While I was still in San Francisco I met a teacher at a charter school through a family friend. The teacher, Kokou, is from Ghana and has a lot of family here. Two weeks ago, I met his brother Senam (who will be an important character in coming stories) in the town of Winneba, about an hour west of Accra. He goes to the university there to get a credential in teaching so he can teach English in a school in the northern region for a while. Because I didn't want to go by myself, Kelli, Mac and Elaine came along.
Here they are in our overcrowded bus at Accra's Kineshie station.The bus was quite warm but fortunately there are vendors that walk around the windows selling cookies, water, ice cream and a variety of other goods. At one point somebody took advantage of such a captive audience and came aboard to talk about a great new cell phone charger he was selling. I've seen everything from shoe heels to screened kitchen sink drains being sold on the street. The bus leaves at no scheduled time, just when there are enough people to fill it up. After we sat waiting for a while, the driver slowly pulled forward. Somebody stood up in the front to lead a prayer that we would arrive safely. That was encouraging.
The best part of the ride by far is what I refer to as our in flight entertainment. After we thought we'd left the vendors behind, the man in the yellow stood up and began an elaborate schpeel about the various artifacts he'd brought with him. What we learned: if you have typhoid, just crush some of his patented mango leaves into a tea and you'll be fine. Plus: a stick that magically increases your sperm count. He was an exciting fellow.
We finally arrived in Winneba, and met Senam (in the center) along with some of his friends (Joel on the left, Charles on the right). They showed us around their campus (which is beautiful), we saw Senam's room and met his roommate, and had some really good conversations about what it means to be a teacher in a developing country. They are all good people. Joel is thinking about teaching biology and then becoming a doctor.
This is the view of Winneba from Senam's balcony (he lives on the fourth floor too). It was a lovely city,much cooler than Accra, but note that the haze hasn't lifted. It's a bit of a quieter town. As we walked around, swarms of kids followed us calling out a word in the local language that means "white person". They were really surprised, and so were we. Gaggles of kids would approach slowly, and one brave one would walk forward. Once he survived, the others would come up and play clapping games, etc.
While walking around we saw some cool statues and plaques. The campus was originally set up to be training grounds for the politicians of independent Ghana and was set up by the first president. It has since become a school to educate teachers. You could say there's an important connection here. The plaque reads "If you educate a man, you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman, you educate a family". An interesting insight into gender relations here but more on that on a later date...
We then walked over to the beach. The surf is too huge to swim, but it was fun to let the waves run over our feet.
Mac was clearly having a good time
Interesting side feature: the military built this "swimming pool" with a sandy bottom for training. Kids now play in it, but watching the waves crash over it made us cringe a little.
As the sun went down, Joel and Charles left to complete some assignments for school and the rest of us took a taxi to a hotel outside of the guidebook with a pretty strong Rasta theme called the Rocktop. It was two tall buildings painted red, green and yellow with beautiful murals all over them overlooking Winneba Estuary and the Atlantic on a beach with a string of palm trees. It quickly got dark as we enjoyed some drinks on the roof before bedtime.We squeezed five of us into two double rooms. The woman who owns it (Shelley) was really sweet and we may go back there for the big deer hunt festival at the beginning of May...
Example of a mural at the Rocktop
We woke up for a 6am breakfast on the rooftop and watched the light slowly fade in. The sun never really rises here, the whole sky just uniformly gets lighter. It's weird since I'm used to the colorful Bay Area sunrises (at least the few that I get up to see). We had a quiet breakfast of eggs, toast and tea and then got in a taxi back to the bus station. Senam left us there to go do some school work and we rode back to Kineshie Station in Accra.
2 comments:
About that plaque- at least in the US they say that a child's success is correlated with his or her mother's level of education. Perhaps this is true everywhere.
Moral: Dads ain't worth shit.
amen
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