African Education

Hey kids,

It's been a few days, but it doesn't mean I haven't had anything to talk about. More that I haven't been able to write as much as I'd like to. I still have to talk about all the crazy things that go around here, like taxis, Ghanaian drinks, the crazy people I live in the hostel with... but I've still got over six months left, so we'll take it at an easy pace.

So it's coming on late October and school has kicked into high gear, if you can call it that. There's maybe 3 weeks left for most of us and after that, there's maybe a few weeks before exams start in late November, so everybody's making plans to travel around. I may kick around here for a bit to study for Arabic, which is the only class that I'm genuinely concerned about. While there's a lot of newbies to the language like myself, there are also many native speakers who already know everything, but have to take it anyways (again, love that bureaucracy!). How can the only 1st year class that I'm taking be the most difficult, I ask you?

As I recently wrote to my exchange program director at Carleton, school here is pretty different. Some classes are incredibly fascinating and I'm learning a lot from them and others I couldn't care less about if I tried. The level of education here isn't nearly as high as at your average Western university, because in Africa, educational resources are scarce (the library needs an overhaul... card catalogues? Come on!), the bureaucracy can get in the way of teaching (you have to register at each individual department on paper, so one won't know what the other is doing) and the universities here simply can't afford to pay the salaries that ones back home can (average annual wage is something like $6,000 US), so truly brilliant professors are fewer and further between. The best ones are patriotic Africans like my Colonialism and African Response professor Dr. Addo-Fenning and Dr. Akosua K. Darkwah, an angry, young African feminist who teaches Globalization and the Developing World. She is scary, but she takes no prisoners, and they need that here!

Of course, if we were here simply to learn, we'd be disappointed. If you want to go on an exchange simply for academic purposes, go to Europe. What's more important for us is not what we learn, but how we're learning it. I already know globalization, but seeing the view from below is so much more refreshing and insightful than reading a book. African history needs to be taught by Africans who can see how the same mistakes that were made a hundred years ago are still being repeated. Even my Management of NGOs class, which I don't particularly enjoy very much, has shown me exactly how the future bureaucrats of Ghana work and how they think. I feel that even though I may not be learning as much academically as I would be back home, I'm learning so much more from reading between the lines and understanding the African mentality.

Joe put it best: We're here for nine months and - at least for this semester - our role right now is simply to be sponges and absorb all of these experiences. Maybe next semester, we will be have enough information and experience to be able to turn it into something productive and we will be able to contribute to society, but even if we don't, at least we will have learned so much more about the world from being here.

So remember kids:
1. It's a big world, go and some of it.
2. BE THE SPONGE.