We Moved and It Is Good

This is the view from the back of our new house facing west-ish. Little Vesuvius in the centre-right is actually an anthill that’s more or less 12 feet high. Seriously.

The land we’re on was loaned by the University of Ghana to the engineering firm that built the George Bush Highway. (Dunno if its for Dubyah or the other guy, or if they’re supposed to share.) The deal was the company could borrow land from the university for houses that would be deeded to the university in lieu of rent at the end of the project.

Ours is the house on the right.

Five of ten houses are occupied. We think of it as the first tract home development we’ve lived in: all the trees are the same height; everyone has the same garbage can; uniformity, people, uniformity. We have two bedrooms, our most functional kitchen to-date, privacy, and a couple of dynamite porches tacked to the house’s front and back.

Our rear windows look out over grassland that turns into a cornfield. The vertical cement posts across the back are intended to support a barbed wire fence. Besides ants, the fields host a variety of birds, including some I hadn’t ever seen until we encamped. There’s one eccentric variety of brown bird that sashays its hind quarters toward starboard and port at the same time it both condenses and loosens its tail feathers when it walks, as if it were a strutting girl wagging a ponytail, then fans its tail feathers really wide and flat for flight. Wacky. (PS. An amateur ornithologist friend made me track down the bird. It is a Senegal Coucal.)

Chai's routine is largely unchanged since moving.

Meet the Children of God

I'm spending a lot of time these days working with a really cool elementary school. The Children of God Community School provides kids in Accra’s Adenta neighbourhood with elementary education even if the parents can't afford to pay fees, with school supplies and uniforms, and a daily bowl of rice. The kids who attend CGCS are from poor families, and many of the seventy-odd students stuffed into the school's four small classrooms have already spent time living or working on the streets. If CGCS weren't there, its pretty likely that many of these students wouldn't have a chance to learn. 

Chilling by the water cooler.

Science class.

Camera! Did someone say camera!

Francis offers lunch in the unfinished part of the building.

Not enough desks or uniforms.

Three of the CGCS’s teacher’s are former street kids as well as the school’s founders. They're motivated by the idea that education combats poverty, and by a desire to keep kids off the street. Cujoe, Sule, and Ozzie, all in their late-twenties, taught school in a church, under a tree, and in an abandoned house before they raised enough money to rent land and put up a small school building. Because the school doesn’t make enough to pay them, these guys don’t have homes themselves: they sleep at the school on student benches that have been pushed together. These three guys are kind of my superheroes. 

from l: Ozzie, Sule, Cujoe

Sule & the little blue school that could.