Acrostic Poems

Today, I got to TEACH! Yay! I went to visit the Children of God International School, unsure of all expectations. After getting off our tro-tro, we walked until we arrived at the village (no idea what the name of it is), where we twisted and turned through narrow, dirty, dusty alleyways. We ducked under lines of hanging laundry, danced our way around matted goats and sheep, and watched our feet with each step we took, as we dodged pieces of broken glass, pipes, and chicken poop, before reaching the school.

When we arrived at the school, the children were lined up single-file, with their hands on the child's shoulders in front of them. The students were in the courtyard (a tiny, open area that was blazing hot), chanting chants, as they affixed their eyes on the teacher and her stick. It was something you would only see in a movie. The kids were excited to see "obrunis", as we were the only white people in the entire village.

I talked with the headmistress, she halfway mumbled fragments of English, as she seemed unsure of the day's schedule and how to use us. I asked her how we could help and she said, as she motioned to the children, then to the classroom, "You (the three of us) can teach the students in there this morning." "What? Us?"--I thought to myself. She couldn't be serious. I was dumbfounded. Shocked. We were obviously unprepared and untrained, without any lesson plans.

Luckily, my mom and I prepared before I left for Ghana, buying pencils and pencil sharpeners during back-to-school sales ("Project Pencil" as we like to call it), so I had brought about 50 or so this morning. As we introduced ourselves, we handed out
pencils (I paid special attention to blue and green ones for the boys and to purple, pink, and glitter ones for the girls), and told the children we would be teaching them for the morning.

MB, Callie, and I stared blankly at each other, scrambling for a lesson or an idea. We thought we could teach them the ABC song, but apparently they were "above that level" (or so their teacher thought). So, we went with acrostic poems.

I wrote on the board...

C
A
R
L
Y

And we managed to go from there...with much distraction, disturbance, and chaos. With only half scraps of notebook paper. With children sharpening pencils with their teeth. With the teacher slamming her stick every now and then. We tried our best to teach.

(More on this later...)