It’s good to be back!

And a few words from Ghana finally find their way to my blog – it’s been a while! I hope that you’re all well and enjoying the Autumnal weather. I’ve been back in Ghana for just over three weeks but it feels like I’ve been back forever – in a good way. Coming back makes me realise just how much I learnt about Ghana and its education system last year; I’m really pleased I’ve got another year to work here and enjoy this country; its people and culture.

I spent my first ten days in Accra attending the National Volunteer Forum and then helping out with the latest intake of volunteers which was good fun. We then did the loooooooonnnnnnnnnnnngggggggggg journey back up to the north which was a bit of a nightmare – discovering we suddenly needed an extra ticket, our transport to the bus station not appearing and then being rather too small for the nine volunteers; eight of whom having just arrived in the country had everything including the kitchen sink with them. The bus was then late and ended up arriving in Bolga about 4 hours behind schedule! Then to top it off, once I’d taken the new volunteers to the hotel they were staying in I headed on to Navrongo arriving at about 6:30am only to find that neither the water nor electricity was working – ARGH! Welcome home Sam… but to be honest, you can pretty much expect that journey to be awful and then the water rarely runs so it was only the electricity that I was really missing! And by 5pm I had the house sorted and the electricity was back on so they world was a happy place once more.

College started back last week; I start at 7am Mon-Thursday… I’m adjusting to getting up at 5:30/6am again – boo and hiss! Classes have all gone really well so far and I do feel like I know what I’m doing this time round and I’ve been able to adapt my planning to meet their needs better, so all good so far.

I’m really happy to be back and looking forward to getting on with my work, it’ll be a pretty similar program to what I was doing last year, so rather than waffle on about that in my blog, this year I’m going to waffle on about all things Ghanaian to give you a bit of a taste of the culture I’m living in!

So a small morsel for today: Greetings

Since I’ve been back it has taken an age to greet anyone – why? Because they want to know how my family, my friends, the weather and the whole of England is! Before you can start any sort of normal conversation you do have to spend a good 5-10minutes discussing how everyone is – even if they’ve not met/ever heard of you. So just know that you are being asked after and wished well by a good half of Navrongo town!

Take care of yourselves and I’ll write again soon,

Sam xxx