the children ate my art supplies!

last week went really well again, and im finally settling into teaching :) as it will be easter soon, brittany and i decided to do some easter creative art lessons, so with the older classes we bought them an egg each. class 5 were asked to decorate their eggs with felt tip and they did a pretty good job :) after we left the lesson we decided we shud probably go back and collect the eggs jsut for the day incase they got broken, we had only been gone 5 mins and when we got back, half the kids had taken their eggs to the cooks! :( so much for taking pride in your work! haha :) so we learned from that one, and much to class 6's disappointment we drained their eggs before the lesson before they could decorate them with glue and tissue paper. they kept asking to cook them but we said they couldnt :) muahahhaha!
On the weekend we went to Accra for Henry's birthday which was pretty good but i dont like accra very much, its very very busy its a bit scary, so many people grab you trying to drag you to their taxi, shop, or to get your number so they can come visit you in england lol but we got around pretty well in the end. This week is revision week and next week is exams so hoping the kids will do well or there could be a lot of caning :S brittany and i have planned an easter egg hunt for thrusday so really excited about that :) xxxxxxx

this week has gone really well teaching wise :) taught quite a few lessons this week and i think the children understood me as well! a bit! friday night, all the volunteers met at funko beach in the evening, the night was going pretty well and it was nice to catch up with everyone. One of the girls ran into the sea in her underwear and other began to follow, i wanted to go but i didnt really want to swim in the dark so i was a bit hesitant, so one of the boys who was extremely drunk picked me up and pretended he was going to drop me in the water as a joke, i was kicking and screaming and then he fell over :( sad times! so i had a very soggy uncomfortable taxi journey back to my placement! Saturday, Briittany, Mingwei, Stephen and I decided to go to the cocoa factory in sekondi, but when we got there it was closed. The smell coming out of the factory was amazing which made it even more painful that we couldnt get inside! so brittany and i decided to go to mingwei's placement to help her set up for her birthday party. It was a really cute party, and it was kind of sad as well because mingwei had to leave on sunday unexpectedly because her uni course starts earlier than expected so she had to fly back to china :( which sucks because she was really nice.
On sunday me and brittany did some more washing, which is always fun! especially when we have to wash our underwear and it always seems like as soon as we do that about every person we know turns up to say hello! Kennedy brought china (his 3 month old puppy) around to meet us as well which made me very happy :) its nice to see that some people look after animals here, a few volunteers want to go to the zoo in Acrra but i think it may be a little less animal kind than the zoos in england!
this week im starting lots of easter thing in creative art lessons, today class 4 drew eggs and decorated them and me and britany are hoping to do an easter egg hunt as well next week :)

i watched football :O

Last Tuesday Julia (a woman who works for latitude) and her husband, and henry came to visit me and Brittany at the school to see how everything was going. We told them about the fact we were hardly teaching and they said they would speak to the headmaster about it which is good. (however it has been a week and very little has changed!) on the bright side, we started football club this week and it went really well :) we took class 5 and class 6 who are about 10-12 years old and walked with them to the local community field, which is beautifully placed next to a picturesque rubbish dump with vultures circling overhead haha the kids really seemed to enjoy getting a chance to run around and even two of the teachers decided to play as well. I of course was terrible but enjoyed watching Brittany beat the teachers :) On Saturday afternoon we all went to meet Julia and henry at raybow hotel and then for dinner at acroma plaza. After the meal, Julia and henry left and we decided to go to a beach bar, which was really good fun until 3 of the girls decided to leave and about a minute after they left we heard a really horrible scream and it freaked everyone out. It turned out it was just one of the girls had seen a frog! But even so, we were all a bit edgy after that so we left soon after. Sunday was really good, Kennedy (one of our host familys friends) took me Brittany and mingwei to a football match at sekondi stadium. I was surprised how nice the stadium was! We watched kotoko (Ghanaian team) play a team from morocco. Kotoko won 3-1 and i was laughing throughout the whole match at how much Ghanaians go mad at ANYTHING that happens in a football match. They score, they god mad. Someone falls over, they go mad. Someone is substituted, they go mad. It was really funny, but then at the end of the game when they had officially won, everyone just left, no one cheered or celebrated, it was really weird! Health wise i am fine (touch wood) although my feet have been swamped with mosquito bites and its very difficult to resist the urge to scratch them L im on my 4th book already, and we have a bit of a book swapping club going on now J also mum, i remembered the name of the dan brown book we couldn’t remember, i saw it in the airport, its called deception point. Sad news – the kitten died L fern and Margaret buried him at their local beach, im glad he never lived at our placement because they seemed really upset so im glad i never got too attached to him.
Hope everyone is well, missing you all! And thanks for all the comments ive been getting its good to hear from everyone xxx

long weekend

have found a hotel with wireless internet :) so using brittany's laptop which is so much easier than the computers at the internet cafes!

