its not every day a friend is able to mobilize a bunch of other friends and get $1300 in 7 days. when i got the news that dan had gotten this much money together, i was completely floored... i still cant really get over it still. after reading my last post about prince, and talking to me over msn last week, he decided he wanted to do something. he thought that he could maybe get 300-600 together over the weekend... that alone surpassed all my expectations. i talked to my sister on the phone on sunday night to hear that she'd noticed this facebook group that had already raised over 300 in like a day and from that point on, i only got more and more excited. i've spent most of the week trying to remember all the people on camp who i've had to say sorry but i just don't have that kind of money to so that i can find them and tell them that now i actually can help them out. i was all giddy just thinking about it... a welcome change from last weeks mood and series of events.
today, once i had the confirmed number in donations (which is actually now $2000 because of donations made from my family), i got to start spending! imagine how many people i can help out if $5 is all most are asking for. i had a quick moment of panic when i was like shit, what if i cant spend it all... what if i dont know enough people to give $2000 out to... then i realized that was totally ridiculous. i'm pretty sure somebody will be willing to accept money. the first person i helped out was a woman who did a bit of washing for me when i first got here. vivian is maybe in her mid-fourties and has been sick for awhile now and it has recently gotten really bad. i'd already agreed to get TB and malaria tests for her. today she got the results back, with positives for both of the diseases. instead of my usual 'ahh i don't know how i'm going to afford treatment for all this even though its only $17' and attempts at finding somebody to go halves on it with me, i could tell her htat it was no problem and we went to get treatment right away. $20 later (we got food so she could take her billion pills), she was at home with her two sons, hopefully on the path to recovery.
next on my to do list was to visit renato, an AIDS patient i've been going to visit for the past few weeks (months now actually..). he went to the clinic a few weeks ago to get checked for opportunistic infections and walked out with a $500 medical bill. obviously treating all of these diseases is not only unfeasible but slightly impractical... renato, sadly, is on his last leg i think. he's been on and off ARVs for so long now that they have limited effect... what i decided to do instead is treat the ones that cause him the most pain (syphilis and gonorrhea). those two cost $50 to treat and hopefully that will make his last little while more bearable. the stigma against him is really bad in camp and has the ability to totally crush him when he isnt feeling well... he says that getting any treatment at all makes him feel stronger and more ready to fight. i think that for him, there isn't a lot more you can ask for.
i know that just throwing money at people doesn't solve any of the underlying problems, and that people might be critical of what i'm doing right now. the thing is though that this money is able to make the people in the middle of this crisis a little bit happier, and make their lives a little bit more bearable. its not always a sustainable problem (although i do try to give money to people will be able to get a long term benefit out of it all - education or buying seeds to farm or something like that) but for them today, its enough. i wish so badly that there was a way i could capture the reactions that i get from people when i give them hassle-free money. i personally find it all a bit unwarranted, but its nice all the same (i dont know that renato's promises of a 11 story house, a rich husband and three children is something that i'll get for giving $50 that isn't even mine to him). a lot of the time on camp i feel like i'm not doing much and i start to doubt why i came here at all... some how though, between running this summer school and the ability to give out an incredible amount of money, i've become more sure of myself. that alone, to say nothing of the people that really do benefit from the money, is pretty incredible.
i flat out don't know how to get across how grateful i am to every person that helped out with that money. all of this has meant so much to me and to people around camp and i just don't know how to translate those feelings over a blog. i'll be sure to take pictures and write down exactly where all the money spent so that everybody can see, but even that just doesnt seem like a big enough illustration of what you've all pulled together to do.
thank you again.
"had it been another day, i might have looked the other way, and i´d have never been aware..."
Friday, July 25, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
60 8-10 year olds is too many.
i think i'm still holding onto my sanity... i've had to double check a few times this week though. its been a big one.
its been 10 weeks now in buduburam and the pressures of life on camp have started to show through this week more than before. i think this is both something to celebrate and struggle with. ive caught myself thinking to myself that life on the camp really isnt that hard for people sometimes (relative to other refugees and even other ghanaians or liberians of course) and i start to wonder if maybe my time and energy would be better spent in liberia. the faces and activities that i see on a daily basis around camp and at school don't differ that much from what i might see at home.. sure the kids are a lot thinner, but even that starts to loose its effect on me. the incredible abs and arm muscles that show through come to dominate over the fact that they exist because they're hungry. kids smiles and their constant demands for footballs make me forget that despite this energy, they may have only eaten once today, if at all. in that sense, i think its a good thing that i'm now able to see past it all without looking. maybe i'm learning a bit more about the camp and the liberians that i wouldn't have known otherwise. at the same time, its incredibly hard to deal with and so, you have to take it all with a grain of salt i guess.
