Again, difficulties with internet have led to a lack of Abrobiano blog posts, here’s some from the past couple of weeks…. enjoy!
5th February 2014
Over the past week we have been focusing on completing our surveys. This task was made more difficult by the fact that several parents were unable to remember their children’s names, ages and even how many children they had actually had. We also noticed that the majority of the population went to the toilet on the beach - making us think twice about going swimming in the sea! However we are making good progress and hope to finish this week! Also this week we finalised the tests that we gave to our pupils. The tests were designed to gauge the knowledge of our students before we started teaching them. Also this week… we started teaching! After a bit of panic over planning lessons everyone has settled into their roles. The topics we are focusing on are Health, Malaria and, for the Junior High School students, Sexual Health. It is a lot of content to pack into 8 weeks of lessons but we are all feeling confident about it.
This week has been as much about planning ahead as it has been doing things in the present. We have arranged to play the Cape Coast volunteers in a football match on Saturday the 15th of February, which promises to be a competitive fixture. We have also drawn closer to choosing a destination for our mid-placement review, where we will be travelling to the Volta region for a couple of nights. We are looking forward to clean sheets and a proper shower. On week 6 we are hoping to put on an awareness-raising football tournament involving local children on the Abrobiano football pitch. This will happen over the weekend, and we hope to draw people’s attention to personal hygiene - hand washing, tooth brushing etc. Other plans include a talent show and the re-building of steps for one of the local primary schools we teach in.
Patrick and Emma 
12th Feb 2014
The past week has been as entertaining as it has been challenging. Our schedule has been packed - making lesson notes for our classes, teaching and finishing off the surveys. Some of the UK volunteers have found the language barrier a bit of a struggle in their lessons, but everyone is working really hard and coping fantastically well. Proud of us! As well as our lessons, we’ve been training for our football match with the Cape Coast volunteers this weekend. Since their placement is focused around football we are at something of a disadvantage. We’re determined to surprise them though, so we’ve been working on being deadly in the box and strong at the back, like a donkey. Kweku has been a brilliant coach, despite his insistence on warming up before every session (surely a warm up is redundant when the temperature never drops below 25 degrees?).Of course during all of this we’ve had hanging over us the cloud of entering data gained from the surveys into an immense spreadsheet. Sometimes you look at the number of surveys and wonder if we’ll ever finish. We will though - just a bit of a slog at present!
On Monday we had an ICS Learning Day presentation from Emma and Kimbrela. They said they were going to talk about litter and, sure enough, their presentation was absolute rubbish (sorry). They spoke very well and got us all worried when they suggested that, at our current rate of consumption, Britain would run out of space for landfills in 2018. They also closed with a useful ‘Four Rs’ system for disposal of waste: Reduce, Re-use, Recycle and Recover. The Cape Coast lot also came up with a novel way of re-using their empty water sachets - weaving them into a volleyball net that they plan to donate to the centre for future matches. We’ll be sure to look out for other methods because litter really is a big problem over here.
On Tuesday we visited Komenda market! We wandered around Komenda for most of the day. Something like a larger Abrobiano - the same assortment of shacks and shops and traders - surreally interspersed with European architecture, remnants of the colonial days. Komenda Fort is the third-oldest in Ghana, and was used for the gold and slave trades. Some of us bought some cloth to get made into clothes back in Abro. When we got back we had a wee celebration of Emma R’s birthday - a card and a smiley mango. Next week we are visiting the Cape Coast volunteers for the weekend. They’re promising a pretty good time so there will no doubt be some interesting blog content as a result. Until then, chaps!
Patrick and Emma
