Africa trip
was worth reliving

By William Kenny
Times Staff Writer

Northeast resident Melissa McGrath and two pals from Bucks County planned to do a bit of traveling during their summer break from San Francisco State University. Instead, they ended up with lessons in geography and sociology.
They also met a lot of new friends.
Rather than soak in the sun on a tropical beach or sip a frothy cup of cappuccino at a Continental café, McGrath, along with her schoolmates Chris and Kelly, ventured into sub-Saharan Africa for five weeks in June and July.
It was no high-priced jungle safari.
Instead, the trio gave their free time and ample energy to educating the impoverished youth of the Ghanaian countryside through a program organized by the New Zealand-based Global Volunteer Network.
For McGrath, an urban studies and sociology major, it was basically her first trip outside the United States, if you don’t count her prior visit to Canada.
Going in, she really had no idea what to expect. But once there, she found simple, peaceful and fundamentally happy people, with great potential for learning but hindered in large degree by an unhealthy obsession with American culture.
"Most of them, all they have in their heads is wanting to go to America," McGrath said last month after returning to her Academy Gardens home. "They’re really obsessed with America and Western culture. It’s really random. They have no running water, but they carry cell phones. I tried to stress that the most important thing they need is education."
When first considering their options for the summer preceding her junior year at SFSU, McGrath and her friends had no intention of teaching African kids.
They thought about touring Europe. But that’s not something that can be easily accomplished on most students’ budgets these days with the relatively weak American dollar. They figured it best to get someone else to pay their way.
"We went out and found a volunteer organization. It wasn’t through school or anything," McGrath said. "We originally signed up for community development, but a lot of physical labor is involved in that, so they put us in teaching."
The volunteer group sent the three students to the rural village Twifo-Mampong, a four-hour drive northwest from the capital city Accra. The town, about 90 minutes from the sea, has several dozen houses. It’s surrounded by jungle. Many of the men work at a palm oil factory in a nearby town, while others operate local shops or farm.
McGrath and her friends stayed with host families and taught at two schools in the area. McGrath was at Holy Spirit Prep, a 10-year-old private Christian school.
The school building was plain but sturdy, with block walls, but lacking the things that American students take for granted, like water and air conditioning.
McGrath was told she’d be teaching kids ages 10 and under, but when she arrived they showed her into a room full of middle- and high-school students.
The school had about eight classes of 30 to 40 youths. McGrath spent time with all of them. Her English instruction covered basics like vocabulary, grammar and reading comprehension. The Ghanaians are generally good linguists, because they’re taught English, French and the local dialect "Twi" as children.
Meanwhile, McGrath added some social science, such as geography, with a couple of inflatable globes she had brought with her.
"The one thing we were most nervous about, and definitely the hardest part of the trip, was teaching," said McGrath, who had no teaching experience or training.
Her mere presence was a lesson in itself for the African children. The school had been trying for several years to get a foreign teacher from the charitable volunteer network, so McGrath was welcomed like royalty. Most of the youths were thrilled just to see her face to face.
"They never talked to a white person before and they asked a lot of questions about the slaves," McGrath said.
She didn’t feel comfortable trying to teach them anything about slavery that they didn’t already know from local history and physical remnants, such as the centuries-old trading forts once occupied by Portuguese, Dutch and British merchants.
"It was (more like) us having a discussion about it," she said. "I can’t teach them about the slave trade because all of the history is there."
She found the young students very bright. Unfortunately, only a fraction of the children in the town bothered to attend school.
"I was told if there’s eight children in a family, maybe only one or two go," McGrath said. "The kids who are in school are really smart if they put the work into it."
The local woman and her friends worked basically from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. each weekday. Besides their evenings and weekends, they had a week off in the middle of their stay for the students’ midterm break. That’s when they got to experience a lot more of the countryside.
McGrath described the capital as dense but lacking infrastructure. The city of almost 2 million people is on the Gulf of Guinea, while the village where she stayed is almost 90 minutes inland.
"There seems to be no city planning," she said.
Some structures, like banks and elite hotels, are large and grandiose. However, "the majority of buildings are half-built like they ran out of money," McGrath recalled.
The three volunteers were glad they got to spend most of their time away from Accra.
"It turned out to be great, because once you get into the bigger cities, it’s too crowded," McGrath said. "I felt lucky to be in a small town where you know everybody. It’s really safe and there are no guns.
"Ghana may be one of the only countries in Africa where there’s not a civil war or anything like that."
War never seems far away, though, as the nation’s countryside still plays host to camps of displaced Liberians who fled their homeland’s long, brutal civil conflict. The Ghanaian government wants them to leave, but the refugees are reluctant to return to their war-torn country.
Similarly, AIDS isn’t as big an issue there as it is in other African nations. Malaria is another story, however, as one of McGrath’s companions learned firsthand. Compounding the problem was the fact that the nation’s hospitals and health care are very poor.
Perhaps that’s one reason that death is treated differently in Ghana, compared to America. "If somebody dies of old age, they don’t mourn, they celebrate for three days," McGrath said.
She took note of other cultural differences, such as how Ghanaians tend to have good posture because they carry everything on their heads. But McGrath viewed other quirks, like their tendency to wear hand-me-down or knock-off Western clothing, as symptomatic of deeper issues in the nation’s modern psyche.
"What I was trying to get across to them was to hold on to their culture," she said. "They can appreciate Western culture, but they have a strong culture of their own." ••
Reporter William Kenny can be reached at 215-354-3031 or bkenny@phillynews.com