anyway.. just as i get carried away with how okay things are on camp, you get weeks like this one to jolt you back into the realities of camp. on wednesday, just as i was getting to recooperate with sex and the city from a chaotic first day of summer school with 50 8-10 year olds in my class who could have cared less what me and my co-teacher were saying, my neighbour came to my door asking if i knew prince. everybody on camp is named prince, so i had to figure out which one he was talking about.. turns out, he was talking to the prince whose picture i have posted on the right. i'm totally obsessed with this kid, and his twin sister propsper. they're two years old and constantly come to my door to snuggle. recently, prince has taken to trying to open mouth kiss me.. together, they're the definition of kids that make you forget that people are hungry and in trouble. my neighbour came to tell me that prince had died that morning. he didn't know the details, but from where we sat on my front porch, we could hear prince's mother sobbing. it turns out that he came home from this massive birthday party the day before and his stomach had started to run. he was sick all night and in the morning, they took him to the clinic. a visit to the clinic costs about $1 to get the card to see a doctor, and then whatever the medication costs (for standard sicknesses, probably not more than $5). prince however, wasn't lucky enough to make it to the clinic... he died on the way there. after talking to more people, i found out that prince had been sick for awhile with a lot of littler things that didn't warrant a trip to the clinic. thing is that here, unless youre really sick (and can find an international volunteer to pay) you probably won't go to the clinic, let alone the hospital. there are so many what ifs with his story... i'd noticed that he was particularly light in comparison to prosper the day before he died but i thought that maybe i just hadn't noticed this before... kids get so small here that i have no idea what size a two year old should be. i just figuredf prosper was the bigger twin.. she's always been the noisier one of the two, so it was sort of fitting. i guess that wasn't the case.
prince's death, while it is far to ordinary here, has had somewhat extraordinary repercussions. for me personally, i lost a kid who i looked forward to seeing everyday. for others, i think its just brought reality to the happy little dreamland that we live in in our respective guest houses. while we very much live in the middle of this camp, with screaming babies and blaring music all around us, its still such a bubble that we seem to frequently get lost in with gin and charades.
that wasn't a hugely uplifting post i guess.... stories about my first 2 days at our summer school program should turn that around though. just picture me and another guy from the US attempting to control 60 8-10 year olds who think us as authority figures is the biggest joke ever. i spent yesterday shreiking at kids until i lost my voice because they just would not sit down. i gave up and started slamming the door until they listened. the first time i did it, all of them whipped around looking totally stunned. sadly, it lost its effect pretty fast. luke (co-teacher) and i resorted to a mass game of football that we seriously thought would result in a lot of broken legs. picture 30 kids chasing after the same little soccer ball on a rocky field. excellent. i'm sure our teaching awards are in the mail as we speak.
we've established a feeding program at this school (that is more substantial than the one they were aready running) and so by the time we were reading to give out the food, our numbers had swelled even more. after giving out bread and water, kids went totally haywire and we just sent half of them home. it got to the point where luke and i would go up to the kids and ask (okay, yell) do you want to be here? if they said no, they'd leave and then if they said yes we'd politely ask them (yelled) at them to go sit down and be quiet (shut up). more stellar teaching. i think the only lesson that they took away from that class was that 2 20 year old white guys cannot control mass amounts of children that respond best to flogging (hitting). god only knows what i'm going to do with them on monday when luke isnt there.... maybe i'll just go by a lot of sedatives or something.
its too early right now to say how i think the school is going. its right back to that sense of total helplessness that i felt when i started teaching with my grade 3s at the begining of my time here. i figured out the ropes though to them, and sent them off to graduate today happy with the little steps they've each taken (i sound like such a teacher-). i hope ill learn the ropes to thsi summer school too, but i just dont' ahve as much time to sort it all out and it feels like a much bigger project that i seem to be in charge of. a big wave of volunteers, who are pretty critical to the school right now, are leavnig in 2 weeks so thats going to be yet another wrench in the functioning of the school. i'm hoping the local teachers will be rested enough after 2 weeks that they'll be ready to come back and work with us.
wish me luck.
