After a long absence from posting here, I am very happy and relieved to announce that our container has finally been released from the harbor and will be unpacked at the Tema, Ghana Rotary Center on Saturday, January 3rd!
It’s been quite an ordeal to say the least and at some future point I will try to summarize the events which took place from August 18 when the container left Willmar until today. But until the contents of the big red boxarrive in every school as specifically addressed, we will concentrate on facilitating that last step of the project.
It is very appropriate to thank all who are reading this for their support, financial and physical as well as moral. If not for that the textbooks and computers would still be on the third floor of The Barn Theatre building in Willmar!
This post will point out three special people who put themselves into the thick of things and traveled to work onsite in Ghana. Joan Kuhn, Candy Anderson and Greg Martin were able to complete the training described and promised in the Rotary grant. Here’s a summary:
Joan and Candy had a literal “love fest” with elementary and junior high teachers from 5 schools, demonstrating how they might use Houghton Mifflin reading textbooks and many hard won teaching techniques to increase the skills of their students.
- In the course of 16 days nearly 100 teachers, administrators and education officials attended training sessions.
- Training was accomplished without access to the container’s treasure trove of reading materials.
- The eager acceptance by local teachers was in direct proportion to the abilities of Joan and Candy to relate to all who are dedicated to teaching.
Greg Martin teamed up with Emmanuel Kodjo Ansah Larbi who owns and operates an IT education service, Eight System, located in Accra, Ghana to supply computer training for the teachers from the five selected schools.
- Greg and Larbi were a team to reckon with as they engaged educators from one end of Ghana to the other.
- No matter what part of the world computer education is conducted, trainers meet trainees who run the gamut of experience from “Yes, I saw a computer once.” to “Did you notice the webmaster used the wrong HTML tag to insert an image into this web page?” Well, Greg and Larbi handled them ALL with aplomb!
- The computers on the container were not available so these guys quickly pulled together enough laptops to conduct their training sessions.
- The training was done even when no electrical power was being delivered to the school. (Magic? No, just good preparation.)
Doug was extremely happy that Larbi and Greg were willing to team up, freeing him up to work on container containment problems!
