Peter, growing up in Africa, climate change was talked about in schools and in the curriculum, though not as much as in the Western World.

However a huge part of the every day problems you mention is the environment. I believe Grant’s students mentioned deforestation and bush fires. Those are just 2 topics that we received much educating on in Zimbabwe along with water pollution, soil polution, erosion and all the other types of pollution. As you can imagine the outdoors are a big part of African life and I noticed a big effort to educate people on how to take care of their environment. So I think the difference with the West is more on the personal emphasis. Rightly so, because a lot of people still rely on subsistence farming, the industry (though it does pollute) is relatively not as widespread.

The nice thing about industry in developing countries is that we’re skipping whole generations of ‘bad’ technology and inadvertently doing our bit.

Grant, I will post some answers and questions in a follow up comment.

Take care, and I’m excited to meet your bride someday soon

Peter G.

Judging by some pictures in your gallery, i’lld say that with form 2 and 3, you mean second and third year of SSS ?
Together with 4 classes per year that would mean that your town has not less than circa 6000 inhabitants.
And it is on the Berekum side of Tain,
and (surprisingly) has electricity.
So i’m guessing your town is Seikwa (although that has 10,000 inhabitants).
(i learned all these from ghanadistricts.com (wikipedia doesn’t have much on Tain)
and also used a higher resolution version of the map on my website ;
if you would like to have a copy, please feel free to email me)

If you are in Seikwa,
i guess one of main development problems would be that there are no perennial rivers,
and no obvious opportunities for dams,
although farms in the river valleys would be better off in that respect,
especially the ones near river Tain (which is perennial).
So Seikwa would be a service town (given it’s electricity and relatively good roads)
and would be usefull for fertilizer/pesticide sales, harvest storage, market,
JSS/SSS, agricultural extension service, healthcare, etc.
Agriculture would need to be profitable before services to it become profitable.
I think that ‘not forest belt’ means that rainfall minus runoff is not enough to support evaporation of forest,
but in many places water is stored undergound, so there are still many trees.

With only 4 classes per yeargroup, your classes would be quite large, i think.

I don’t understand why you spend time on grading test papers.
Tests ofcourse are usefull, but papers ?!?
Aren’t you supposed to do everything with ICT ?

Do you use data of local economy to make your pupils interested in using spreadsheets etc ?

What OS do you teach your pupils ? Linux or Windows ?
Do they allow you to make your own mistakes, or can they not afford that ?
I gather that of the 12 teachers in your SSS, 5 would not be qualified teachers ;
i wonder what that really means ?

I also wrote a small software, which is called canvas and executes drawcommands ;
it can be found on my site (and i have put an RFP bug for it in Debian’s bug tracking system).
Maybe you would like it.

Don’t become a monk in later life !
Start your own pizza place instead ! (yummy

Ĝis revido!

Good to hear from you. Sorry about the delay in replying to you.

Life in rural Ghana is all about routine. I do vary it from time to time, of course — going to a spot for a minerals with my colleagues, bike rides in the bush, buying red-red or kenkey for dinner instead of cooking — but when you have to be in school all week, spontaneity is unfortunately rare. My main opportunities to depart from the beaten path come during the term breaks, when I travel, bike, work on projects, and so on. That’s one of the main differences between the Education PCVs and the PCVs working in other sectors; Ed PCVs live in a state of punctuated equilibrium, whereas Omnibus (the other sectors) have a bit more fluidity in their schedules.

Speaking of schedules, I think there’s a little confusion in how a school timetable works here. The time table isn’t structured to have 47 periods total; it’s 47 periods per class per week. Form 2 and Form 3 are both divided into 4 classes, to whom I teach 4 periods of ICT per week. It doesn’t seem like a lot at first, but it means that most of my day is taken up by teaching, and I have very little time left over to prepare lesson plans and mark papers.

Tain is borderline savannah, though my village seems to straddle the savannah and the forest belt. Mechanized farming is making inroads to my area, but so far, it’s pretty limited; I can count all of the tractors in my town on one finger. The farmers make it work, but everybody seems to agree that another tractor would be necessary to get the most out of the Agric. Mech. program.

My town is actually located in a triangle between Sampa, Techiman, and Berekum, with most of our road traffic going through Berekum except for market day. The Sampa Road is about 2 hours drive from my town. Therefore, we don’t have a lot of road-side business; we’re more of a rural town surrounded by farms.

Thanks for the questions!

I’ve been following you on RSS since last year, and am just checking in to say, good job. I wish I was local enough to make for the lunch, but the blog will have to do.

I hope everything is well and you have a safe journey back.

We are grateful that the Peace Corps is still alive!