Our August Newsletter is now available--just go to the News part of our site, or click here.

​Most of the newsletter is devoted to our July 1-2 conference at the University of Education, Winneba.

Now, back home in Portland, I've had a bit more time to soak in what happened, and also have had some good talks with Wendy, Elizabeth, Eric Ananga, Berthy, and Lucy about the event.

My hunch is that if we are fortunate enough, as individuals and an organization, to be alive from now in a decade or two, we shall look back at this conference as a turning point in the history of Yo Ghana!

Organizations have to generate or tap into enthusiasm and passion to survive, let alone thrive. Otherwise they are just an abstraction. The conference generated enough passion to drive nearly ninety people to attend. Most traveled great distances. Dozens paid their own way. Parents entrusted their children to up to three days away. Teachers and administrators gave up a holiday and week-end.  On Thursday people set out long before dawn and arrived long after dark.

And Friday morning everyone was ready to roll. The Ghana education system is often criticized for perpetuating a system of passivity in which teachers are told what to teach and students are told what to learn, with no questions asked, no initiative allowed. We didn't see much of that. Administrators and teachers debated each other as colleagues, as respected peers--and then formed a WhatApp group to keep the discussion going. Students reached across regional, ethnic, and class differences to make new friends and, when Madam Berthy asked students trained to memorize to stand up and share their poems, there were soon more students than was time for.

At the end of the conference on Saturday we gathered around a sign that read "Better Together."  Madam Elizabeth years ago thought that slogan captured what Yo Ghana! is about. Certainly our first conference expressed that ideal.

​We have so much to learn from and share with each other. Our first conference revealed that there is a deep passion and capacity for such learning and sharing. Certainly there is much more to come.

​Saturday I had the pleasure of meeting with Mr. Eric Opoku Agemang and Madam Brittni Howard, who had kindly arranged the meeting after we met at the Ghana Studies Association meeting a week ago.  Mr. Eric heads an organization called Patriots Ghana that works to help children who have been trafficked to the fishing industry.  As so many problems are both cause and consequence of child trafficking, Patriots Ghana works on a host of other issues, too, from economic development to training teachers how to work with students who have suffered severe trauma to how to persuade children how to go to or stay in school.  It’s a remarkable organization, and we hope for Yo Ghana! collaborations in the future.

Then it was off to Winneba for a long meeting with Dr. Eric Ananga, the busiest person I know, and his research assistant, Madam Berthy. 

I met Dr. Eric nearly two years ago and was immediately drawn by his unassuming passion for and dedication to education.  Everyone who had met him attached to Yo Ghana! was delighted when he joined our board, and it was his vision and dedication and connections that made the first Yo Ghana! conference happen in the first place, let alone for it to be so successful.  Eric likes to move behind the scenes to get things done, and he had to be prompted before he would agree to speak at the conference.   He is a delightful person to spend time with, though after doing so I go away feeling like I should be doing more to make the world a better place.

The day began at Anane Memorial International School, where I got to do one of my most favorite tasks: distributing letters of recognition to some of the many parents and school members who contributed goods or services to the school over the past year, such as Madam Joyce who volunteers as a cook.  Nima is a place of both widespread poverty and determination, and the school staff confirmed that these donations, which Yo Ghana! matches, have raised morale considerably.  The community feels much more ownership of and commitment to its school when they are giving time and other resources to it.

I then had the pleasure of watching the Kindergarten students practice their dancing.  They are very dedicated, and the school regularly performs in a variety of venues, such as the airport, to help raise funds for the school.

Then it was off to Angel’s Academy to follow up on Tuesday’s visit by seeing what the students had learned in their interviews of elders.  The reports were much longer and more detailed than I had anticipated.  We started with having the students pair up and deliver their reports to each other, then each read to the group.  We then had a long discussion of how to elicit longer, more 
interesting answers, with reflection on what had worked or had not worked in the interviews, and why.  All of the participants seem eager to do a much fuller life story of an elder starting in September, with the assistance of their very dedicated teachers.  Back in the U.S., some students at St. Andrew Nativity School will be doing the same sort of work, so we are excited to see how these two pilot projects work out and what sort of stories the students are able to share with each other—and hopefully the rest of the world.

This oral history project is an example of our desire to go deeper into our exchanges, and it expresses our belief that transformative exchanges can occur not only between nations, but also between generations.

Today was one of those days when your camera stays in the bag—not because there was nothing of interest to photograph, but because stopping to take pictures would have interrupted the flow.

Mr. Frank’s taxi brought us to Dannacks Senior High School and a meeting with its head, Mr. Justice, teacher Madam Aborgeh, and their students.  Mr. Justice had told me about Dannacks during a meeting a few days ago.  It works with students who struggled in junior high school and would otherwise be unable to attend senior high school.  A high proportion of them then do well on the exams that determine whether or not they can go to university, and many have gone on to excel at university and beyond.  I enjoyed meeting the students, many of whom are keen for the school to join Yo Ghana!  Mr. Justice is also very interested in developing in students a love of poetry in a nation in which rote learning is still emphasized.

