School trip – Ghana Style.

Sometime in January while I was facilitating a workshop for a circuit of schools in Bolgatanga a teacher, Joseph, was sharing how important he finds the school trips he runs each year.  I said innocently that I would love to go with him and would be happy to be a member of staff looking after a group of students if he needed me. Six months later he hadn’t forgotten that innocent comment and he phoned me to invite me the following Saturday.  Unfortunately it was not possible as my work commitments had increased 10 fold… trouble is you can’t say no once you have said yes so to speak. They following day he phoned to tell me that they were changing the day of the trip and he hoped I could make the new date!  It still wasn’t ideal timing but I felt compelled to go.  7am Saturday and I was there (having been up since 3.45 to wave off my Upper West friends who had been staying with me and were getting the bus home).  I was knackered before I started.  It was a relatively fast process getting the children sorted and we had left school on two buses having done a vague headcount by 7.40am.  

We visited Navrongo Dam (3 times bigger than Vea our local dam)….

The children quing to have their photo taken

Me with one of the teachers and Joseph (the teacher who invited me on the trip) in the background

The fish ponds and Paga crocodile pond…

No man’s land and Burkina Faso….

And finally back to Ghana in one day with 200 JHS children....





Despite having the official paperwork for the boarder for which I was included they still made an example of the white woman and I got pulled aside at both the Ghana and Burkina border; my teacher colleagues rescuing me in Burkina shouting ‘She is one of us!’

The children loved the trip!  Insistent they wanted to do another one again next week… some had never been on a trip before, many had never travelled further than their local village, let alone gone to another country (albeit for 10 minutes!). 

The journey home was fuelled with excitement from the day.  The children shouted (although some claimed it was singing!) and danced their way home.  Somehow, and given the noise levels, I’m not sure how, I fell asleep.  I remember once a school trip with Parkside to Barcelona with two buses of pubescent year 9’s… after 24 hours on a bus with them the smell was rancid.  Just 8 hours on the bus with this lot and we were in the same position.  It took me the rest of the evening for my ears and nose to recover but it was a great day : )