Integrating into the Community

Hello everyone! I know it’s been a while, but time has really gotten away from me as I’ve been managing with the struggles and successes of my new life as a Peace Corps Volunteer. There’s so much to share with you all–about teaching, cultural experiences, personal connections, and much more, but in the interest of keeping this a relatively short read, here’s an overview of what I’ve been up to for the past few months. 

I’ve been at my site for almost 4 months now. I meant to post this blog closer to 3 months in, since the first 3 months at site are referred to by Peace Corps as the “integration period.” For PCVs, integration into our communities is an extremely important aspect of service. This is why our “job” is really 24/7–we are always in the process of becoming closer to the community members and learning to live like locals. Integration serves many purposes: functional, as our ability to fulfill our roles and serve our community rely on being close to the members of the community and understanding it well; protective, as being connected to those in the community will also allow them to keep us safe and look out for us; and even social, since being so isolated means our only opportunity for human connection is with the community members. 

This is one of the reasons that Peace Corps service is a long 2 years (after

swearing-in)–as you may already know, integration into a completely new community takes time. It’s not over just because I completed this “integration period”–it is a continual process that I will have to keep making efforts towards.

Anyway, what integration really looks like from a day-to-day perspective is getting used to my new routine, trying to make connections with others in the community, and of course engaging in my official position as a teacher at the JHS. I will definitely say that all of this has taken a significant amount of effort. To be completely honest, it seems as though almost every aspect of life is at least a little more difficult than what I’ve been used to previously in life. But, of course, that’s what I signed up for–and overcoming it is what will make me even stronger as a person and allow me to help the rest of my community.

when the villagers were all harvesting their groundnuts, it was very common to see huge areas of the village covered with these groundnuts laying out in the sun to dry

Teaching

I’ll give a brief overview of what my life looks like, starting with teaching (sometime in the future I’d love to do a day-in-the-life post and detail what I do throughout the day). Monday through Friday I have classes at the JHS, where I teach Creative Arts and Design to Forms 1, 2, and 3, and Maths just for Form 3. This means I have a few classes every day that I go and teach, and of course I have to plan these lessons in advance. I plan my lessons with the goal of best engaging my students using the national Ghanaian curriculum, though this has its own difficulties. 

Like in many villages in Ghana, particularly in the north, my students have had less than consistent schooling. This means they’re far behind the national curriculum (which is actually quite rigorous). It’s no worries for math, because I just focus on establishing the basics that they were never fully taught, and take my time with the students. Of course, they’re as intuitively smart as any other group of middle schoolers, and working slowly through these concepts with them over the past few months I’ve been able to see them starting to progress in their overall numeracy skills. Creative arts is a whole other situation. Even though it’s part of the national curriculum, my students haven’t really learned creative arts before–without enough teachers assigned to my school, it was deemed less important and just hasn’t been taught in past years. Meanwhile, the curriculum covers many difficult and intangible concepts that, especially with the language barrier, I can hardly even begin to properly convey. Instead, I’ve just been doing my best to focus on encouraging my students to be creative wherever possible. Even still, we’re extremely limited on art materials, essential to any creative arts class. There’s no one to provide art materials for the school, nor is there really anywhere nearby to go get them, but I have been able to travel into Tamale (the closest city) and find some art materials like markers, colored pencils, and paper, which I purchased with my own Peace Corps-provided stipend (that part might not sound so different from the experience of many teachers in the US). 

But overall, school has been going relatively well. Issues of student attendance and classroom management, which are expected for all education volunteers in Ghana, continue to be a point of frustration, but of the students who come consistently and pay attention, I see interest and dedication turning into progress. With the difficulty of materials for creative arts, we’ve done a lot of drawing, because at least every student has (or should have) paper and a pen, and I’m able to lend them pencils if they don’t have. We even did origami one week, which was a lot of fun. 

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students getting creative with origami and drawing

my hair was getting long, so I told my students that whoever got the highest grade on the math test I gave them could shave my head

Engaging with the community

In my free time, I’ve been doing my best to engage with members of the community. Of course, this is a huge part of integration. So when I have the energy, I try to at least walk through the village and greet people. When I can, I try to engage with what they’re doing, like sitting down and helping crack groundnuts (peanuts). But I’ve admittedly been having a lot of difficulty with engaging with the community members. By and large the main difficulty I’ve been experiencing is the language barrier. Yes, I did pass a language exam during PST, which allows me to exchange the extremely important greetings with those I pass in the village as well as interact in specific situations like the market, but realistically I’m nowhere near having an actual conversation in Dagbani. From what I hear from volunteers, in most villages in the south, it’s common for many people to have at least workable English in addition to their local language, but in northern villages like mine, an extremely small minority of the villagers speak English. This means that interacting with others takes a lot of mental effort. Like I said before, I try to engage with community members when I have the energy, because it does take energy. And with other factors like the admittedly tiring days at school, the ever-beating sun, and the nutrient-deficient diet, it can be difficult to gather up this energy to venture into town from my room in the teacher’s quarters on the periphery of the village. But like all things, I’m working on it.

I have had some success in engaging with the community. Most in the community are at least familiar with me, since I walk around and greet those in the center area of town relatively often, and that’s a start. Since being here I’ve also gone to a few different events in and around the community, namely weddings, funerals, and baby naming ceremonies (these are like the “big three” in social events in the Ghana villages–there were also a number of political rallies recently, leading up to Ghana’s election this past weekend). These sorts of events have given me more opportunities to interact with the men and women in the village. I’ve spent time with the assemblyman, too–although he’s quite busy, especially with the election coming up, he still makes time to help engage me in the culture when he can. Also, as I’ve spent more time in the village, I’ve slowly begun to connect with some of those few people who do speak English. One is Ibrahim, who trained to be a teacher but hasn’t been placed yet. He has also accompanied me to some community events, and he’s even agreed to help tutor me in Dagbani, which gives me some hope for the future. The other is Kasiru, who is a veterinarian. Kasiru is nice to talk to about things, and he’s also agreed to be one of the main counterparts working with me to implement some new projects around Kadia using grants (something we can work on through Peace Corps–I’ll go more in depth on it in the future). In general, progress on engaging and connecting with the community has been slow–and I wouldn’t actually say steady, since it tends to be sporadic and unpredictable–but at least there has been progress. Having completed the integration period, I can see there’s still a lot more for me to do in terms of integration, and I will continue to work at it.

helping roast groundnuts in my fancy smock

That’s the overview of what I’ve been up to here in the Northern Region of Ghana. It’s definitely difficult out here, but I do my best to focus on the good moments. I can’t believe I’m almost finished with my first school term already–we’re taking exams this week, and then it’ll be vacation and all of the other JHS teachers will leave for a couple of weeks. Anyway, I know it’s been a while, but I’m hoping to do more frequent, smaller posts about aspects of my experience here. So let me know in the comments what you’re interested in hearing more about–whether it’s the community events, the teaching, the people, how I do my chores here, etc. Until next time!