its been 10 weeks now in buduburam and the pressures of life on camp have started to show through this week more than before. i think this is both something to celebrate and struggle with. ive caught myself thinking to myself that life on the camp really isnt that hard for people sometimes (relative to other refugees and even other ghanaians or liberians of course) and i start to wonder if maybe my time and energy would be better spent in liberia. the faces and activities that i see on a daily basis around camp and at school don't differ that much from what i might see at home.. sure the kids are a lot thinner, but even that starts to loose its effect on me. the incredible abs and arm muscles that show through come to dominate over the fact that they exist because they're hungry. kids smiles and their constant demands for footballs make me forget that despite this energy, they may have only eaten once today, if at all. in that sense, i think its a good thing that i'm now able to see past it all without looking. maybe i'm learning a bit more about the camp and the liberians that i wouldn't have known otherwise. at the same time, its incredibly hard to deal with and so, you have to take it all with a grain of salt i guess.
anyway.. just as i get carried away with how okay things are on camp, you get weeks like this one to jolt you back into the realities of camp. on wednesday, just as i was getting to recooperate with sex and the city from a chaotic first day of summer school with 50 8-10 year olds in my class who could have cared less what me and my co-teacher were saying, my neighbour came to my door asking if i knew prince. everybody on camp is named prince, so i had to figure out which one he was talking about.. turns out, he was talking to the prince whose picture i have posted on the right. i'm totally obsessed with this kid, and his twin sister propsper. they're two years old and constantly come to my door to snuggle. recently, prince has taken to trying to open mouth kiss me.. together, they're the definition of kids that make you forget that people are hungry and in trouble. my neighbour came to tell me that prince had died that morning. he didn't know the details, but from where we sat on my front porch, we could hear prince's mother sobbing. it turns out that he came home from this massive birthday party the day before and his stomach had started to run. he was sick all night and in the morning, they took him to the clinic. a visit to the clinic costs about $1 to get the card to see a doctor, and then whatever the medication costs (for standard sicknesses, probably not more than $5). prince however, wasn't lucky enough to make it to the clinic... he died on the way there. after talking to more people, i found out that prince had been sick for awhile with a lot of littler things that didn't warrant a trip to the clinic. thing is that here, unless youre really sick (and can find an international volunteer to pay) you probably won't go to the clinic, let alone the hospital. there are so many what ifs with his story... i'd noticed that he was particularly light in comparison to prosper the day before he died but i thought that maybe i just hadn't noticed this before... kids get so small here that i have no idea what size a two year old should be. i just figuredf prosper was the bigger twin.. she's always been the noisier one of the two, so it was sort of fitting. i guess that wasn't the case.
prince's death, while it is far to ordinary here, has had somewhat extraordinary repercussions. for me personally, i lost a kid who i looked forward to seeing everyday. for others, i think its just brought reality to the happy little dreamland that we live in in our respective guest houses. while we very much live in the middle of this camp, with screaming babies and blaring music all around us, its still such a bubble that we seem to frequently get lost in with gin and charades.
that wasn't a hugely uplifting post i guess.... stories about my first 2 days at our summer school program should turn that around though. just picture me and another guy from the US attempting to control 60 8-10 year olds who think us as authority figures is the biggest joke ever. i spent yesterday shreiking at kids until i lost my voice because they just would not sit down. i gave up and started slamming the door until they listened. the first time i did it, all of them whipped around looking totally stunned. sadly, it lost its effect pretty fast. luke (co-teacher) and i resorted to a mass game of football that we seriously thought would result in a lot of broken legs. picture 30 kids chasing after the same little soccer ball on a rocky field. excellent. i'm sure our teaching awards are in the mail as we speak.
we've established a feeding program at this school (that is more substantial than the one they were aready running) and so by the time we were reading to give out the food, our numbers had swelled even more. after giving out bread and water, kids went totally haywire and we just sent half of them home. it got to the point where luke and i would go up to the kids and ask (okay, yell) do you want to be here? if they said no, they'd leave and then if they said yes we'd politely ask them (yelled) at them to go sit down and be quiet (shut up). more stellar teaching. i think the only lesson that they took away from that class was that 2 20 year old white guys cannot control mass amounts of children that respond best to flogging (hitting). god only knows what i'm going to do with them on monday when luke isnt there.... maybe i'll just go by a lot of sedatives or something.
