Adventures in Ghana: Madame Bling Bling.

Ali told me some stories of her time in Zabilla. One of her jobs was to introduce the teaching of ‘phonics’ to 6 or so schools in Zabilla and build capacity for the teachers to take on ‘Phonics teaching’ on their own by the time she left. She did an incredible job; demonstrating lessons, team teaching and eventually handing over the reins to those teachers who were capable. Phonics for those of you who are not familiar is a method of teaching people to read by correlating sounds with letters or groups of letters in an alphabetic writing system. The ‘ch’ sound Ghanaians have a particular problem with. In fact I remember Ali telling me that a man in a village introduced himself as ‘Keif’ which she interpreted as ‘Keith’ and went on to announce she knew many people by the name of Keith in the UK, whist at the same time thinking what an unusual name to have in Ghana. Shortly after this encounter she was corrected and told this man was in fact the ‘chief’ of the village and was unable to pronounce ‘ch’!

On a similar note Ali was getting rather fed up when driving or walking around the villages and being shouted at by the children saying ‘Nasaara! Nasaara!’ meaning white person in the local dialect. She tried (when she wasn’t on her moto driving), to encourage the children to use ‘Madame Alice’ (the nearest to Alison the Ghanaians understand) saying that they must use her name, not call her ‘white person’. This is something head teachers and teachers were also encouraging. Ali had started to introduce the ‘ch’ sound in schools and had put together some teaching and learning flip chart materials to aid the learning through pictures and writing. She had one wonderful flipchart page which summed up the ch’ sound….’children chasing chickens’ which when spoken and chanted in the classroom normally involved ‘ch, ch, children, ch, ch, chasing, ch, ch, chickens’ with the obligatory flapping of the chicken wings (teachers and children’s arms) when saying chicken. So when one day she was starred at as she was driving her moto by one small child and instead of shouting out ‘Nassara! Nassara!’ he simply lauched into ‘ch, ch, chicken’ whilst flapping his little arm wings as she drove by - she felt quite victorious at the passing of 'Nassara' and of course 'Madame ch, ch, chicken' has quite a ring to it….

Now I too am spending a significant amount of time in one school it seems I also have acquired a new name; Madame Bling Bling. Let me explain, because to me, without the explanation one could mistake that for my ‘porn star name’ or ‘lady of the night name’ of which I must fiercely deny immediately for it is the name Form 3 at one particular JHS in Bolga has given me. The school is one I have visited to do the ‘Science resource box’ workshop. During this workshop one of the practical activities I share with teachers is how to teach students about electricity without using electricity (useful as electricity can be an issue here in Ghana). Using role play I get the students to pretend to be electrons within a circuit and the room is reorganised to become the circuit. A couple of students are given the role of being the cells and provide energy to the electrons and the electrons drop off the energy to the student who is taking the role of the bulb and on receiving the energy the bulb goes ‘bling’…’bling bling’ if it gets two packets of energy. Introducing role play to Ghanaian teachers who are used to simply ‘chalk and talk’ methods of teaching is difficult when you need to express that their classroom management skills need to be modified alongside this and even though the students are up and moving around they can still have fun. This is best shown practically by getting them to act as the students. During the workshop at this school I realised there was not enough teachers to adequately explain the concept so this was the first school I enlisted the help of some students which just so happened to be form 3 and were asked to ‘bling bling’ their day away by Madame Ellie but also had a lot of fun doing it.

In fact on that same day as the workshop the school obtained 24 laptops from the Ghana government. It also happens to be the school to which the owner of my local spot (bar) is headmistress. A lovely woman. So when I sensed her concern over the safe storage of 24 laptops, how she was to charge them and the need to get them used by form 3 before they write their ICT exam in April and move on to SHS I felt compelled to help. I have spent the last couple of weeks writing a funding proposal for the MTN foundation which I hope will be successful and will provide funding for an ICT teacher laptop, projector, headphones, computer mice, extension cords, additional electrical sockets, secure and safe storage. Why can she not use her capitation I hear you ask. She hasn’t received her capitation for this term, let alone last term and the capitation for her school is just 100GHG. For some perspective on that amount; one computer mouse costs 10GHC, so you see her hands are tied. In Ghana the PTA in a good school is very active and raises lots of money to support the capitation given by the government, but clearly it cannot be raised immediately and the laptops were given ‘out of the blue’ with no indication they were on their way… as is the way things work in Ghana. No planning.

The laptops were sent to solve the issue of the very poor results that occurred throughout the country when the students wrote their ICT exam last year (the first year the ICT exam was introduced). Can you believe that last year the pass rate for ICT for this school was 17%? I can - when you are asking students to learn something so practical in a purely theoretical way. I couldn’t do it. It does seem very narrow minded of the government not to have considered the consequences of handing over a bunch of laptops to schools with electricity as if that alone will solve the issue. If the laptops are to survive in such a dusty environment, maintenance needs to be considered. What of the increased electricity bill? And who will pay for the internet connection to support the internet section of the syllabus in year 1, 2 and 3? (Last year they learnt about the internet by simply being told about it....goodness me!) I imagine this huge amount of money which has been put in to buying the laptops will quickly become a waste of money when they laptops fall into disrepair and there is no money or no one to repair them, or they are stolen as there is no where secure to put them. This school is lucky, the head teacher has a step son who is half Russian, he was schooled in the US and is a bit of a computer geek; a lecturer at the local Polytechnic. She has the support for maintenance from him (if not the funds) so is in a better position than most head teachers who have just received the laptops. In fact he has been very supportive in putting together the budget for the funding proposal.

I have also offered my services to support the ICT teacher in the teaching. For those of you who don’t know, ICT teaching is something I have done in the past (‘small small’ as they say in Ghana). For those of you who do know me (I was never a great ICT teacher!), don’t worry… some of these children haven’t even touched a laptop… I’m managing! It’s during these classes with Form 3 that the name Madame Bling Bling’ has grown. I will support this class for the next couple of months until they write their exams. They are lucky; they are a class of 22 and can have one computer each. Form 2 are a class of 53 so they will have to share. Form 1… well, you can see the upward trend beginning… let’s just say even with resources, schools still have challenges and they really aren’t easy to get over.