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Over the last year my work with VSO/GES (Ghana Education Service) has included some weird and wonderful things. From previous blogs I have written about drawing maps, helping people join facebook. Recently I accidently found myself in a business meeting talking about the best way to sell soap. Everyday throws up something unexpected which makes life quite interesting. One day I will be planning a computer course and then the next I will have dropped everything to franticly plan and execute a workshop that involves teaching each circuit of schools multi-grade teaching. So every day that week we loaded 6 of us into a car with generators, projectors, laptops, TLMs and whatever else needed to be taken (see some of the recent pictures for the photographic evidence of this) and spent 12 hours on bad roads going from circuit to circuit presenting.
As my time at VSO comes to an end (I have just over 2 months left!!!) I thought I would wrap up my blogs with overviews of different areas in my life. There also is an ongoing blog that I am writing trying to catch up on events that were missed. This is going to be the work blog.
I think a good way to show the difference two years makes is to compare an early workshop to my most recent one. When I first arrived in the first few months I helped out with a few workshops. My main job was ICT support but I would also ask if I could have some time to talk at each one about an area that was being covered or that was relevant. These would normally be interludes of around 15 minutes squeezed into any gap that I could find. Quite often I would have to get one of the officers to translate what I was saying into 'Ghanaian English'.
As the time past I got more involved with the planning process of workshops (We got a DTO, who is a person solely in charge of helping the running of workshops who I have become very friendly with) and this lead to me being more confident in asking for more time. I started taking entire sessions; help write/steer proposals into areas that I thought would be more useful. The big breakthrough was being allowed anywhere near a budget about 14 months into my two years. I became known as the budget slasher, any budget that needed a third lopped off, I was the man to see (don't need to spend 300 cedis buying everyone a notebook when you can buy a ream of paper for 10 cedis etc).
Finally, we got to two weeks ago. One of the three main areas I have been working on has been the development of KG (kindergarten) in Sissala East. There are a few reasons for this, firstly the KG officer is young (so recently trained), competent and motivated (the Holy Trinity of a good work colleague!) called Joshua, secondly our Director has a passion for it, making it easier to get things done and thirdly a phone call away I had Ellie in Jirapa who specialises in Early Childhood and has absolutely no problem with me plagiarising all her good work!
A year in the making, we have been trying to get a KG workshop of the ground. Last year Action Aid paid the main lecturer from Cape Coast to run a 5 day KG workshop that we piggybacked onto so ours was put on hold. Since July we have been constantly been thwarted by lack of funds (The excuse that many a good workshop goes to die!). But due to some persistence, a Director who continued to follow it up and the kind people at GPEG (A massive grant for education in Ghana of 10s of millions of dollars) we managed to get our hands on just over 4000 cedis. (£1300 which is the cost of keeping me in placement for 9 months as a comparison).
A tight but adequate budget later we had an extensive two day programme ready to go. Every part of this was lead by Joshua with me inputting whenever help was needed but I think the most striking things was how much responsibility Joshua took on, quite often thinking of things before me or that I had forgotten completely. A complete change from the Joshua I met when I first arrived. We split up the areas to play to our strengths (Joshua curriculum, James behaviour and classroom management) and team taught the rest. Watching Joshua control a room of 124 teachers, many older than him, was a delight and those two days were some of the most rewarding of my placement.
A month later, Joshua organised and independently took another KG workshop, grabbing specialists from the College of Education all on New Year's Eve. My help no longer required and my job done.
Inevitably, there is always more to do. I had finally cracked the nut of getting more than just the exceptionally keen teachers and head teachers coming to me to help them team teach INSETs and I feel like that a good base was set up for another volunteer to follow in my footsteps. Unfortunately, VSO Ghana has shrunk from 65 volunteers to 19 when I left meaning it was incredibly unlikely I would be replaced but I feel that even if no new VSO volunteers come to Tumu, I left it in a better place then when I arrived, which is all you can ever hope for.
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