Longer Days In Training

[Belated post]

Happy Veterans' day from Ghana. It is my first in Ghana and my second-to-last Veterans' which is about the way all of these holidays can be marked while I am here.

Our little group of teachers is nearing the “trained out” phase of In-Service Training. The days grow warm and humid in the afternoon and the attention spans go down by an inverse reciprocal of some sort. Many subjects are very important to us all, but sometimes we will have presentations and workshops that seem more apt for one group of us teachers than the other. That means minds wander. For the most part we just need a little reminder every so often to keep the eyes focused.

I am happy to learn a bit more about what secondary projects volunteers have done, and what we are doing within Ghana to share ideas and try different things in our communities. I see that several have started just small little clubs within their schools to push students to become involved in particular fields and subjects. I have two or three ideas already for the school.

Also we get to have a new acronym that will come into being for this blog sometime near the start of 2011. VRF is the Volunteer Report Form which will detail our time spent teaching and doing community outreach work. It looks nice enough as it just went through a revamp and I am almost ready to start working on it... almost. There are a million fields to fill out in this electronic report so it can be time-consuming but still, it is a good thing to get this all written out. I can get used to writing reports for the government and oddly enough, it makes me a little happy.

For today, Thursday, we had a little slack in the schedule so a few volunteers and counterparts went over to Koforidua for a short time. I bet a few will get a seat at the internet cafe and try to email as much as they can in an hour. Everyone will come back here though for dinner and then we might play a game or two of Mafia which is fairly popular among the education group. I think I explained that game before, but it is quite fun to deceive your fellow volunteers and put on your best, “but I am innocent,” face, even though that is far from the truth.

Good times but I do miss the home and the community back in Hohoe. I bet I will be happy to get back and eat banku and see friends.