My teacher

Edem is my teacher – he has been teaching me everything about Ghana, Ghanaians and how they live in the small communities.

Edem works at Care Net Ghana, the NGO I’m working at too. Like he says we (the volunteers) are smarter than them because we have the knowhow – we know how to structure projects, how to make proposals, etc. He has the local knowledge that we don´t have and that we so much need to build projects that can actually have an impact in the communities. Like he says, it’s team work and exchange of knowledge =)

Edem studied Electronic Engineering in a Polytechnic in Ho, the capital of The Volta Region. He had his first contact with a computer in 2004 and it happened because he had a friend who knew how to use one so he learnt from him.

Before he entered the Polytechnic he worked for a while and he actually participated in a project organized by Johns Hopkins University.

He is a compulsive reader with very strong ideas. He says that in order for Ghana to grow and develop they need to bet on children education because they are the ones who can change things; because the elders have extremely strong mindsets that cannot be changed anymore.

According to him there are two things Ghanaians need to change in order to grow.

One of them is confidence and initiative. He says Ghanaians learn from very early in their lives what he calls the “don´ts” but they don´t learn the “do’s”. This means that they always know what they should not do but not what they should do. So when someone tries to do something different he/she is usually convinced not to do so because “you shouldn´t do this or you shouldn´t do that”. People are supposed to follow and not “get out of the line”. If a young man tries to build his house in a different way from the one that has been used people around will say “we’ve been building it this way for years and years and now you think you’ll be the one doing it differently?!”. When someone thinks differently than that person is an outlier and people don´t want to hang out with him anymore; so that person becomes excluded so other people do not have the incentive to think different too because they know what will happen. Considering all of this it’s easy to understand there the spirit of initiative and critical thinking is not fostered.

The second thing he says is to “learn to give back to the communities”. Edem says that when people manage to get studies and to succeed in their careers their first destiny is Kotoka International Airport – they want to leave the country and they don´t want to give back to their communities. For example, a man who studies medicine and manages to become a Doctor will most probably not want to go back to his community and work there. The interesting thing is that this happens not only because they simply don´t want to go back but because the people in their communities don´t accept them anymore; they make vudu and they wish them bad things. Edem says that the key is in educating the children and by doing so in some years these children will be grown up and will accept the ones who studied and come back with innovative methodologies.

25/07/2012