books.  When they told me that they had left these at home, I reminded them, just as I do my Berkeley Middle School students when this happens, of the importance of being fully prepared for class every day so that one can learn as much as possible.  We were in the computer lab yesterday and again today, where I could use the projector to display the various primary sources on the slave trade that we are using for this lesson, which was being done in both second and third form today.  The projector is very good, providing a far sharper picture than the one in my classroom at home—even in a classroom with 90 students, those in the back could still read the documents easily without my even having to enlarge the image to any degree.  Many of the students seem to enjoy the chance to dig into these sources in detail and to apply to their thinking about the sources both their broad prior knowledge on this topic and the ideas that we had elicited from the introductory activity about the effects of a substantial population loss on a community.  It is exciting for me as a teacher to see students so engaged with the lesson.  One of the very sharp second form students asked me after class if she could copy the primary source information onto her pen drive (flash drive) tomorrow, and of course I was happy to say “yes.”  Similarly, last week I gave a copy of “How to Say Hello in Africa” from the Spread of Islam lesson to one of the students who had asked about it.

After classes, Osman and I headed off to Nima market, accompanied by another of his friends from the neighborhood who also comes from the north.  The sequence of the wording is important here—it would be incorrect to say “with one of his friends from the north who also lives in the neighborhood,” as it was only after Osman’s move to Accra and through their common residence in the Zongo neighborhood that his initial connections with these friends became established.  However, it is the tie to the north that really seems to cement many of these bonds, and allows the neighborhood’s residents to establish networks of mutual association and support.  These networks are very important in light of struggles that many newcomers from the northern regions experience here both while trying to establish themselves in Accra and find jobs, and thereafter while struggling to make ends meet.  Zongo residents’ shared geographic origins do not always correspond with shared ethnicity, yet I have seen evidence of fictive kinship ties in the ways that Osman and some of his close friends refer to each other as “brothers.”

Wednesday is the main market day in Nima, and the Nima-Mamobi road, as well as the side streets in the market zone, are jammed with people and vehicles when Osman and I head there after classes.  The crowds, and the buying and selling, spill over more here than anyplace else I have yet seen onto the sidewalks, into the streets, and between the vehicles that creep along.  The presence of the Nima tro-tro station here adds to the congestion, but also is one of the sources of the market’s popularity, as it is easily accessible from even distant areas of Nima and the surrounding zongo neighborhoods.  Walking slowly through the crowds, I have to lean first to right, then to the left, then perform a slow half pirouette to avoid the loads carried atop people’s heads.  Although I would by no means describe Ghanaians on the whole as short, and while I have seen a number of fairly tall men here, both young and old, the fact remains that I am much taller than most of the people around me, especially the women.  Ordinarily this would provide me with a clear vantage point from which to observe the marketscape and its activities.  Today, however, instead of a continuous and uninterrupted view around me, my vision is regularly obscured by and my height means that I frequently find myself face-to-face, or rather face-to-basket, face-to-basin, face-to-box, face-to-pile or face-to-bag with an amazing array of goods--smoked fish standing on their tails in a large metal basin, a two foot stack of toilet paper, a full medicine cabinet’s selection of toothpaste, toothbrushes, aspirin, and other remedies, the inevitable water sachets (usually carried by younger children), plantain chips, a rack of shoelaces (where were you when I needed you last week?), not to mention large burlap sacks stuffed with who knows what, a wooden bench, and stacks of neatly folded clothing and fabric tied neatly together with string—all balanced skillfully atop people’s heads, and most without any additional support except perhaps one light steadying hand when the load is especially heavy or the crowd particularly dense.  Despite the crowded conditions, the sometimes uneven footing on rutted streets or walks, and the fact that these loads limit the carriers’ abilities to see and react to other people or vehicles coming at them, I have not yet in my entire time here seen a single person of any age drop the load they are carrying.

Moving from the main street of the market into the pathways between the market stalls lessens the crowds somewhat, but even here people continue to carry their loads in the customary way, despite the low hanging corrugated roofs that sometimes hang down to my eye level and require me to watch carefully as I walk. We visit the butcher’s section of the market, where Osman buys some beef at Gh₵3 for a pound.  The meat here is halal, or slaughtered according to Islamic custom.  I ask whether there is some lower status associated with being a butcher in Islam, as there is in Hinduism, but that does not seem to be the case.  Sellers of metal cooking utensils bang their spoons together, spinning and flipping them in rhythmic patterns.  I wonder about the metal from which these are made, as I do about the large metal cooking pots I see stacked high in places—many of which have a mottled, uneven surface.  Does this merely indicate that the molds used to cast them are well-worn and pitted, or, as is my initial thought, is the raw material from which they are produced some strange amalgam of recycled metals?  Walking among the stalls, and later again out among the vendors on the street, I see market officials collecting fees from the various sellers and handing out small receipts. We stop to speak to one of the vendors, one of several young women whom Osman’s friend seems to know here, who is having her toenails trimmed by a young man as she tends her collection of packaged spices and prepared sauces.  This toenail trimming, Osman tells me, is characteristic of the neighboring French-speaking countries, and is fairly common here in Nima because of large number of immigrants from those countries that live in this neighborhood.  Printed fabric is Gh₵15 for four yards, or at least this is the initial (and obruni) price when I get Osman to ask.  Periodically, the crowd parts so as not to impede the progress of groups of young men, hard-working physical laborers who are quite literally manhandling four-wheeled carts loaded with huge bags of rice or cassava flour through the narrow rutted market streets, several spattered with white flour dust as evidence of their labors.

A fairly large mosque, at least by the standards of those I have seen in Ghana, is under construction right on the main road.  Arabic writing, likely verses from the Koran, is engraved into the concrete surface above the main door.   A number of elderly men and women sit on mats in front of the mosque, small bowls in front of them to ask for alms from the passersby, hoping perhaps that their proximity to the mosque will inspire market-goers to remember the Islamic injunction to aid the poor and unfortunate.  This mosque, though two stories high and already in use, is, as is with the case with so many buildings here, still under construction, as evidenced by it unpainted exterior and also by its lack of minarets.  The smaller mosques that dot Nima are almost all painted white and green, with two small minarets.  In many cases, the only writing that identifies them or distinguishes them at ground level perspective from the adjoining shops and homes, is just a small painted sign in Arabic and /or English.

School lets out early on Wednesday, so Osman and I made sure we were here at 2:00 for me to meet with the AGHISSA officers.  They asked to make me a patron of the group, along with Osman, an offer that I was happy to accept.  In addition to making a contribution to their treasury, I also wanted to thank them for the great experiences they have given me in my classroom, but especially on our excursion on Saturday.  I presented everyone with a Missouri state quarter, and gave a quick numismatics lesson on its symbols and written elements, including the significance of the Arch, with which they were already slightly familiar from my presentation of the model to Ms. Akapame this morning.  The other main element of the Missouri design relates to Lewis and Clarks Corps of Discovery and, on this theme I presented a book about Lewis and Clark and their journey to Osman.  I then had t-shirts from Berkeley Middle School and St. Louis that I distributed to Doreen, the president, the vice-president, treasurer, secretary and others, with small American flags for the rest.

I returned to my rooms to keep up with typing my journal entries, but as I was still recovering from Tuesday to some degree, later when Osman and I made our customary stop for something to drink and some conversation, I stuck to Fanta.  Take away rice was fine with me when it was time for dinner, as was an early return home, where I could relax and try to get some of these sketchy notes from my notebook into more polished form.  Given my inability to upload this material at school, I told Osman that tomorrow I would like to get to an internet café, so that I can take care of the matter there.