“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

My last exam at Savelugu School For The Deaf took place on the 2^nd of December, 2013. In one day I had 3 written and 2 practical exams from 8 am to 2 pm without any break. This was quite tight schedule for me but not for other teachers because they helped each other to conduct their exams. However I couldn’t ask for their help because I knew they didn’t fulfill their job at all; when they conduct exams, they don’t check cheating properly. It’s a paradise for students. I never allow students to cheat because it’s the beginning of crime in future and I always give prizes to those who get good results in order to motivate them. Therefore I had to have the tough day without any help.

The exams used to be organized in different days class by class, but now all classes take the same exam in one day. They say that it’s better for students to follow the timetable of BECE (Basic Education Certificate Examination), which is the national exam for all JHS-3 students in Ghana, but to my eyes it’s better for teachers to be able to finish exams in a day. In Ghana, surprisingly enough, teachers can feed family by working a couple of hours in a day and a few days in a week, namely 9 - 12 hours per week. It’s a paradise for teachers. And even in this paradisiacal situation, they try to reduce their workload and complain to their salary. Actually there was a strike last year and teachers boycotted their classes, insisting that they came to school and didn’t teach and this is the only language that the government understood. However next day no teacher came to prove their words and this strike brought them a 2-week vacation. I think it would be just a social difference but when I think about future of Ghana, I can’t help weeping for the future indeed.

And In this term, I didn’t teach primary classes because essentially class teachers are supposed to also teach the subject ICT, but they’d totally depended on me and refused to teach it. Although last year they promised to start teaching ICT from September, but they didn’t, which is a big lie. The thing is, the headmistress doesn’t force them to take its responsibility and the Ghana Education Service (GES) allows them not to teach the subject and give them salary without records of teaching ICT. According to the headmistress or GES, all teachers must work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (and needless to say they must come everyday), but they don’t work as much as required like the above, rather they try to reduce workload, skip their classes, and come late and go home early, and what's worse, there’re some teachers who don’t care about students at all. It seems to be a paradise for teachers today but it’s a debt for future of Ghana and someone will have to pay for the bill someday.

I’ve spent for more than two years and devoted myself to contribute to development of Ghana, thinking about 100 years later of this country. I know it’s not very good to talk about bad aspects of the country where I live in and work for and this is actually a complaint to Ghana. But whenever I witnessed such hopelessness of ordinary people in everyday life, I couldn’t help feeling really sad and what I’ve been doing is in vain. What am I here for? And in the last 2 months of my stay, to tell the truth, I’d been sick and tired of those irresponsible matters and really irritated and frustrated by insulting words on street “Hey, Chin Chon Chan!” and begging words of local people, “Give me money!”, and even some school staffs say “Give me your computer, buy me a camera!” I wanted to love Ghana but those little tiny things destroyed my dream and I’ve faced the reality and difficulty of International Development. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” Future of country is made by the hands of people living today. What do you want to leave to your children?