its too early right now to say how i think the school is going. its right back to that sense of total helplessness that i felt when i started teaching with my grade 3s at the begining of my time here. i figured out the ropes though to them, and sent them off to graduate today happy with the little steps they've each taken (i sound like such a teacher-). i hope ill learn the ropes to thsi summer school too, but i just dont' ahve as much time to sort it all out and it feels like a much bigger project that i seem to be in charge of. a big wave of volunteers, who are pretty critical to the school right now, are leavnig in 2 weeks so thats going to be yet another wrench in the functioning of the school. i'm hoping the local teachers will be rested enough after 2 weeks that they'll be ready to come back and work with us.
wish me luck.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
guess its been awhile...
well. i guess its kind of been awhile... sorry, yeah? as they say here. things have really been picking up on camp lately and i really just havent found time to be on the internet...
its exam time right now at school (yes, grade threes write exams... the littlest pre schoolers do them too, which is totally ridiculous). last week was all revision, and this week is the actual writing. so far, it gone pretty well... i have a few kids that still don't understand things like long division so i'm having an after-school session with them to give it one last go before they move onto grade 4. i've noticed that with these kids, who are generally a bit slower to pick up on things, i get really frustrated with them and stop wanting to teach them. i reluctantly keep doing it though, because you start to realize that these kids are behind because teachers get frustrated, stop working iwth them, and then they just fall further behind, making things more furstrating and making less teachers want to work with them. not rocket science or anything, but it really makes me appriciate teachers in general, particularly those who only work with kids who are struggling.
since school is coming to a close on friday, our attention has been turned towards establishing a summer program for the kids on camp. after talking with a couple of the local volunteer teachers, i've sort of taken on this project. what i've found is that a lot of the teachers at CBW are now turning their attention to getting themselves back to Liberia (now that they don't have a job here) and so their willingness to do a purely voluntary teaching program during the day is kind of low. they're eager to lend a hand, but the planning is falling on our shoulders. i'm personally kind of pumped about it, because it means we can take charge and really get the ball rolling. we've decided to make this school totally free, with no uniforms required and we'll provide pencils, papers etc. we want to get as many kids as possible (i might be kicking myself for saying this on wednesday when i'm up to my armpits in kids) so yeah, no barriers to enter.
we're hoping to have a big focus on reading at this summer school, using the books that we have in the library. what i've found with my grade 3s is their ability to read new material is really limited. they're wicked at memorizing and reciting, but putting a new book in front of them is totally foreign. i did this free reading stuff with my kids and they'd never done it before, but it worked really well. hopefully, the same will happen just on a bigger scale with these guys (or.. it will be total chaos). we also want to push free writing and stuff like that here.. this whole creativity idea is something that isnt really pushed at CBW, probably due to a lack of resources and teacher training. whats cool right now is that we have a bunch of trained teachers here with us, hwo have experience and ideas that we can really put to work. because they only just got here, they didn't really get the chance to do any official teaching, but i think they might actually be more useful in this program than during the actual school year.
we started to do outreach today to let the camp (population of about 20 000 now... it was 30 000 when i got here) know about our school. we've divided the internation and local volunteers into groups that will go into each of the 12 zones on camp. today i did one zone and got an incredible response from the people. a lot of people were so excited to hear that it would be totally free and that we would be establishing a more in depth feeding program (although how we're going to buy and cook rice for hundreds of kids is still a mystery...). i think that the first few days are going to be totally chaotic and insane at this school, but hopefully by august we'll have something established. its a big project, but it feels really good to be doing something that, while we wont see any real results, is going to be a bit more concrete and really beneficial to the kids who are just sitting around right now because they cant get themselves to school.
the orphanage and the pee has also been keeping me busy. yesterday we took some of the older kids to a recreation day that CBW hosts every tuesday. these kids, like the ones i met in uganda, continue to just blow me away with how they take care of each other. not only do they make western kids look like huge weenies, but they really put the kids on camp to shame as well (who, until this point, i thought were pretty self-sufficient). they don't have a choice in how fast threy grow up, but it just blows my mind that one woman (regina) and a couple helpers are able to raise kids that not only do well in school, but are so polite, well mannered and generally well rounded. at the field, one kid started beating on one of the ARCH (the orphanage) kids and rather than starting a mass brawl (which is normally what happens) the ARCH kid came over to tell my friend that this kid was beating the crap out of him. that being said, isaac, a 2 year old at the house, continues to punch me from the second that i come in the door. regina says its a twisted sign of love that he only gives to me... i'm not totally sold though.
i'm rushing right now to get to dinner at a teachers house tonight... he always makes me and my friend come over for dinner (which ends up being a boring discussion of how he can marry british royalty). i'm not thrilled about going this week but... he's found me in the internet cafe so, i guess i'm going to go eat some fufu and fish soup with him. lucky thing he has a really nice mother who is cool to hang out with.
