At one point last week during my brief host home stay, I was making use of the long drop whilst holding my breath when a lizard ran over my feet and as i nearly fell into a communities-worth of poop I realised that i'd been sharing the small space with a box of chickens who had watched the whole thing, which has inspired the title of today's blog 'what am I doing here?'

Now that I am here I am able to give more information about what the flippin' heck i'm doing in Nothern Ghana rather than a vague 'children's project'.

In short, I am working on a Comic Relief funded project called TENI which stands for Teaching Education Needs Inclusively and runs in 20 schools throughout the Jirapa District. This project has been handed to VSO who run the project in 4 schools in Jirapa and the rest are run by a charity call Pronet.

The project that we will be running with the 4 schools have a particular focus on young female students, (or as i've heard them called - 'the girl child'), and involve the volunteers working 7am-2pm Monday-Thursday in the schools identifying weaker students, assisting with diagrams to prepare for lessons to help make lessons more interactive, working directly with students who cannot read.

The class sizes in Ghana are HUGE. The smallest class I saw when I visited last week was 77. The teaching style is therefore quite a 50's style 'rule with the rod' style whereby the teachers mostly stand at the front with a cane and teach facts with very little student interaction.

On top of this, it's not unusual for teachers to turn up hours late or not at all. There is a national shortage of teachers and therefore once someone has got through teaching school they pretty much have a job for life regardless of how often they bother to turn up or not. Due to this attitude it is pot luck as to how much effort each teacher puts in to their lessons. Some teachers are hugely dedictated and try immensely hard and others haven't been seen for weeks.

What happens very quickly is that students either drop out of school, attend infrequently, or attend but slip through the net and never receive the help that they need to keep on top of their studies and you end up with a class size of 80+ students who are 15 and about to take their exams but actually they can't read and theyve been quietly sat at the back of the class since they were 5 years old until today.

Lastly, we are implementing a disability screening programme as learning difficulties are almost completely unheard of and I am yet to see a child with special needs in class.

As well as this, on Friday's the volunteers will be doing Active Citizenship Days in pairs where they do an interactive presentation for the rest of the group on one of the Sustainable Development Goals to raise awareness of issues and improve the cross cultural learning, e.g. how is poverty different in the UK compared to Ghana? Are the causes the same?

On top of this (!) they will also be running a series of girls afterschool clubs to help these students learn about everything from ABC to how to correctly use a sanitary towel and the importance of feminine hygiene.

In the scraps of time inbetween, the volunteers will be preparing Community Action Days which is when we involve the whole community on raising awareness of an issue. Previous CAD's have included a flashmob dance to celebrate Interntional Volunteer's Day, a music festival for young people and community rallies.

This is when I laugh heartily when the volunteers ask what is there to do in their 'free time'?....