had a long weekend from thursday until monday (today) so did a lot this weekend which was good :) school finished on wednesday, so thursday we came to africa beach hotel to sit around and do nothing which is always fun :). friday we went up to busa again as a farewell to rosanna who decided to go back home, which sucks because she was really nice but i suppose if you arnt happy then why stay just for the sake of it? friday night we went back to takoradi and me brittany, margaret and fern got ready for the independance day party at last hour beach near the harbour in takoradi, it was a pretty good party and lots of the volunteers managed to make it from their placements so it was really nice to see everyone :)
tom offered me a snack he had bought called killy willy??? which is fried plantain covered in cinamon, which although sounds nice, tasted horrible, but everyone else seemed to like it? maybe im weird.
Saturday we began our trip to butre to go to a hostle known as hideout lodge. couldnt be named better. after a 30 min trip in a trotro (local mini bus full of street sellers who have bowls of fruit and dried fish with them) we then got another trotro 40 mins down dirt roads with massive potholes until we finally got there! this place was incredible, the beach was completely empty, there were hammoks and i got an egg sandwich and chips for lunch :D (by the way laura, seriously craving eggs benedict this week!!) the boys decided to sleep in a tree house, but the girls opted for a dorm that was sturdily fastened to the ground :)
sunday morning we went on a "crocodile safari" which was really just a slowly decaying canoe ride down a river that smelt like sulphur :) we saw a tiny bit of an alligator through a bush and one kingfisher, but i suppose its all still an experience :)
sunday home we got back and spent 2 hours helping sammy (our host brother) to number and stamp school books.
A funny cultural difference story for you :) out here when you say call me to someone you say "flash me" which didnt go down to well after a taxi driver gave me his number and then asked me to flash him! haha :)
missing everyone back home, but having a really good time :) love you xxxx

hello :)

found some more internet! exciting times! feeling a little competitive with richard now seeing as he has a ridiculous amount of posts and they are very funny and i only have two :( soon he will travel and discover the pain of internet cafes :)

Getting back after such an amazing weekend was a bit depressing and i am still having air conditioning withdrawal symptoms! The day we left the hotel a kitten fell off the roof and one of the volunteers found it and couldn’t find the mother so has decided to raise it herself. It was so young it couldn’t even open its eyes but got news today that its eyes opened today so its all very exciting, this poor cat has about 17 parents now who all want to hold it and feed it. We are slowly getting into a routine at the school, i have asked the head master to take nursery off my timetable as it is impossible to teach kids that don’t speak English, i promise i tried! But i only can say about 3 sentences in fante before i run out of things to say. Starting up the art club has also proved to be a lot more difficult than expected, as the school bus refuses to take home those who stay later and parents will complain so i have asked if i can teach all creative art classes and let the kids use the materials i brought with me in the lessons. We are hoping to start a football team as well and possibly play some teams from other volunteers school but being organised isn’t really a priority in Ghana so im not sure if it will happen but it would be really cool if it did. I have a long weekend this weekend as there are no lessons on Thursday or Friday and possibly even Monday as it is Ghanaian independence day Friday 6th march, i think there is a beach party thing on Friday so that should be good and the navy guys have promised to bring us chocolate from the vending machines on their ships so i have a very important reason to go really :)

i finally got internet!

okay so firstly i should apologise for not posting anything on here for the last 3 weeks! but in my defense the internet here is ridiculous. it takes about 45 mins to load up a page :S but im at a hotel this weekend and the internet here is really good so i will try to fill you in as fast as i can :)

so i got through the security gate at heathrow and realised i have never been in an airport completely by myself before which was a bit scary but i managed to navigate my wway to the boarding gate and found a few of the other volunteers and finally got to meet everyone properly.. there are 17 off us in total, 11 girls, 6 boys.

we arrived in acccra after a 7 hr plane journey and as soon as i got out the door someone had already grabbed my bbag to "help" me get it on the bus and then demanded money from me, which i didnt have so i ended up giving him my sudoku book :(

we stayed at our reps henry's house for the first week and spent most of the week on a teaching course at valley view university, which was extremely long and boring bbut it is ccool to say i have been to uni in ghana :)

henry's wife emily cooked us lunch and dinner everyday ffor a week for 17 of us and the food was pretty goo. LOTTS of rice lol but we get some pretty good fruit its all really fresh.

the ride to takoradi where myy placement is took about 5 hours and we dropped people off along thee way. my placcememnt is pretty good, its opposite the school so i dont have to walk far at all in the mornings, and our host mum makes us chicken and chips for dinner occasionally which i always look forward too :) the watter works about 20% of the time so there is a lot of showering from a bucket which really is no where near as bad as i thought it would be, its just annoying when u judge how muchc water u need wrong and dontt have enough to get the shammpoo out of your hair lol

the school is insane, im not sure if they actually have proper lessons? but the kids are really cute, the nursery children all call us "obruni" which means white person and one girl actually cries when she sees sus cos she cant unerstand our skin colour at all haha it is strange being a minority lol

me and brittany decided to wash our clothes the otther day and this woman showed us how to do it properly and warned us our fingers would be sore, shee didnt say that they would be friction bburnt and bleeding! mine wernt too bad but brittanys looked really painful, really appreciating washing machines right now!

this weekend i am stayying at a hotel on busa beach which has air conditioning which is very exciting :) we met some guys from the navy who spend money ridiculously, and they decided to buy a roomm for the night jsut so they cud use the jet skiis even tho they have to be bback on the ship at midnight, but it worked out well for me and 2 other girls bebcause it ment we got a ffree room for the night :)

i hope that kind of sums up the last 3 weeks a little bit, i will try to find a bettter internet cafe but i cant promise anything! hope everyone is england is well :) xxxxxx