Sunday is the sabbath in Ghana, which means a lot of church service. Catholic church service begins at like 6am, so that was a no go for me. There was a children's service later in the day around 9. i wasn't sure that adults could attend so i didn't go then but i heard from other PCVs that went that it was a fun service with lots of singing and dancing. So i will try and go next week. But on the downside they did say it was like 4 hours long, so i best be getting plenty of sleep the night before. I decided to do my laundry on Sunday since it had been quite a while and i must say that there is definitely an art to hand washing clothing and i am far from getting anywhere near good at it but my homestay sister graciously helped me and i was able to be done pretty quickly. Usually Sunday's are mostly reserved for worship and also a time to do laundry and maybe some other small house chores but this Sunday was special because Ghana was playing Serbia in the World Cup. My homestay brother took me to a local spot to watch the game and i was the only girl there around a bunch of loud but fun soccer hooligans. And thankfully we won! So everyone in town was extremely happy and dancing and singing in the streets. The world cup is definitely making it an exciting time to be in Africa. During the match they mostly play the same commercials over and over and there is this song in one of the commercials called "Wavin' Flag" that EVERYBODY sings. Its actually a really cool song and super catchy but i can tell that a couple more weeks of it playing non-stop and im gonna want to hit myself over the head with a rock.
So this weeks starts practicum, where we go to actual schools and teach classes for 8 days. The ICT group teaches at a college a couple of miles away from Kukurantumi at a teacher training college which will also give us a feel of what our site will actually look like and what sort of resources we will have. The college was very nice and the computer lab just got renovated so they got i think like 20 new computers and they have wireless internet! sweeeeet. so my fellow ICT peeps and i have been exploiting that little perk quite frequently. I was a little nervous when i began teaching but so far it has been not so bad. I know i don't like it when teachers talk at me for like 90 minutes so i tried to make my classes as interactive as possible, but since we had an evaluator sitting in at all of our classes, i couldn't be as free-spirited as i wanted to be. The students are very well behaved but naturally they should be at the college level which im quite happy about. No rambunctious high schoolers in my class, thankfully. The students are very patient as well which makes the whole process of teaching a lot more relaxing and comfortable.
Homestay is going good as well, there are lots of children around my house all the time and they greet me enthusiastically every time i come home which is nice. They also try and teach me Twi, but most of the time they speak entirely too fast and i just nod my head like i know whats going on. At night, me and a couple of other PCVs head over to a local spot(bars are called spots here) where a PCV has her homestay. Its a really chill indoor and outdoor spot and they have so many animals, so obvi im always happy to be there. They have this pet monkey named Guy who is about the size of both my hands and if you feed him some yams he's like your best friend and he just sits and chills on your shoulder. So cute! haha So anyway, we also received our site placements this week! I found out that i will be located in the Volta region of Ghana in a regional capital town called Jasikan. Which is great because im right near like 3 other PCVs in my group so i wont be as isolated as i thought id be! Im also very close to Togo, so im sure we'll venture across the border a couple of times and see whats going on over there. Another great thing about my site is that i will be learning Twi, which could have changed because there are over 70 languages in Ghana. Needless to say things are going great and im super excited to get to my site, only 7 more weeks!
click to enlarge
On a less upbeat note, i got my first bout of stomach sickness on saturday morning but thankfully that went away by mid-day but then i got a very painful ear infection that same day which is still afflicting me. But alas i will drug myself up and power through! im on some pretty high dosage antibiotics so im hoping by like day 3 the swelling will go down and i can begin to hear out of my right ear again, if not no biggie i always have the other one, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment