Tales from Ghana: Spring 2011

In this blog post Maire Tejani, the Founder of Yaarah Schools gives an insight into her latest trip to Ghana with some of our volunteers.

With this being my sixth visit to Ghana as the founder of Yaarah Schools I was glad to be joined on the first half of the visit by Janet Moore.  On the second half of this trip, I was joined by Russ Aziz and Kerry Hope.  Janet and I arrived in Accra on Saturday 26th March, very tired and all we wanted was to rest until the following day.  On our third day we travelled to the Volta region where Adaklu Aziedukope is located early in the morning.  Our arrival at the project site was unannounced at 12 noon, as we wanted to take the villagers by surprise in order to get a genuine picture of how the classrooms were being used and the progress being made.  We had to go through the formalities, this included visiting the chief and his elders to acknowledge our arrival to the village.  This is a culture which exists in almost all the Ghanaian communities and it shows respect for the chief and elders of the village.  Janet and I had a useful discussion about the project.  We went to all the classrooms to say hello to the children before having a meeting with the teachers to find out about some of their problems they are facing regarding teaching in the school.

We then went on to meet with the members of the school building committee to agree on the materials needed for the continuation of the block of two classrooms.  With all materials ready, the skilled men and the volunteers from the village got straight to work.

We provided both the school and the adult education students some useful educational materials and football kits for the children provided by charitable organisation Afrikit  www.afrikit.co.uk .

Maire and the team will be sharing more Tales from Ghana over the coming months. Have a look at the photographs from the trip here.