i'll be in accra later this week and will give a bigger update then... i just felt bad it had been so long! hope canada day was good - it overlaps with ghana's republic day so it was kind of overshadowed here.
its exam time right now at school (yes, grade threes write exams... the littlest pre schoolers do them too, which is totally ridiculous). last week was all revision, and this week is the actual writing. so far, it gone pretty well... i have a few kids that still don't understand things like long division so i'm having an after-school session with them to give it one last go before they move onto grade 4. i've noticed that with these kids, who are generally a bit slower to pick up on things, i get really frustrated with them and stop wanting to teach them. i reluctantly keep doing it though, because you start to realize that these kids are behind because teachers get frustrated, stop working iwth them, and then they just fall further behind, making things more furstrating and making less teachers want to work with them. not rocket science or anything, but it really makes me appriciate teachers in general, particularly those who only work with kids who are struggling.
since school is coming to a close on friday, our attention has been turned towards establishing a summer program for the kids on camp. after talking with a couple of the local volunteer teachers, i've sort of taken on this project. what i've found is that a lot of the teachers at CBW are now turning their attention to getting themselves back to Liberia (now that they don't have a job here) and so their willingness to do a purely voluntary teaching program during the day is kind of low. they're eager to lend a hand, but the planning is falling on our shoulders. i'm personally kind of pumped about it, because it means we can take charge and really get the ball rolling. we've decided to make this school totally free, with no uniforms required and we'll provide pencils, papers etc. we want to get as many kids as possible (i might be kicking myself for saying this on wednesday when i'm up to my armpits in kids) so yeah, no barriers to enter.
we're hoping to have a big focus on reading at this summer school, using the books that we have in the library. what i've found with my grade 3s is their ability to read new material is really limited. they're wicked at memorizing and reciting, but putting a new book in front of them is totally foreign. i did this free reading stuff with my kids and they'd never done it before, but it worked really well. hopefully, the same will happen just on a bigger scale with these guys (or.. it will be total chaos). we also want to push free writing and stuff like that here.. this whole creativity idea is something that isnt really pushed at CBW, probably due to a lack of resources and teacher training. whats cool right now is that we have a bunch of trained teachers here with us, hwo have experience and ideas that we can really put to work. because they only just got here, they didn't really get the chance to do any official teaching, but i think they might actually be more useful in this program than during the actual school year.
we started to do outreach today to let the camp (population of about 20 000 now... it was 30 000 when i got here) know about our school. we've divided the internation and local volunteers into groups that will go into each of the 12 zones on camp. today i did one zone and got an incredible response from the people. a lot of people were so excited to hear that it would be totally free and that we would be establishing a more in depth feeding program (although how we're going to buy and cook rice for hundreds of kids is still a mystery...). i think that the first few days are going to be totally chaotic and insane at this school, but hopefully by august we'll have something established. its a big project, but it feels really good to be doing something that, while we wont see any real results, is going to be a bit more concrete and really beneficial to the kids who are just sitting around right now because they cant get themselves to school.
the orphanage and the pee has also been keeping me busy. yesterday we took some of the older kids to a recreation day that CBW hosts every tuesday. these kids, like the ones i met in uganda, continue to just blow me away with how they take care of each other. not only do they make western kids look like huge weenies, but they really put the kids on camp to shame as well (who, until this point, i thought were pretty self-sufficient). they don't have a choice in how fast threy grow up, but it just blows my mind that one woman (regina) and a couple helpers are able to raise kids that not only do well in school, but are so polite, well mannered and generally well rounded. at the field, one kid started beating on one of the ARCH (the orphanage) kids and rather than starting a mass brawl (which is normally what happens) the ARCH kid came over to tell my friend that this kid was beating the crap out of him. that being said, isaac, a 2 year old at the house, continues to punch me from the second that i come in the door. regina says its a twisted sign of love that he only gives to me... i'm not totally sold though.
i'm rushing right now to get to dinner at a teachers house tonight... he always makes me and my friend come over for dinner (which ends up being a boring discussion of how he can marry british royalty). i'm not thrilled about going this week but... he's found me in the internet cafe so, i guess i'm going to go eat some fufu and fish soup with him. lucky thing he has a really nice mother who is cool to hang out with.
i'll be in accra later this week and will give a bigger update then... i just felt bad it had been so long! hope canada day was good - it overlaps with ghana's republic day so it was kind of overshadowed here.
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