It's Ghana be a Merry Christmas and Dusty New Year

Merry Christmas All!

Sorry it has been so long since i have posted, it has been a busy holiday season for me here. Which i suppose is good because it kept my mind off missing christmas time back home.

My regular students semester ended on December 17th and we had a great christmas celebration and matriculation ceremony where we welcomed the first years officially as new students. If you have facebook, i put an album up on my profile if you would like to see pictures. Putting up pictures here is very slow in comparison. It was lovely though, we had the choir sing christmas carols, hundreds of presents that were given out and even a faux christmas tree! It was a nice time and i think everyone was in the mood for some end of the first semester holiday cheer.

After the regular students vacated, a new group of students came in called UTDBE(Untrained Teachers degree in basic education). They are all teachers in various locations in Ghana teaching at the primary to SHS levels but who don't have a certificate in teaching yet. I think it is great that they want to further their education and have as much knowledge as they can about the subject they are teaching as well as other subjects. But unfortunately i didn't know that there would be 800 of them i would be teaching! Compared to my small number of regular students(about 250 split up into 6 different classes) my first day of teaching a class of 200-300 was a little overwhelming. Luckily my two counterparts in ICT were there to help me out and we shared the course-load by team teaching. These students were a lot harder to teach though. They have been coming in-between regular semesters for about 2-3 years now and we still had to go over basic computer information with them at the very start….which makes for a very long day when you are starting from square one. So basically we had 3 weeks to prepare them for their exam which would be administered by The University of Cape Coast down in southern Ghana. My days consisted of waking up by 6am, eating a small breakfast and being ready for class by 7-7:30 then i would teach until about 9, have a break until 10 the teach again until 1, have another hour break then continuing teaching until 5pm. Such a long day! It was exhausting and i could tell i was getting burned out. Fortunately christmas came around and i was planning to leave for a two day excursion to the beach in southern volta. A bunch of other PCV's and I went down to a small beach community where my counterpart was from and who so graciously offered us his house for the weekend. My ever thoughtful mother sent me, weeks in advance, a miniature christmas tree complete with ornaments and battery operated lights(Thanks Mommy!) and we set that up on christmas eve awaiting santa to put presents under it for christmas day. And he did!(well you know what i mean) We got out christmas care packages from friends and family and were able to do some actual present opening while listening to christmas music on christmas morning. It certainly made my day and made me not so sad that i wouldn't be home for x-mas, my favorite time of year. We had a great couple of days on the beach and then i headed back to site to continue teaching. It was a lot of the other PCV's vacations since their students were out on holiday as well, so some stayed at the beach longer and some travelled around to other places in Ghana site-seeing. Although i do not have the regular semester breaks off like i thought, i still have the whole summer off where i can do some traveling and site-seeing as well.

So now the untrained teachers are packed up and ready to go and i am awaiting the regular students back on monday. I am excited to have them back and fall into my regular schedule again. Hope everyone had a wonderful christmas and a great new year!

Some resolutions in 2011:
Run the half-marathon in Ghana
Build a Health clinic in nearby village that needs it
Visit Dogon country in Mali
Integrate with my community more!

Happy 2011! Love, peace and happiness in the new year!