it's august

the cute kids who live down the street


HIV sign on the campus of local school


apparently crap rhymes with top?! (one of liz's student's homework)

finals
last week we experienced the joys of organizing final examinations for the school. it was... a process. liz and i volunteered our stellar typing skills and typed most of the questions for all 8 grade levels. there are a load of subjects: english, math, science, religious/moral, catering, pre-technical, social studies, french, twi. they use windows 97 msword. the computers turned out to be not too shoddy though the keyboards are sticky. but there is only one old-school printer. we print the tests onto special stencil paper that is then put into a manually cranked copy machine. kinda like a ditto machine. we have to squeeze black ink for every new set of 40 sheets, re-insert them to print on the backs, and crank away! it took forever! about 4-8 pages for each test, 6 subject tests for a grade level, maybe 40 students in some grades...you do the math. at one point they had to print out in larger font because the ink was smearing, doing this lead to using a lot more stencil paper, which they ran out of, and then we had to ask the students to donate more money (liz and i put in a nice amount) to buy a new box of stencil paper. whew! today we finally gave our last exam. we've been marking them, recording their grades and ranking the students. tomorrow is "our day" where all the students bring in food and have a little party!

side-note: the funniest exam question i came across was while typing Mr. Kassei's P3 (third grade) English exam. they are learning reflexive pronouns. dude, if they found this in an american test, and the student answered correctly, they would probably put him in counseling! or maybe the teacher.

Question: I want to kill _______.
a. ourselves
b. yourself
c. myself

malaria pregnancy and sheep
vera's friend's niece came to visit from the states a couple weeks ago. she's a 4th grader named barbara who was born in Ghana but has been growing up in the suburbs of Seattle. she came to school with us for a couple days while her mom went to visit other relatives. really mature little girl. we had interesting discussions about Harry Potter. but at one point she tells me she has a little brother and says, "yeah three years ago when my mom was visiting Ghana she got malaria and it made her pregnant." and i'm like, "umm, are you sure it was the malaria?" she assures me and replies "yeah, malaria can do crazy things." liz and i start grinning. barbara shares that she has also gotten malaria before. so i ask her if she is pregnant as well! and says "oh no.. it only does that to adults." thank goodness i havn't gotten malaria yet. pregnancy is not something i'm prepared for yet!

later on we take her to see waterfalls near school during lunch break. (how many elementary schools do you know are walking distance from waterfalls?) as we are going down this steep path we cross a big herd of sheep. they are sort of dirty and have lots of stringy thick wool. all of a sudden they start BAA-ing at us hardcore and walking toward us. so far all the sheep i've come across are scared of me or ignore me. but these were kind of belligerent and the BA's became really loud and persistent and souded more like BAA-UUUUUUUUUGHHH (like they wanted to throw up). barbara flipped out and started grabbed my arm really tight. i tried to stay cool but couldn't help laughing my head off. wow, my most memorable sheep attack!

willage people
couple weeks ago we met some austrian teens. there is an austrian woman who started an NGO called Help for Ghana many years ago. it sponsors local ghanian students as well as donates computers to schools. a few times a year she visits to check up on the students and brings interested austrian computer students from a technical highschool. we met them one day when they came to akuffo tom. they stayed in town for a couple weeks, getting computer facilities running at schools (i think they brought 180 pc's this trip) and setting up networks. they were staying at the house of the town nana (chief) so the teachers at our school were invited to a durbar (an event hosted by the chief where there is dancing, drums, official cermonial stuff). the last night they were here we visited the nana's house while they were getting their hair braided. it was pretty funny hanging out with 17 year old austrian boys who are into computers, horror movies, and punk music. we learned some austrian-german slang! "peepeefine" is "great" and "shizer" is "not great." the way they pronounced their v's as w's (example: willage instead of village) reminded me of my austrian friend in taiwan (Hi Kurt!) so i told liz and vera about it and one night vera jokes "are you visiting the willage people?" and she isn't even aware of the cultural reference to the disco era band.

shio in africa
my sister is here! we picked her up from Kotoka airport in Accra friday night safe and sound. since finals are still going on so we're sticking in akropong most of this week. saturday we did a little day trip to the Cedi Bead Factory (we are all about learning the bead-making craft) in a town not too far away called Somanya. it took a long walk after getting off the tro-tro so by the time we went through the tour, bought a couple nice beaded items and some fried sweet potato on the side of the street, we were pooped and came home. yesterday, vera's newly wed sister jane invited us to the methodist church in dawu (another town close by) so she got to experience an african church service with much singing, dancing and hankerchief waving. we brought her to school to meet the kiddies. we had to spell the difference between J-E-A-N and J-A-N-E several times when introducing her. today the three of us organized a scavenger hunt for the kids. big success! later this week we plan to travel a couple hours to nearby Boti Falls, a trip into the capital (mainly to go to the ATM for some cash), Akusumbo Dam (which is part of Lake Volta the largest man made reservoir in the world), a town called Ho-Hoe (where there is also supposedly a really great Kente cloth market) and a monkey sanctuary. Apparently there used to be an abudance of this species of mona monkeys. traditional religious believers protected the monkeys because they were thought to be the translators of tortoises. but then, monkey numbers dropped dramatically in 1980s as Christianity became popular. ha! churches killed monkeys!


"bead factory" more like huts behind a family's house where they fire crushed glass in kilns to make into pretty pretty beads

shout out to my lovely coworkers at TPR who sent me like 12 postcards! wo ai ni! thank you so much! i will make a collage of the scenic taiwan cards on my wall:) i miss the good ole' teacher-lounge-guffawing-at-random-stuff times:) oh gmail isn't working but i will see about setting up a taiwan-ghana pen pal exchange for the TL classes. that would kick butt!