What a Palava

Today I returned to 94 school, and on the way witnessed a rather brutal altercation between two men at Kasoa market.  This involved a relatively young man beating an older man with a large wooden stick- we swiftly walked in the other direction, as even some of the locals were making a speedy exit! The plan was to attempt to gather some data at 94, but Lisa (who we used to think was called Berlinda- turns out we had the two the wrong way round!) who I had spoken to it about was not in, so I spoke to Berlinda, and planned to do some interviews during break and lunch.  Until then I attended Sophie's phonics lesson.  I was impressed by how engaged the children were, and they seemed to be enjoying the lesson, especially learning the actions that go with the letter sounds, and I hope that this helps them to improve their reading skills.  It had gotten too late to conduct any interviews at break-time, and we seized the opportunity to visit an Omega school that we had not yet seen, as Ken was going there and offered to take us.

The new school- with a name I cannot yet pronounce, was quite large and nicely spaced out, with a separate area for the really young nursery and KG children- a nice addition which was not at any of the other schools.  We were offered lunch by the cook, who was the nice English teacher from Kasoa school's wife.  Lunch was palava sauce and rice- palava being a leaf, similar to spinach.  It was nice, but as usual very spicy!  Following this we helped Ken to organise the children's enrollment sheets by their parent's occupations so that he could gauge the backgrounds from which they came- this revealed a large number of artisans and traders, and only a few of anything else.  I was surprised however that one child's address was stated as "Liberia camp", and apparently there is a refugee camp in the area.  This was unexpected for a few reasons, firstly because Liberia does not even border Ghana, and secondly because the civil war in Liberia has been over for a while now, so I was surprised that their are still people living in refugee camps, especially if they have been in Ghana for a few years.  I would be interested to see how the people live their, and whether what was a refugee camp has actually evolved into a permanent settlement.

We also informed Ken of our idea to paint 94 school, as it has no pictures or painting, but Kasoa school has lots, for example, the school song and national anthem on the walls of the playground area. Ken seemed pleased by the idea, and we are hoping to begin next week- should be an exciting project!

We eventually made it back to 94 around 2pm, so all opportunities for data collection had passed, and I decided to return the next day to catch up.  We took the tro home to Marcbeas, and the evening was relatively uneventful, apart from the continuous lightening which we could see for some time before the storm finally hit later on in the night, throwing down some serious rain, thunder and lightening and of course causing the electricity to cut out!