first day of glona teaching

i don't know what my problem was today but i could not pay attention in the morning lectures. they were interesting and engaging i just couldn't focus. the first was about mental health issues and how they are dealt with in ghana. this was a good lesson for those who are teaching at new horizons. there is a very strong stigma attached to mental illness in ghana, so strong that a man would not marry a woman who has a brother or sister with a mental illness. ghanaians are very suspicious people and the belief is that most illnesses are the work of the gods because that person had done something to deserve the illness. their karma is immediate. the second lecture was about the politics of ghana and the most interesting thing from that lecture is that they have a policy of decentralization. it's funny because our country seems to be traveling in the opposite direction.

today was the first day of teaching at glona. i don't know what i expected but it definitely wasn't what happened. we got to choose the class we helped out with; i choose the "special" class, which is basically for students of all ages who have never had any schooling before. we teach them literacy and numeracy. kelly and i walked into class and there was no teacher. i guess the teacher was sorting out some monetary problem that she had, because she didn't show up for like fifteen minutes. we were kind of thrown into a classroom with no instruction, without knowing what the students had done before. finally the teacher came and told us they needed to learn the months and then left again. we taught the students the months, which was great. it was kind of a test run to see what worked and what didn't. we didnt have a great control of the class, but they learned! the teacher came back after about half an hour and she took control. she taught them phonetics for a test they have tomorrow while we sat in the corner and watched. it was kind of a 180 and i didn't really like it. i wish that the teacher had given us some sort of information on what our role in the class actually is. i was pretty disappointed but we'll see what tomorrow has in store. we're allowed to switch classes if we want and i'm considering it. i'm still undecided so i'll figure it out tomorrow. i'm ridiculously tired. oh, i bought a cell phone so i'll be able to make more phone calls when i get it tomorrow.