Two more days have passed and shortly we will be transferring to the Byblos Hotel for our in-country training.
On Sunday we went to the Shai Hills Sanctuary. This is a small reserve and Darlington was able to drive us through it in the 4-wheel drive. First we saw the baboons and fed them with a banana, and then as we drove on we saw antelope and a variety of birds, including guinea fowl who had no road sense.
Within the reserve is a cave that had been previously occupied by a tribe called the Sayu, and is now occupied by thousands of bats. We climbed up to it, but Janet had to retire as she was wearing the wrong clothing and footwear! The smell was overpowering but the sight of the bats was fascinating.
At some point during the drive a stick insect popped into the car for a visit. It crawled over me and I didn’t mind too much but when it got to Janet she screamed loudly!
After coming away from the reserve we stopped for a drink and Darlington entertained us with stories of what happens in Ghana when people steal things. People don’t talk to the police but deal with the problem themselves, and thieves are badly beaten. This explains why nobody steals anything from the stalls overnight!
Next we visited a coffin shop Darlington knew about. It was full of novelty coffins! By that I mean they were carved into shapes relevant to the dead person, such as a cocoa bean pod, or a chicken, or a large insect. This was completely different from anything we’d ever seen before. The shop was set in a very run down area.
Lastly we drove through the embassy district of Accra. This was a very smart area, particularly around the very large American Embassy, and there was an International School. As we left the bats of Accra began to fly from their roosting places in the trees in the city. The sky was soon filled with millions of bats as far as the eye could see, making their loud squealing calls. They were flying to their night-time feeding areas.
Monday soon arrived and Darlington drove us to the Cape Coast University where we were met by our contact, Might, at the Institute of Education. The University is piloting a scheme called TESSA (Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa) which is a set of resources for African teachers by African teachers so we were particularly interested to hear about it, and picked up several CDRoms for our schools. On our arrival we were shown to a lovely air-conditioned lecture theatre and were introduced to Kwame (Saturday male born) who was the Deputy Director, Eric who was a lecturer at the teacher training college and Millicent, who was a local primary teacher who was using the TESSA materials.
Kwame and Might gave us an overview of TESSA and then there was a question and answer session. We looked at monitoring materials and found out more information about schools and funding in general. State schools are funded differently from the UK, but the same across the country. They receive separate funds for catering, exercise books, maintenance etc, and a capitation per child of 60 cedis (£25) per year. This is spent on day to day running of the school, including transport for trips. Levels of funding are very dependent on who is president at the time. Unfortunately we found that running the TESSA programme is very dependent on access to computers, and while progress is being made in providing computers for schools in the south, schools in the north are being left behind as they have very few computers and certainly little internet access. Even the teacher training college up north in Navrongo does not have enough computers to train the teachers on. Might fetched us several copies of the CDRom though so we will pass these on to our schools. Their use will depend very much on whether teachers have access to computers and printers at home, although we can use my laptop to read it. Some of the resources are ideas rather than print outs so teachers will be able to make use of it in some way.
We were told that Ghana has a National Curriculum which is online and there should be a hard copy in every school too. TESSA links to it broadly, and is divided into five subject areas – Language, Numeracy, Science, Art & Social Studies (Humanities) and Life Skills (PSHE & Citizenship). The website for TESSA is www.tessafrica.net and more resources can be accessed here, although currently the website is down.
On the way home we stopped to buy some Cape Coast pineapples from a street seller. These are particularly delicious, sweet pineapples and were fresh from the trees. We bought six large ones for 4 cedis (£1.70) – two for Mariam, two for Darlington and two for us.
At 9.30pm Mike Cashman, another volunteer who we’d met in Milton Keynes in December, arrived and stayed overnight with us – the more the merrier!
Tuesday was spent around the villa, updating our blogs and packing ready for our transfer to the hotel.
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