First thing's first, a map of Ghana:
We flew into the capitol, Accra. Then we made our way west along the Cape Coast to Takoradi and Sekondi.
We were there to teach entrepreneurship to high school students. We also managed to do some work with the local community. The people we met were very welcoming and excited to have us around. The schools we taught in were scattered through out the Cape Coast and Takoradi regions. I taught in two which both happened to be in Takoradi. We were hosted by Reverend Andoh and his church community.
There were around 50 of us travelling from Babson (the largest cohort yet). We spent the first few days acclimating to Ghanaian culture and doing some touristy sight seeing. After that we had a week of teaching followed by the rocket pitch competition.
First stop: Ashesi University
Located just outside Accra is a small university that Babson has a really good relationship with. There are fewer than 600 students, so it's even smaller than high school. (Check out their website here). We started with a campus tour that took us around the courtyard, through the library, and into a couple classrooms. We were accompanied by student tour guides and a group from Harvard as well.
After the tours we sat through a lecture about the history and economy of Ghana. It was interesting to see the things the Ghanaians made a point of compared to what we had learned in our lectures with Dean Hanno and Professors Deets and Schlesinger before hand.
Next up was lunch. I was silly and didn't take pictures of the food while I was in Ghana, but it was fairly simple. We had a lot of rice and chicken, and some local fruits & veggies.
Then we got to sit back for a cultural lesson in traditional dance and music.
This made for a fairly easy first day to acclimate ourselves to the weather and time change.
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| The courtyard at Ashesi. |
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| Ashesi's library |
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| The cafeteria. It is essentially a covered patio with a kitchen. |
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| Learning traditional dance & music |
The next day was a travel day. We made our way from Accra to what would be our home for the rest of the time we were in Ghana: Reverend Andoh's church.
It took us pretty much all day to get from Accra to Sekondi. I naturally stayed awake the entire time watching out the window. The scenery reminded me of a cross between Malaysia and South Africa. Overall it was poor, much like the townships of South Africa. Yet the communities seemed to be better kept than the townships, much like the rural areas around Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Along the way we stopped for lunch at a beach resort. It was a good chance to stretch our legs and take in the ocean breeze. Each of our travel days we stopped for lunch. Vacationing at these resorts would make it very easy to forget how poor the region is.
Then it was back on the road to Sekondi. Apparently every year Dean Hanno brings a group to Ghana the church has been renovated. This is probably very necessary as it was full quite a bit in the short time we were there. The compound was set up with two larger rooms downstairs and four small rooms upstairs. There was long hallway across the entire width of the building upstairs. We lined the hallway with tables and chairs and that was where we ate most of our meals. If the group was any bigger we would not have fit all at once.
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| Just a lizard chilling on some coconuts. No big deal. |
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| A local Ghanaian community. People just going about their daily business |
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| Naturally there are vendors at the resorts. They reminded me of the vendors in South Africa with their crafts. |
Third Stop: Tourist Attractions
No matter how much you try to immerse yourself fully into a culture, some tourist attractions are a must. They help understand part of the culture. In our case we did a canopy walk in the jungle and went to Elmina slave castle.
The canopy walk was very much what it sounds like: we went up into the jungle (not like deep into the jungle but to a touristy part of the jungle). Then we hiked along to an area that had ropes ladders set up to walk across something like 100m above the forest floor. It was fun, not really all that much to say about it, though.
The other adventure of the day was Elmina slave castle. We had all learned about the slave trade in elementary school, but we learned about it from a Western perspective. This was the rest of the story.
Before future slaves made the voyage to wherever they were "needed" they were brought to Elmina or another port. They were put in what really felt like an old prison, except for the fact that there was a church in the middle. The architecture was a weird mix of dungeon and old European. The other difference between Elmina and a prison was the fact that the people kept there had not committed a crime. It was really chilling to think about the fact that this was their last connection to their homeland. They didn't all survive the time they were held at Elmina, either. Yet it was clear that the Europeans who lived there led comfortable lives.
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| View from one side of Elmina. The slaves were held in dungeons and then forced out straight onto the ships through "the door of no return" |
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| Another view of Elmina: the top overlooking the neighboring community. |
Since the next day was Sunday and we were hosted by a church, we all got up and went to one of the services. I always find it interesting to see how other communities worship. I think it says a lot about the culture. This wasn't a flashy service, but people came out in their Sunday best and filled the church. The churches in Ghana certainly were a major part of the community.
That afternoon was spent preparing for our week of teaching. That was partially lesson planning, partially organizing materials. We also had a break to read to the community children (which I particularly enjoyed, of course).
This was really our final day to get acclimated, if there was any more need for it. The rest of the time we would be in school mode.
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| Hilary with some of the children. They came around quite a lot throughout the week. I think they rather enjoyed having some extra playmates. |
As far as the teaching component of my time in Ghana went, I was fortunate.
