Earning that bread

I hope you are ready for a long and confusing story about my job here.

We are already halfway through the work week aand I SWEAR  just few hours ago it was Monday morning, so how it can already be Wednesday evening? Go figure. Time is flying! 

Soooo, I guess it’s time to talk about work. I mean, that’s the main reason why I am here. Not surfing, like my dear cousin (greetings to Viltsu if you are reading this!), put it: “So you basically just went to surf there, with the money you got from the university”.

Not quite.. luckily I get to surf and enjoy of the beach on the weekends, but during the week I actually have to try and get something done. 

Classrooms!

School kitchen

 I work from about 8.30am till 2.30pm. I can pretty much define my work hours by myself, so I could go in later and work a bit later, or maybe sometimes I guess I could just do shorter days if I feel like it. Every day at about 12/12.30 we have lunch. 

Lunch is provided by the school which is AWESOME. Meaning, we don’t really have to worry about cooking, except in the evenings. Lunch is always something quite basic, mostly rice and some sort of mildly spicy sauce, usually with fish. As I do not eat meat (but fish yea), I sometimes get the food accompanied by egg – as a substitute for meat. Can’t say that the food is very versatile – looks pretty much the same every day (but does not taste the same every day). Also, it does not contain much of protein or anything else, but anyway, does the job. And btw it is way tastier than it looks like, don’t let the (not very appetizing) photos fool you!

                             

Banku! Unable to explain how this tastes like...

Hello my friend

Okay, somehow, I ended up talking about food when I was supposed to talk about my job. Typical. It is actually kind of difficult to explain what I am doing here since it’s a bit vague concept to myself as well. 

Let’s start with the easy one and hopefully that will lead me to some sort of explanation of what I am doing, or what I’m at least supposed to do.

Firstly, I am here to collect data for my master’s thesis. I only have a working title for my thesis now and don't really want to share it,  but what I am aiming to research is teacher professional learning communities. Therefore, I am focusing on teachers’ professional development and teacher collaboration, and I’m doing a case study in this specific school I’m working at.  I have managed to link my thesis and my job tightly together, which makes the whole thesis project actually intriguing and motivating. At least for most of the time, can’t say it’s fun all the time, in its entirety, master’s thesis process sort of sucks.

Secondly, I'm here to support teachers' professional development, by trying to plan and implement in-service training programme. Great, and simultaneously awful, thing is that I have plenty of freedom when it comes to my job here. I can pretty much decide what I do at work, as long as the outcome is  training/professional development programme for the teachers.

Coffee and planning

Got mail, aww

At the moment I am planning to organize about 4 workshops for the teachers here, mainly just to enhance collaboration between the staff and to start creating understanding of preconditions for the development of teachers’ professional learning communities.
I might, or might not, tell more about these later on. Right now, I have quite clear image in my head what I’m going to do, but still have to concentrate on how and when I'm going to do these thing, and how to squeeze this all in 4 workshops.
 And one of the biggest questions is,  how to make this project sustainable. My aim is to start and create something that will continue even after I have left Ghana. But we’ll see, after all it is Ghana and things work here in a veeeery different way than in Finland. 

In conclusion, what I do is that I sit in our cute office. For real, they have at the school given us this one pretty cool and quite big room in the administration (the very first picture of this post is from our office), and even the principal does not have his own office (just a desk in administration), so it is actually pretty cool that we have one. And since Eveliina, the other intern here, is teaching and therefore basically in the class for the whole day, the office is pretty much just mine.

And how does my typical day at work look like?

Besides sitting in my office, I walk around and ask stuff from people (such as from the school owners and principal), chat with the principal (a lot, have to CB), hit my head to the wall occasionally, try to organize the data I have already collected, try to create something from scratch, try to somehow overcome the issue that we are constantly running out of internet (no wifi here), and trying not to get annoyed by the fact that I do need internet a lot in order to do my job. And when I do have the internet (hotspot from my phone), it most often does not work since the connection in my office is bad. And then it works for 10 minutes and then I run out of internet again. But that’s okay, now I can just print something I need and go do something fun with the students. Oh but the printer does not work. I downloaded some hecking big installation program on my computer, and managed to print something yesterday. But something miraculous has happened in one night and the printer just does not function anymore. Of course. So there goes my plans to do some coloring activities with the first graders.

Since I feel like I sit a lot in the office, it is fun to go to say hi to the kids and play something with them, talk with them or just chill for a bit and gain that positive and cuteness energy from them before heading back to work. I mean that is also my work or could be at least. These kids here are just lovely and adorable, funny and handful as well. Never a dull moment in a class with them.

The work environment is a bit different here. Lack of resources and equipment is setting us some challenges, but nothing that we could not overcome with some sort of plan b. It’s just slowing me down a tiny bit, and tbh from time to time it is very frustrating – trying to do something and not being able to finish or even start because there is something important missing.  Something (but luckily not everything at the same time!) is ALWAYS broken or at least working insufficiently, but I’m sure this is something I’ll get used to pretty quickly. I have been working only for about a week so far, so it’s just about getting used to this.

Okay, so might not sound like it, but I really really am enjoying of my job and I’m sure it will just get better and better the more familiar I get with this place and the further I get with my work projects and the thesis project!

OH WAIT! Last minute edit! I wrote this post on Monday, and on Tuesday we got wifi AND it works, at least for now! Yay! 

SECOND EDIT. As I said, something is always broken: now, when we have got a working wifi and printer, and the ceiling fan in my room got fixed, one of the most important work equipment of mine broke down. The coffee machine. Wish me luck, I have already downshifted to two cups a day (from 4/5 cups a day), now I might have to settle for just one cup per day..