Coconuts, Banku and wild Kids
It’s been only a month that I spent here in Ghana, but Elmina already feels like home. Here I am living in a room in the house of the director of AIM Ghana, Solomon Appiah. Unlike former volunteers I’m not staying in the village of Komenda, where the training center of the organization is located, but in the next town. After AIM had to stop the state funded voluntary service weltwärts there weren’t any volunteers up to me, so the house in Komenda was given up. As a result I have to spend time and money to get to my courses but on the other side I’m also enjoying the more urban lifestyle of the touristy town Elmina and the (in local terms) luxurious equipped kitchen of my landlord and supervisor.
It´s a fun fact that Elmina Castle has also been the first European settlement in Sub-Sahara Africa, and that I start my African adventure here…
Every Tuesday and Thursday I’m driving with public transport to the training center in Komenda to teach the local children, who don’t have any access to computers at Komenda Junior High School, in the basics of windows.
We started with the different functions of the mouse, learned how to navigate in folders and how to delete, copy and rename them. After having showed them some useful shortcuts we started with the use of word on last Thursday.
In the beginning there were two to three kids per computer, but after realizing that I don’t accept playing computergames in my lessons, the group condensed down to one child per computer. Besides this reduction it’s probably my change of strategy, to summarize the lesson on the board and giving thereby giving them something to practice at home, which is responsible that we’e finally making some progress…
Wednesday and Friday afternoons I’m spending at Essaman United Junior High School doing a movie-workshop. At the beginning we collected some ideas on what makes a good movie and some topics which they would like to make a movie on. Some of the kids wrote a story to a topic of their choice as a voluntary homework. We read them out in the next lesson and evaluated them on interest and feasability. In the end I gave in to the democratic decision, so we’re shooting a stealing-comedy now, and not the cute ‘be happy with what you have’-story out of a young students everydays life…
In this case I still consider it the best format to work together as a team with flat hierarchies and lots of communication, but I had to learn, that these brags in the midst of puberty need some clear borders even in such a fun project. After a bit of chaos in the first weeks we’ve nearly got to the point which I would call work atmosphere and friday we started the shooting.
The results you’ll see on the youtube channel of AIM and in my own vimeo-channel.
Besides those two projects I came with the intention to start a radio programme. I would have loved to show preferably Senior High Students to plan and realize a radio show how I learned and practiced it at the noncommercial radio station Wüste Welle the last year. I also offered to stay a month longer if we can organize a group of students that would also continue throughout the Christmas holidays. But it seems like this project won’t start anymore and I’ll be leaving even earlier than my as planned. Because there are exams and the Christmas holidays start at the 15th both the Movie-workshop and the ICT-Course must end beginning of December.
I could easily spend another month with my lovely friends around in Elmina and Cape Coast, the next bigger city, but without anything to dedicate to I feel like letting the journey go on. I’ll keep you updated in a further blog and in my vimeo channel.
Everybody who is considering whether to volunteer here, I would recommend to give it a try. The awareness about it, being more of a learning-holiday than a superhero’s mission, will spare you disappointment.
by Pablo Flock
