Counting the little things during service

Apr 5, 2025

8 min read

This blog is a continuation of sorts from the blog I just posted yesterday about starting a game club with my students. That post was getting too long, but I actually had more to say, since yesterday happened to be quite eventful! Sometimes during service you have a big event or occasional that's particularly notable, like a religious festival or starting a club with your students, but often it's really the little interactions here and there that keep you going. Taking you through my day, here's some of those little interactions.

First, I’ll briefly go back a bit and tell you what happened earlier in the day, BEFORE all the club stuff. I popped into town yesterday morning before school–I rarely do this, but I was out of water sachets and needed to buy some. After carrying them back on my head (it gets easier with practice, I can even go no hands now), I went to my maths class. The spring term is already ending next week, and the Form 3 students will be taking a Mock Exam of the BECE, which they will take for real later in the year to apply for SHS. So, we used the class time to review a bunch of topics on the exam.

After my class was over, and I’d stayed a bit over time as well, I went back to my room to relax for a small bit. Of course, the entire time I was hanging out I felt a bit guilty since the students were all in the classrooms doing whatever, unsupervised by any other teachers as no one else had shown up, so after a bit I went back out to engage with them. I found most of them playing games of football–in the classrooms of course, to keep out of the scorching sun. They were playing 2v2 games with the doors on opposite walls of each classroom as goals, first team to 3 goals. I had seen them playing this the day before and decided to join them, and I did yesterday too. Sometimes I try to teach them more when I come back to the students outside of my classes, but they were already occupied with this, and it’s good exercise for me anyway. I played a few games with my student Adamu as my partner–we won one!

2v2 classroom football–the kids watching on from the desks get super into it!

Now we can skip back to after Wunintira AKA Maligunaa Game Club finished. It was still 30 minutes or so from sunset, and many boys were out playing on the football pitch (no grass, but a big expanse of dirt with metal netless goals on either end, in front of the school). I noticed the boys seemed younger than the ones I’m normally used to seeing play–turns out these were the SHS-age boys, evidently home for vacation already. I was hanging out in my room, but my student Abdul-Hafiz showed up, telling me his older brother, who was playing football, was asking for water.

It’s unfortunately difficult for students to get water to drink while at school. Really the only way to get water is by coming into the teacher’s quarters compound, where there is a big tank that is kept full of tan-colored dirty water that the teachers use for ablutions before prayers. For the most part I don’t really see adults or older kids drinking water that’s dirty like this, but the younger kids (primary school and below) will still come into the compound whenever it’s left open and drink some. But I do have my own smaller stash of clear water on my porch, which I use for bathing–it’s slightly more difficult to get–and the older students have recently discovered that they can ask me for some of that water to drink and I will usually give it to them. I don’t want to give it every single time, because before I know it I’ll have a steady stream of students drinking from my water supply without asking me, but at the same time they do need to drink, so it’s hard for me to ever say no. So in response to Abdul-Hafiz’s request I poured plenty of water for many to share into a large bowl and even added the rest of the ice cubes I had made in my freezer.

These are the kind of small but nice interactions I want to show you–the interesting subtleties of me interacting with the students and with the community, because almost every single aspect of what I do is different to life in America. To be fully honest, not everyday is like this, full of random and interesting interactions–some days are much less eventful, either because just fewer people happen to be hanging around or I’m lacking the mental energy to go engage with people.

Anyway, I finally retired to my room yet again, and had the inspiration to start writing my day down–but little did I know the day was still far from over. I sat in my room with the door open starting to type, and some young boys came around investigating, wanting to see what I was up to. Usually I see the young girls Saphia and Rashida come to visit me, but these were some similarly aged boys who I didn’t know as well–of course, they knew me, though, as does literally everyone in town. Because I had left my door open they were able to make it all the way into the entrance of my room, and honestly it was pretty funny to see them quickly stop whatever they were starting to say and go quiet in awe of my messy room with a bunch of random junk they haven’t seen lying around. I’m telling you, this one boy was just pointing to things he was seeing, and as I was trying to keep him from pushing further into my room I was also explaining it all to him–yes, that’s a jar of mayonnaise I left on my table/desk, yes, there’s other food on my shelf over there, no, I don’t think that picture on my wall of a natural spring was taken in America, it’s just a print that I brought with me here to hang up because it’s pretty. Of course, most of this I could only say in English, so I’m not sure how much he actually understood.

