Yo Ghana! in 2014 and 2015: Exchanges for Transformation
2014 has been an inspiring year for us.
We are now working with 16 schools in Ghana and 18 in the U.S., from second
graders through graduate students. Fellow board member Brando Akoto and I spent
September visiting the Ghana schools. Since school started in the fall we have
facilitated the exchange of more than 2,300 letters. We added two new board
members: Dr. Eric Ananga, a Lecturer at the University of Education, Winneba,
and Harriette Jackson-Vimegnon, the Assistant Principal of Beaumont Middle
School in Northeast Portland. Both are passionate about education and
opportunity for our children. Thanks to the efforts of co-founder Elizabeth
Fosler-Jones, the FRANK Creative Group donated to us a state-of-the-art website:
http://yoghana.org.
Most important of all, we have a
better sense of our mission. At a summer board retreat we arrived at the term “transformative
exchanges” to describe what we do best. I am repeatedly struck while visiting
schools in both Ghana and Oregon at how vulnerable our students are. Those in
Ghana often feel or believe that their schools and lives are “less than” those
in the U.S. We tell them that their new friends need them not just to learn
what Ghana and Africa are really like, but also for inspiration and encouragement.
Many of our Oregon classrooms are populated by a lot of students who are
struggling with school and life. We tell
them that their friends in Ghana need to learn that not everyone in America
lives in a mansion, that their lives in fact are much more similar than they
might have thought, and that simply receiving a thoughtful and warm letter from
a student in the U.S. is an act of respect in a world of staggering
inequalities of status as well as wealth.
In fact part of what
Brando and I learned in Ghana is that relationships are more important than
financial support. Again and again we found that our Ghanaian hosts insisted on
giving us the best accommodations and meals that they could while expecting
little in return—except our friendship. Don’t get me wrong, all of the schools
we work with have acute needs. But we learned that the best way to meet those needs
is slowly, through partnerships in which local schools and communities lead.
Our goal is not to send over a wad of cash to plunk down a new computer lab and
then move on, but rather to augment and stimulate local initiatives, including
ones in which students in both places collaborate to serve students less
fortunate than themselves. We are in it for the long haul.
That said, we can make
good use of monies donated to us. Projects
for 2015 include helping schools to: create a plan for how to pay its teachers while
serving many students from impoverished homes; finish classrooms so that
kindergarten students are taught in groups of 50 rather than 90; make books
available for students to use during and after school; expand student access to
computers and other technologies.
Our plans for the
coming year also include establishing and measuring desired outcomes for the
letter writing in both sets of schools, to further refine what exactly we are
trying to do and how well we are doing it, a task made easier by the fact that
our board already features academics who do that sort of research. We will also
be having a dinner in the Spring to celebrate the dedication of our teachers in
Oregon and to raise a bit of money for our projects in Ghana.
More important than money or
expertise or research, though, are deepening the roughly 1,000 friendships that
we’ve helped to get started. We are an
all-volunteer organization in which relationships, not money, are the driving
force. The teachers and administrators in Oregon and Ghana get nothing tangible
from Yo Ghana! except for maybe a shirt and certainly a whole lot more work.
Mr. Nantogma has worked so feverishly at organizing more than 100 writers at
his senior high school that the staff and students now call him “Mr. Yo Ghana!” Ms. Julia in North Portland is routinely at
work several hours after her students leave school, but she somehow makes time
for Yo Ghana! Mr. Brew in Sampa not only
insisted on feeding us three times a day and taking us to the town’s chief, he
painted our logo on the side of his school.
When we return to Ghana we’ll be paying our own way to fly there and to
get around—but also relying again on the hospitality of friends.
And that, I think,
speaks to our ultimate goal, that twenty years from now the paint may have
faded from the side of Mr. Brew’s school, but that the friendships it signifies
will endure and spread, that a generation of people in Ghana and the Pacific
Northwest will have grown up thinking of each other as cherished friends rather
than exotic or mysterious strangers, that thousands of students and hundreds of
teachers will have learned not just about each other, but to care for each
other.
I’ll close with the
words of a student at a school in Northern Ghana that is mostly Muslim: “If we
choose to, we can make the world a smaller place.”
Let’s do that.
David Peterson del
Mar, Yo Ghana President and Gofer
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