Monday 29th October

Monday morning

The Vocational College starts its day at 7.15am.  We arrived somewhat later, and had a general introduction from Castro who is the head, and very calm and capable.  The college has about 150 students and will have almost 200 by the end of the year when the full compliment of first years have enrolled.  There has been some bureaucratic slowness in assigning students to colleges this year.  The General Election, due on December 7th, is being blamed, but it's hard to establish cause and effect.  

A collection of poles and separate electronic parts has arrived from Accra and lies all over the floor of one of the outdoor open-sided huts.  It's allegedly a wind turbine which will be about 10 metres off the ground when assembled.  Chris looks confident that there are the doings for completing that task but to me it looks more like the scrapings from a technology equivalent of an IKEA outlet.  Fortunately, it's his challenge, not mine!!

I go off to meet with some dressmaking students.  They are a combination of 3rd and 4th years, and my challenge is to get them to talk English with me.  English is their national language, but most speak Fante among themselves.  They agree that in principle they should be speaking English, but in practice?  They are quite ambitious, and we have an interesting conversation about going on to the Polytechnic and how they could fund that.  Some want to train to teach and come back and serve their community.  Others are much less communicative in the classroom, but happier chatting over their sewing afterwards.  They have an interest in fashion and also in tie-dying and batik which are popular here.  

After a break, I have a session with the year 1 students. There are 11 of them so far, and more will join in the next few weeks.  Some of them are housed by the college in a hostel.  14 to a room in some cases, and there are not quite enough beds, but we do have some on order, and will put them up in the garage until the new hostel is built next year.  

We talked about their backgrounds, about the presidential election due here in December.  They were all keen to vote, and to do so will have to travel back home or where they are registered.  There was a mixture of confidence that the candidates would implement the plans they outlined and cynicism that they might just be appealing to electors to get the power.  The students came from a number of local towns as well as Mankoadze (Man-kwa-ze) and a wide variety of family backgrounds too.  They range in age from 16 to 22, and have the usual mix of bravura and anxieties common to that age group in the UK.  But they do differ in that generally they do at least say that they want to learn and look as though they mean it.  

In the afternoon we have an official visit from Nana George.  He is the chief of the village, dressed in long robes, though with a mobile phone lodged somewhere inside, which he fishes for when it rings during our discussion.  There is a problem that the head of the organisation that provides some of our vocational staff has decided he wants to run the college.  We need to provide a united front to ensure that does not happen, and its very good to hear that we have his support.