5:20 pm Ghana time
This language thing is crazy! I have three languages spinning through my head all the time: English, Ewe (local African dialect), and American Sign Language. A lot of the teachers at the Deaf school are hearing, and I was really excited to know that--until I realized a lot of them only speak Ewe. It's not too bad, though...I'm becoming fluent in ASL faster than I ever thought possible.
Today at the Deaf school I taught the concept of family. The School for the Deaf is a boarding school, and some of the kids are orphans, so it was extremely difficult to get across the concept of parents (not to mention I was trying to do it all in sign language). I tried to explain brother and sister, but that was a complete lost cause.
To explain what each family member's sign was, I made flash cards. I have never seen the kids more excited about anything!!!! I guess it was the first time they had any school supply besides a small workbook, a pencil, or rusted bottlecaps.
The differences in my kid's learning levels are starting to come out, too. One of my kids fingerspelled the words mother and father to me, while others did not even understand the signs after an hour of the lesson. This challenge makes me SO excited for the upcoming weeks, though!! I know I have the ability to figure out where each student is at, and what they are going to need to be able to successfully learn.
The kids in my class are not malnourished by any means, because this is a government-sponsored school and they have money for food. However, they take so much advantage of everything. It's so different from the kids in the states. Their snack this morning was a bowl full of nuts, and they all downed them in less than a minute. We started to leave for a class trip to the library and one of the teachers started going through the kids' pockets. I figured out some of them were trying to save the nuts in their pockets to eat later, and it broke my heart to see them hit (they're all for corporal punishment here) just because they were trying to save some food.
The library has two wooden tables in the middle of the room, surrounded by benches for the kids, covered in yellowed newspapers, textbooks appropriate for fifth or sixth graders, atlases, and one children's book about monkeys. Let me tell you, that monkey book was the attention of the entire class. Every student took a turn looking at it, showing me what the monkeys ate and what they did--it was obviously the only book they had ever truly read.
Today I had one of the kids ask me if I ever shower. I said yes, I shower every day, and the kid had such a scared look on her face that I asked why. Turns out she thought that I had showered one day, and washed all my color off, and that was why I was white. Ha! Try explaining to a Deaf five year old girl that you were just born white!
They also kept signing "Teacher, you're a pig". I couldn't figure out why, so they took me to the pig pen to show me that the pigs have white hair over their pink skin, just like I have white arms.
The entire country of Ghana has been in a blackout for the last two days, and we only just got electricity back. Luckily my house has a generator to use at night, but the rest of the country has been pitch black. What was amazing to me is that the electricity went out during the day one day and no one even noticed. Electricity is just not essential in any way, shape, or form here.
Sorry this is so long!!! I'm not very good at the whole short blogging thing.
Miss you all!
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