Yo Ghana: Last Year and Next

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

delmard@pdx.edu    http://yoghana.org

Christians and X-Mas

I've recently been reading Philip Yancey, who could perhaps be best described as an Evangelical Christian who irritates a lot of Evangelical Christians.  Yancey argues that Christians' primary responsibility is to manifest God's love rather than trying to force their moral code on unbelievers.  He in fact suggests that Christianity does best in situations in which professing Christians are not in control of the government or culture.

I believe that this sheds some light on why Christians' determination to turn "X-Mas" back into "Christmas" are misguided.  Every December Christians often come across as "Pharisees and hypocrites," self-righteous and legalistic bullies who hector and lecture defenseless check-out clerks who wish them "Happy Holidays."  The rest of the year many of us focus on denouncing abortion and same-sex relationships--two issues which (conveniently) don't much affect the straight men who run most Christian organizations.  What if we instead focused on the much more difficult task Yancey speaks of, the endless and exhilarating work of seeking to reflect and embody God's love to a broken world?

Our Debt to Our Ancestors

I'm at the Oregon Coast for a few days to rest and recharge. After spending September in Ghana, I returned to my teaching duties about 12 hours later, and it's been a wild 11 weeks.

While riding the bus to Tillamook I passed near where my maternal grandmother spent her early years. She dropped out of school after fourth grade because her parents couldn't afford the books for fifth grade. Plus, like many impoverished African parents today, they needed her to go out and earn money. While working as a domestic servant in a house in Netarts she met a young man who grew up on the land shown in the photograph, above. His parents rented the poor farmland, and his father, too, had a drinking and an income problem that drove him out of school at a young age. So they fell in love, got married, and worked and worked and worked to give their children (and therefore their grandchildren, like me, and all those who came after) a better life than what they had.

In Ghana I meet a lot of people who probably would have gotten along well with my grandparents, students and adults who are very earnest and serious and hard working, who are fighting steep odds to create a better life not just for themselves, but for the generations who come after--and their neighbors and their nation. Of course there's always the danger that those who come later, with much easier lives, take the prosperity that they won for us lightly. Easy come, easy go.

That would be a travesty. A very small proportion of the world enjoys the sort of choices and advantages that my grandparents passed along to me. Most or even all of the people reading this are probably in the same boat. So, then, the question becomes: what are we going to do with those choices and advantages?

Some 80 years after my grandmother's death, I am grateful to her. Will anyone be grateful to me, to us, 80 years after we are gone? Will we give them a reason to remember us, and to remember us with gratitude?

Why I Love Teaching at PSU

This photograph of Portland State University always makes me chuckle, as it is so generic, could describe most any small-town college campus.

My PSU is much grittier than this.  I have a little office in Cramer Hall, which looks like it was designed to survive a nuclear attack.  Let's just say it's short on charm.  The ground floor of our Student Union does not exude luxury.  We still have a lot of wooden desks that are bolted to the floor.  When I am teaching 3.5 hour classes, I am always thankful to be standing up rather than sitting down in such classrooms.

A very small percentage of the students live on campus.  Most of them seem to be always coming or going, not just hanging out.  They are coming to and from work, or rushing home to pick up their kids from daycare, maybe caring for an elderly parent.

It's the students who make PSU beautiful.

For starters, they are truly diverse.  Even a small class is apt to have students from several different countries.  Unlike certain colleges which will remain unnamed, PSU is not dominated by white students from privileged backgrounds who are trying to outdo each other in being more radical and sensitive than thou--not that there's anything wrong with that.  Rather, at PSU you find thoughtful students who are Mormons, Muslims, radical feminists, evangelical Christians, evangelical atheists, Socialists and Libertarians and everyone in between, and, of course, the guy who believes that hemp is the solution to every problem.  They usually listen to and respect each other.

And there are so many amazing stories, from the young woman who was a pregnant gang member at fifteen and is now headed off to law school to the guy who dropped out of high school and almost drank himself to death for years and is now getting an education to help others avoid those choices to the innumerable mothers and fathers who are somehow going to school and working one or two or three jobs and raising children and volunteering in their communities and turning in amazing papers and thank you at the end of the term.

Thank you for the inspiration.