And Life Returns To Campus

Things are back to normal insofar as things can be normal when three hundred or so high school students have descended on the campus grounds. Life certainly picked up over the weekend, that is for certain.

There are athletic events all through the week that pit many different teams of Senior High Schools from the entire district of Hohoe against each other. The soccer field is the site for the bulk of these events, and given that my house is quite close to the field I get to hear all of the cheers and screams as well as the beating of drums and cowbells. It makes for a raucous place during the day.

What it makes for at night is another story entirely. The campus is housing all of theses students in any room not occupied by its own students. That leaves pretty much every room aside from the student dormitories as fair game for these youngsters to reside in. All of the first- and second-year classrooms are now converted to large bedrooms, and most of the desks and chairs have been moved outside under the shade of trees. It really has made a kind of mess of the campus. So far as those of us still on the school grounds living in our houses, we can safely say that these temporary students do not believe in the quaint notion of sleep. It can be a bit loud over the course of the evening hours. Since they are not students of St. Francis, then they're not under control of the staff or the facility. It is a touch more lawless than we are used to here.

Maybe the incoming students can help on this matter. I saw many of our students arriving on campus and getting ready for this next semester. I am sure they are a bit surprised to see their classrooms turned into makeshift barracks, but they are their classrooms so if they say clean it up and put it back the way you found it, maybe the interlopers will take the hint and do as they are asked.

Not to neglect on what I have been up to (aside from lamenting the noise-level and squatters), I made a trip out to Accra on Saturday and returned on Sunday. It was a quick trip for a meeting with some of my ICT (Information and Communications Technology) cohorts at the Peace Corps headquarters. We conducted a meeting and then went out to enjoy ourselves afterwards. I don't recall getting much sleep, but I was awake enough to keep a lookout on the way home to Hohoe. Maybe half-way home there was something standing by the road waiting to cross. My first inclination was to say a goat was being patient. As it was getting closer I revised it to somewhat large dog. At maybe 200 yards I put my money on what it really was: a rather large monkey. Standing on two legs and two arms, it seemed to find itself at a crosswalk and just waited for our tro-tro to pass. I didn't make out a lot of details as we were maintaining a fairly fast speed, but it was bigger than I was expecting and had a face that seemed somewhat darker than the coat of fur he was wearing. I would love to know what species I was seeing, but it was gone in a second. My first ape sighting!

So things are picking up. We have a staff meeting in the morning and I am sure we are going to be discussing when classes begin and what will be done while the sports competitions are ongoing. Maybe while that goes on, we can manage to get the computers fixed in the lab. They are ready and waiting to be fixed and my students will be very appreciative once they can get back in here and go online. It was really nice to be greeted by the familiar faces and the "Fo Koku" that I go by here. I am excited to get back to work.