We then made our way to my favorite place, Ashesi University, where I had the pleasure of meeting with Madam Carolina and the inspiring students who constitute the very first Teach for Ghana cohort.  This September they will go, in pairs, into fifteen rural, low-performing schools in Ghana and work to transform them.  We are hoping to partner with them, as the prospect of writing to a friend in Ghana can be a great incentive to learn to write for students in such schools.  It was an honor and a privilege to speak with and listen to this band of pioneering educators talk about how they intend to go about the work of providing an excellent education for every student in Ghana.  You could feel the trajectory of Ghana education shift under our feet.

I also had the pleasure of meeting Mr. TK, an Ashesi administrator who in his spare times brings Canadian university students to Ghana to help to activate in them a desire to serve their communities back home and started Future of Africa, a program serving about fifty of Accra’s many street children.  More about that soon.

The long day ended with a nice long visit with board member Dr. Williams, who is also a dear friend.  Years ago Wendy told me that the best way to start and organization is to invite the people you most respect to join it, and when Dr. Williams agreed to join us, it was a wonderful day.

Today Madam Lucy and I had the pleasure of visiting Kwahu Taho Senior High School.  It was a long day trip, but definitely worth it!

We learned of the school from Dr. Seth Asare, who grew up in the town and has lived in the Portland Metro Area for many years.  He assured us that the school has a reputation for excellence, and that was certainly the case.

We had an excellent meeting with Madam Alice, the Headmistress, and Mr. Phillip and Mr. Prince.  Mr. Phillip has already started a Yo Ghana! club in the school, even before the school has been paired with U.S. one for the coming year.  That’s the sort of initiative suggestive of a long and dedicated relationship, as is the fact that so many staff members at the school are enthusiastic about our program.

We also got to meet with the students.  There are about two hundred per level or grade, with many coming from villages in the area, others from far away.  The great majority board at the school.  We hope it is the first of many visits.

Today Mr. Frank got us safely to L & A Academy.  I think it is the first time in my many years of coming that we arrived on time, and it was a pleasant surprise to see that the very rocky and pitted road on the way to the school is being graded.  I had a good long visit with Mr. Kankam, the school staff—who had some excellent suggestions—and several classes.  L & A was again one of our work-horse schools this year, and Mr. Kankam is the first teacher in Ghana I met, some five years ago.

Then it was off to Angel’s Academy, not far as the crow flies, but a bit of time over the crowded and at times rough roads.  Mr. Justice, founder and proprietor Mr. Ernest, and the rest of the staff game me their usual warm welcome, and the students sang me a lovely song and then stood in the hot sun for one of my “short” speeches.  Some of my African friends tell me that I am perhaps becoming a bit too much of an African man inasmuch as my short speeches are not as short as they might be, but the students were either too engaged or too polite to complain.

Then we tried a grand experiment, as the school’s staff had expressed great interest in having an oral-history workshop.  I’ve done this sort of thing at the university level long ago, but not with students ranging from grade four to eight, or in Ghana, but it was a lot of fun.  The students practiced asking each; other open-ended questions, their teachers were extremely helpful in explaining to them more clearly than I could what it was all about, and on Friday we shall get back together to see what they have come up with, as each are going to write a paragraph or so on some aspect of an elder’s life based on their interviews.  I can’t wait.

Tonight I get to catch up with Miss Dorcas, a recent Ashesi University graduate I met two years ago while doing research on that remarkable institution.  She was very active in an organization devoted to helping rural schools in Ghana that were struggling, and I’m excited to hear what good work she has been up to lately and plans to do in the future.

So it’s another day hanging out with passionate idealists.  Sure beats laying around at the beach!

After returning to East Legon on Sunday, it was nice to be back ‘home” with Madam Senadza and Madam Doris in their very comfortable home and to have dinner at Chez Afrique, the restaurant that the wife of Yo Ghana! board member Michael Williams has made such a success.

Mr. Frank and I left at 6:00 a.m. to beat the traffic and in three hours were in Akalove, where dear friend Brando Akoto is buried.  It was so good to speak and cry a bit with his mother, from whom certainly he inherited his big heart and great care for others.  I presented her with a Yo Ghana! Kente stole, as her son did so much to form our organization.  I also had the pleasure of meeting with the chief and the elders and telling them of the great contributions that Akalove Basic School was making to Yo Ghana! through their letters to the U.S. and their participation in the Yo Ghana! conference at Winneba a week and a half ago.

I also met with the school staff and the students.  Akalove is a very young school, started just a few years ago by the community. Next year it will offer all three forms or levels of the Junior High School, which is a very exciting development.  The students are a bit on the shy side, but their enthusiasm for the letter writing is very evident, and, as the photo to the right suggests, not all of them are so shy.  It is a pleasure to visit a school that so many people have sacrificed for to bring into existence.