I was able to teach every day, although the first day there was a moment it seemed we wouldn't teach. Our students were far too motivated to have us leave, though. Some of them had participated in the program during previous years.They even still had some materials that had been left behind.
It was definitely a learning experience for me, though. I reaffirmed the fact that I do not want to be a teacher.
During the teaching week I would start each morning getting breakfast with the whole Ghana 2013 group. Then a small group would go by bus to Cape Coast while the rest of us finished getting ready and took taxis to our schools. Mine was about half an hour away. Some days Professor Deets and I would share the taxi with another group, others it was just us. Then it would be my job to teach the lesson of the day. The idea was that this was my only experience in Ghana so I needed to get the most out of it. One day we had a visit from Dean Hanno, who then took Professor Deets on an excursion when he left.
It was very much like a condensed FME, and very much like the Girl Scouts Camp CEO program I helped coordinate a few years back. The students came up with some creative ideas, some which could work and some which clearly would not work. Some students were better presenters than others which made their pitch overall work better.
But anyways. After that we would taxi back right around lunch time. After two days they needed someone to go to another school so my new friend Carly and I went. At this point it was Wednesday and so we had a really condensed teaching week with no planning. But it worked out fine. I only worked with that group for two days, then I missed the final day because I was still at my morning school.
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| My classroom: the library. We had electricity and snacks each day. We were doing really well. |
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| Last day of school: class picture! |
The Big Day
After a week of teaching each school was able to send a team of student representatives to the rocket pitch competition. Just as the program as a whole had grown to more Babson students than ever before, there were also far more schools & teams presenting than ever before. This meant that the presentations had to be split between two churches. Because of this there were also two rounds of presentations. The top teams from each church in the first round presented again in Rv. Andoh's church for the second round. Both of my teams started in the other church.
As both of my teams arrived I went back and forth between them to help them prepare for the presentation. I wanted, ultimately, to see the best work that they had done so far that week. While neither of my teams ultimately moved onto the second round I was impressed with how far they had come, especially the school that only had three days.
Then for the second round I was a judge. I sat along nine other judges listening to what were deemed the six best teams present that day, then scoring based on a few different categories such as creativity and feasibility. One of my bigger takeaways was to let the students dream big. Throughout the week I had certainly heard some ideas that simply weren't feasible, but focusing first on feasibility limits idea generation. While I questioned the feasibility of the team that took first place, their idea was certainly one of the more innovative ideas (they managed to make a light that was sensitive to the darkness and only turned on when there wasn't sufficient light outside).
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| One of my teams presenting bags made from yogurt wrappers. |
The following day was our final day in Ghana. We were up early for church services, then made the journey back to Accra to catch our flight for London.
Once again we stopped at a beach resort along the Cape Coast for lunch on the way. It was a good chance to get one last moment of peace in Ghana.
Meanwhile, Dean Hanno was busy coordinating with someone who had accidentally taken the bags of one of the members of our group at the airport two weeks earlier (she was a trooper and managed to last the full two weeks without her checked bag). When we finally got to the airport she received her bag. It was kind of the happy ending to the trip...
except for the fact that our plane was still in London.
See, it was now nearly the end of January and, as it does in London, it was snowing and grounding flights. This meant that with just a few hours to go before we were supposed to take off our plane was not just in a different country, but an entirely different continent. We took to playing cards and games while waiting to hear what we were to do next and when we would make it home. Keep in mind that if our flight is canceled it's not easy to fit an entire airplane full of people onto the next flight, and it's not like there are frequent flights to London.
A few hours after arriving at the airport we are told to go through security (though from my memory we still weren't quite sure if that actually meant we would be leaving).
We get to the other side and still had to wait for a while (our plane still wasn't in Ghana). We waited, napped, and watched for our plane to land. It must have been nearly 2am when finally our plane landed and we were able to board.
Knowing Professor Deets would prefer not to sit in the middle of a row I switched seats with him (after taking Dramamine figuring I would just sleep the whole flight). Shortly after take off (I had gotten maybe an hour of sleep at this point) the guy on the inside (window seat in a row of three) got up so I let him out. He went back and forth for a while before it was determined that he wasn't experiencing air sickness, he was actually sick and running a fever.
Delightful.
But I stuck it out without complaining (and with a good amount of hand-sanitizer).
The leg from London was fairly uneventful. We were mostly fortunate enough to have enough time between our flight from Ghana and our flight to Boston that the delay really only shortened the layover. Professor Deets, however, was forced to miss his flight so we then all had to wait on word of if he was making it home that day. Then we just had to make it back to Babson and prepare (for a good number of us) for our 8am Advance Accounting class the next morning. We were kindly greeted by Dean Hanno first thing in the morning, too!
And thus ended my second adventure in Africa and first in Ghana.
Until next time :)
