Schools, Beavers, and Jesus

Hope International School against the setting sun.

I had to look twice to be certain but I’m pretty sure it was a live beaver, dangling head first, with its feet tied to a stick. “Fifty Cedi” was the offer. My instinctual reaction countered at 20 before I realized I had absolutely no need for a beaver-on-a-stick. I would much rather buy a good, used paperback. But no such luck. In fact, there isn’t a major book store in the entire country. I have been in Africa for too long.

We took a different road to the school than we did last year. I didn’t recognize anything. But then a lot can change in a year out here. “They even paved the road,” Eric said gleefully. “I can tell,” I mustered as we careened into a, well, beaver-sized pockmark in the road that sent my head into the ceiling of the ragged VW Golf. But as we got closer to the school I started remembering. What used to be piles upon piles of locally-made cinder blocks now composed a beautiful wall, 2 meters (6 feet) high, around the majestic Hope International School. The septic tank that we toiled for hours in the hot equatorial sun to build, was now covered, painted, and polished clean. Overgrown shrubbery sprouting from forgotten cracks in the concrete walls of the school were all but gone, and in their place stood tables, chairs, desks, and books. It was another situation where I had to look twice to be sure, but the school, the half-finished hope and prayer of last year, now had its first students - and in smart looking uniforms no less.

The first students of the school, out of uniform. Over the next month Eric hopes to register an additional 30 students.

“Many of the students commute to Madina or Accra for primary school,” Eric says. “Some travel more than 30 kilometers (20 miles) by public transport. This school is closer and more accessible for everyone.” But as Eric quoted his reasons, once again, for opening the school, all I could do was sit and stare. I hadn’t seen a toilet seat in 11 weeks and now here were 3 of them. I couldn’t find a book in this country and now here were shelves of them (I even read Goodnight Moon for good measure). The classrooms were even outfitted with whiteboards. Whiteboards?! My high school in Berkeley still uses chalk. It was a true sight, a magnificent construct, and an epic transformation from only one year earlier, when the GO team first partnered with SGM.

I had traveled to Ghana explicitly to see the opening of our first school. And in the few weeks I was here I decided to go on some “administrative outings”. One such outing involved an EPA field agent (questionable relation to the US agency of the same name) who needed to sign off on the school’s Environmental Outlook papers. So we set off to Accra in search of this man. About ten minutes out of Madina, we happened to see him sleeping under a tree next to the road during normal business hours (mind you it was 11am on a Monday). So we decided to wake him. At this point the three of us walked to a nearby hospital (luckily there was one!), commandeered a consultation room from one of the resident doctors, and promptly discussed the merits of water runoff and seepage, a topic that in my humble opinion would benefit a road building outfit far more than a rural prmary school on a dirt plot. In the car I was told that the man would charge 100 Cedi (about $80) to look at the school. “You mean for the certificate?” I asked. “No,” Eric replied, “more like if he gets the money he will fill out our forms, if not, he won’t.” I immediately understood. Sleeping under trees and holding 0.5 office hours per week was tough business, so it was better that we subsidized his income for a recommendation letter stating, simply, that our dirt driveway indeed had  “Adequate water runoff potential.”

Another such “administrative outing” went as such: For some reason in Ghana, businesses are all named after something religious. There is the “God is Love Hair Salon”, the “Jesus Love Me Forex Bureau”, and the “Forgiveness Communications” office. So it should come as no surprise when we stopped in a small local business center aptly called “Only Believe” to print some education board letters and the like. Upon entering the small shop I was immediately impressed by a modern-looking computer AND a copy machine. Rarely in Africa do you see not one but two modern looking pieces of electronics under the same roof. Yet when asked if we could conduct our printing, the response was simply that the computer was “finished” (a gem of a word used across Africa to refer to something that is broken, missing, or that never worked to begin with). I pointed to the copy machine, at this point not holding my breath. “Also finished,” came the reply. Trying to be clever, I said I must not have believed hard enough. He missed the joke. I suggest this business center scale back on its “Belief” inventory and stock up on some “Holy Toner” and “Jesus Printer Paper”.

Director Eric Annan with his two right-hand men.

But I digress. As far as the other programs GO helps support here in Ghana: the orphan feeding program is looking to expand into more slums, the mango farm is nearly planted, and there is now a child sponsorship program implemented in an attempt at sending the most at-risk students to the Hope International School. Well hope they shall receive. In the coming weeks (official start dates really have no bearing here), Eric hopes to register as many as 60 students, giving the all-too-clean walls and yard a bit of what it really needs: life. The school additionally hopes to contract a bus to pick up those children who live further from the school. But it must draw a fine balance between keeping costs low (currently about 30 Cedi, or $25, per term) and providing additional services. Yet the palm-fringed walls surrounding this oasis provide nothing short of the perfect place for learning outside the aptly named slum of Accra: Sodom and Gomorra.

And so as I look out into these hills, and think about everything this school has become in the past year, everything it symbolizes for GO in terms of our first major project, I realize that I too have come quite a long way. Five-thousand kilometers (3,500 miles) overland across some of the worst roads on earth, 18 days (432 hours) spent in a car or bus, 3,000mg of Ciproflaxin with 1,400mg Imodium (and still the possibility of a tapeworm), running out of cash in 3 countries, 6 books that don’t change no matter how many times you read them, and 83 days in sub-Saharan Africa. But who’s counting?I have to admit it will take some time to readjust to the Western world after traveling for so long. The mere thought of not arguing over an $0.80 overcharge in a taxi scares me. But there will also be benefits. Like our new school, GO too needs time to grow, to cultivate its expanding resources, donors and staff, into a larger and stronger organization. We’ve come a long way in just 2 short years. But then that’s just the beginning.

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-Kyle Miller