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Lending a Hand in an African Village (Don't Mind the Goats)
August 1, 2003
By ADAM COHEN
PRAMPRAM, Ghana
The first time a goat walked into the classroom, when I was
going over some of the fine points of complex sentences, I
was not sure exactly how to proceed. But by the second
time, a few days later, I knew the drill: I was expected to
keep teaching while a student in the front row quietly led
the wayward goat out the door.
My lesson in goat protocol came in mid-July during a
two-week stint teaching English in Prampram, a small
African village on what was known, in colonial times, as
the Gold Coast. I was there with Global Volunteers, a
nonprofit group that sends people to work in needy
communities worldwide. Our 15 team members, who ranged in
age from a Yale premed student to a 71-year-old
grandmother, included lawyers, nurse practitioners, a bank
officer and an advertising executive.
We were in Africa, it turned out, at the same time as
President Bush. It was heartening to see the president take
an interest in Africa, and promise it badly needed aid. But
it was unfortunate that he did not take the opportunity to
push an idea he raised in his 2002 State of the Union
address: the importance of ordinary Americans' volunteering
in foreign lands.
It sounded simple when Mr. Bush said it, but I suspect that
many people would be wary, as I was at first, of showing up
in a place like Africa on a mission to do good - worried
that the local people would see them as overbearing,
supercilious Westerners. But that wasn't what we found.
Village residents, who are far more used to sharing and
helping one another than we are, saw it as natural, and
welcome, for outsiders to come lend a hand.
Prampram was, in many ways, as exotic as we could have
expected. Whites are so rarely seen that the children ran
into the streets pointing and yelling "blofono" - "white
man" in the local language - when we passed by. There were
dirt roads, open sewers and - everywhere - goats. But
Ghana, a former British colony, still has a strong flavor
of Mother England. The children of Prampram have first
names that could be found in the starchiest British public
school: Patience, Jonas, Victoria, Comfort. The education
system is still dominated by the old Anglican and Methodist
missionary schools. And Christianity is deeply entrenched:
the cars and vans have decals proclaiming "Trust in Jesus";
the shops have names like "All Praise to God Beauty Salon."
We were assigned projects on our first day. The medical
volunteers worked in the village clinic and did outreach
with a traveling well-baby clinic, which weighed babies in
a scale hung from a tree limb. The construction volunteers
helped a local crew build a septic system.
The teachers were divided among several schools. Mine, the
equivalent of an American junior high school, was one of
the smallest and bleakest: two grim classrooms in a
building that lacked windows and electricity. There were 10
reading books for a class of 35, so when it was time for
English, the students moved their desks into clumps of
three or four, each group sharing a single book.
Little of the outside world reaches Prampram. My students
asked about my eyeglasses, the purpose of which eluded
them. When I showed them a book of New York photographs,
they had trouble understanding that people lived on each
floor of the tall buildings. The World Trade Center
produced a glimmer of recognition. The students wanted to
know why it had been attacked, and whether the attackers
had been caught. One student had heard that Osama bin Laden
was angry because America had reneged on a promise to pay
him money.
Fifteen people working in a poor village for a few weeks
cannot have much of an impact on a community. But Global
Volunteers sends a continual series of teams - groups have
been coming to Prampram for three years. It is the
organization, not individual volunteers, that provides the
sustained effort. As we wandered around town, there were
eerie signs of blofonos who had come before: children with
limited English who inexplicably started singing "Blowin'
in the Wind"; first graders who ran up with palms in the
air, squeaking, "Gimme five."
It is a cliché, in situations like this, to say that you
learned as much as you taught, but it was still true. We
picked up some of the local culture: we all learned a few
key phrases of dangbe, and we could do "the snap" - the
Ghanaian handshake, which ends with the shakers making a
snapping sound with their middle fingers. And we sat out
under a star-packed African sky and debated, as local
residents do, the relative merits of Star and Club beers.
We also learned about dignity in tough circumstances. The
children of Prampram are poor - some came to school
barefoot - but they are unfailingly polite. They call their
teachers "Sir" or "Madam" and, as a sign of respect, never
look them in the eye. And they have a communitarian spirit
that American students lack: when one is struggling at the
blackboard, the others quietly call out the right answer.
Our Global Volunteers team leader, a Prampram native, said
that one thing he wanted us to tell people back home was
that despite the serious deprivation we observed all around
us, the people we met were happy.
When President John Kennedy started the Peace Corps in
1961, he hoped that it would bring other parts of the world
"that decent way of life which is the foundation of freedom
and a condition of peace." Volunteerism is about that,
certainly, but also about smaller connections.
On my last afternoon in Prampram, one student, Joseph, came
by to wish me a safe journey. He told me that in two years
he had to take a test that would determine whether he could
continue his schooling, but that he did not have any books
to practice reading. He hoped I would be able to send him a
"storybook." Then he shook my hand - his eyes averted - and
uttered the same phrase several other students had on my
last day at school: "Don't forget me."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/01/opinion/01FRI4.html?ex=1060756631&ei=1&en=13c510210e7bfba3
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