I wanted to get back to writing, but the boys were persistent in their curiosity. I decided to indulge them and invited my cat (oh yeah, I got a CAT. His name is Jollof and he is very sweet and playful. Also for another future post) over for them to observe, though he wouldn’t get too close. Finally they seemed about ready to leave, but first asked for some toffees. Now, I don’t just hand out toffees to anyone who comes by asking, because, again, I would start receiving a steady stream of expectant children. I was considering giving the boys a toffee each just this once, but as if hearing the call, other children started to enter into the courtyard, so I knew it was time to escort them all out and take my leave.

Once again, I thought that was it for today. But much to my surprise, about an hour later, I sat writing and heard a knock on my door. It was none other than Abdul-Hafiz. Like Adamu, he’s another of my better students, very bright, though sometimes troublesome; a class prefect, and a newly elected Vice President of our club as well. He said he was just there to say hi, which surprised me, because it was after sundown at this point and he hasn’t really ever done this before. But of course I was happy to speak with him, so we took out chairs and sat in the little courtyard.

Incredibly, we ended up sitting and chatting for the better part of two hours. We talked about many things. I talked to Abdul-Hafiz about the BECE exam, and if he was excited for SHS next year. He said yes, and that he wanted to go to an SHS in Tamale. He asked me what classes I took in SHS, and I told him I took Band, and learned to play many different percussion instruments. He also asked me what classes he should take, and I told him he should take whatever was interesting to him, but I recommended STEAM classes–Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics. An interesting part of our conversation was when we were talking about WhatsApp, a messaging app which many use here in Ghana, although it does require you to pay for internet data, so some just use basic messaging and calling. Abdul-Hafiz showed me that on his WhatsApp account he was using Meta AI, the included AI language model you can message on Meta-owned WhatsApp. He had been using it to ask some science questions and the definitions of certain words! So there you have it–out here in a small rural town in northern Ghana, a JHS student who managed to get access to a smartphone and occasional internet is using AI to help him in school. He also showed me that he had tried asking it for a diagram of the digestive system, and it had given him some weird AI-generated image, so I showed him the wonders of Google, where we found many such diagrams.

As Abdul-Hafiz and I sat out in the courtyard with the front doors closed, I left my door open to allow Jollof to roam around, which he likes to do when it’s not busy. He’s very timid of people he doesn’t know, and was shy coming out with Abdul-Hafiz hanging around, but we managed to coax him into eating a treat from Abdul-Hafiz’s hand. Oh, and at some point I discovered there was a baby goat (AKA a kid) we had accidentally shut in the courtyard with us while he was off taking a nap in some secluded corner–Jojo was very curious to go see him, but when I went over to see what they were doing Jojo got spooked and ran away.

Finally it was getting late and I told Abdul-Hafiz I’d better go see if the woman I sometimes buy food from was out cooking tonight. She in fact was, so after grabbing my flashlight and bidding Abdul-Hafiz a good night, I walked into town and asked the woman to make one of my favorite meals I can get in the village, spicy spaghetti and fried eggs. I paid her and walked back home.

A Brief Conclusion

Again, today just happened to be super eventful and I wanted to share it with you all. Like I said, this really isn’t what all days are like. Today was honestly a great day, but some days I only get a bit of this, or none at all. One thing I’ve certainly learned is that Peace Corps service is very much like a roller coaster, with some big highs and some big lows. Overall I have been struggling a bit with my mental health–which I don’t say to make you feel bad, but just to be fully upfront with you about what things are like here. To be fair, I did come in with preexisting mental health issues, which were already medicated and for the most part under control, but naturally the difficult circumstances here exacerbate things.

I know I should try writing more frequent, shorter blogs–I can’t stop myself from being all perfectionist about it and wanting to write down absolutely everything or nothing at all. But I do have some other stuff on the way. I actually filmed a little vlog about my living space almost a month ago now, I just haven’t gotten around to editing it, but I’ll get there! I’ve also been trying to post more casual, impromptu stories on my Instagram account, which you can see on my profile even after the fact on my Peace Corps story collection. And check that post on the Peace Corps Ghana Facebook page!

I think that’s all the big updates for now. Got a cat. Doing my best, as always. Thanks for checking out the blog, and I look forward to reading your comments!