Mr. Frank then got me safely to Accra Girls Senior High School where Mr. Benjamin took time out from his very busy afternoon to organize many of our letter writers for a meeting.  About half of these students correspond in French with their counterparts in a French class at Central Catholic High School, which adds another international wrinkle or layer to our program.

Today while the other attendees of the Ghana Studies Association Conference were going on tours, I had the pleasure of visiting Ebubonko Basic School.

Madam Felestina, the Headmistress, was so kind to pick me up, and the students who had been writing were well prepared with intelligent questions.  We had an interesting discussion comparing Ghanaian and American schools.  The students immediately pointed out that the U.S. was more developed than Ghana.  But they also noticed some Ghana strengths, from better handwriting to knowing a greater range of languages to close friendships.

So often the differences between the West and Africa are defined by who has the tallest buildings and the largest military budget.  We hope that the letter writing gets at less obvious but very important social and cultural features of life in which Ghana shines.

The students then presented me with place mats that they had woven, which was a wonderful and generous surprise.  Mr. Wisdom has been a very active coordinator for the school, assisted by Madam Lucy.

It was also exciting to see what the school had been doing with its computer laboratory.  Yo Ghana! had provided two laptops a year ago, which the school had augmented with ten additional ones from other sources, as well as providing internet access.  This year we provided some of the materials for strong tables and benches for the room, and the school provided the rest of the materials as well as the labor in putting them together.  Now the school is working on additional improvements to make the building cooler and more secure before adding additional computers.  It is this sort of steady, community initiated improvement that Yo Ghana! loves to collaborate with.

​Wednesday I got to present the research that Dr. Eric Ananga and I have been working on at the triennial meeting of the Ghana Studies Association, this year held at the University of Cape Coast. Mr. Wisdom Havor,, our coordinator for Ebubonko Basic School, provided some testimony about the impact of Yo Ghana! at his school.

The paper’s title is “’They Are Not More than Us’: Letter Exchanges between American and Ghanaian Students.” Our research shows that although before exchanging letters, Ghana students widely associate the U.S. with development, the exchanges both lead them to improve their writing and to identify strengths in their own cultures and societies.

The conference itself has been a lot of fun.  There are scholars here from North America, Europe, and of course Ghana, from graduate students to old hands.  It is much less pretentious than academic conferences I have attended in the U.S. or Canada, but the level of intellectual exchange is high.  I’m already looking forward to the next one, in 2019.

Dr. Benjamin Talton, the Conference Chair, noted in his opening that although the GSA started in the U.S., it quickly became a shared enterprise with Ghana.  It struck me that this is also how Yo Ghana! began. And it has been very gratifying to have so many scholars of Ghana take an interest in the work Yo Ghana! is doing.  There were about sixty in our session.

The day before the conference was busy and intense as attendees started arriving in mid-afternoon, with our friends from Dambai.  The action really picked up late at night, and shortly before midnight there were twenty students from three schools packed into a van, traveling from the round-about where the transit bus had dropped them off to the university dorms.  In Ghana, you find a way!  The last group arrived around 1:00 a.m.  Many traveled more than twelve hours in cramped conditions.

But everyone was up early the next morning.  We had eighty-nine staff and students attending.  Madam Patricia Ananga emceed, Professor Jophus Anamuah-Mensah, for whom the grand conference center is names, welcomed us, and we were soon into our various sessions. Students learned about how to do math in every-day life, how to write poetry, and exchanged ideas with each other on what they learned from the Yo Ghana! letter writing.  Students from Don Bosco Basic School presented their fine independent research project on a day in the life of a Winneba fisherman. 

The teachers and administrators from the sixteen schools spent much of their time listening to presentations from each other and discussing issues ranging from how to discipline without caning to how to improve the educational possibilities for girls whose families require them to work late into the evening to whether or not the national examinations are a worthwhile measure of educational achievement.

Everyone toured the Kantanka Factory, enjoyed dancing and drama from the University of Education Winneba Arts Department, and shared their dreams for their schools and how Yo Ghana! might fit into them.  There were also brief speeches from board members Dr. Eric Ananga—who conceived of and pulled the whole conference together, a massive undertaking--and Dr. David del Mar on Yo Ghana!  Board member Elizabeth Fosler-Jones ironed out a million details, and board member Dr. Eric Donkoh, in Ghana for two months, spent all day Saturday meeting people.

Among the many people who made the event happen, we must mention a few. Madam Berthy, in the photo to the right, on the left, was the master of many details. Madam Lucy, a recent Winneba graduate, did the very big job of running the dormitories.  Madams Wendy and Lucy of Yo Ghana! worked very hard pulling things together.

Dr. Ananga envisioned this conference as a bench mark in Ghana education, as it is time for teachers and administrators in outstanding schools to be heard on how to improve Ghanaian education.  For me, this amounted to seeing amazing people I had met in isolated schools over many years coming together to educate and inspire each other.

As Dr. Ananga told our teachers and students when we closed: “You are Yo Ghana!”