Another Adventure in Ghana...

Greetings to everyone!  I hope all is well in the United States.  Life has been going well over here.  Last week was a busy week for the elementary school art department.  We have a few projects we are doing with some of the kids, so it has kept me very busy.  With the 2nd grade kids, we did a "bead workshop" where they all got to make bracelets out of some beads from here in Ghana.  That was a ton of fun and all the kids really loved doing that.  But when your dealing with second grade kids, making bracelets can be extremely complicated and time consuming.  Not to mention, someone would send a whole handful of beads scattering across the floor, about every 4 minutes.  The cleanup process after the bead workshop was a little tedious and annoying, but doing something different with the kids was a lot of fun and the thoroughly enjoyed it, as did I.  With the 5th grade kids, we just started painting a mural in the dining hall.  We have been working on "People in Action" with the 5th graders and we recently introduced them to Keith Haring and his style of artwork.  Because the 5th graders aren't all superb artists, we decided to paint the mural in the style of Keith Haring because his style is fairly easy for these kids to draw.  If your not familiar with Keith Haring, his work is somewhat cartoon-like, very colorful and mostly just outlines of people.  So we have been painting this mural in the dining hall with the 3 5th grade classes, and this project has also been a lot of fun.  Before this, the dining hall was very boring and plain looking. It's really cool to see how much funner and nicer it looks, and the kids get to know that it looks nice because of them.  This project involves some time and effort as well, but it has been a blast.

This past Friday, we (Mrs. Nnurom[the art teacher I work with] and myself) took the 3rd grade students on a field trip to the palace museum here in Kumasi.  This was a very interesting experience, but it was a lot of fun. The kids are a little crazy and even with us telling them to keep quiet every 3 and a half minutes, they were talking throughout the whole tour.  I don't know what it is, but these kids love talking and they very rarely listen to any teachers when told to be quiet.  I guess maybe they're just kids... But it can still be a bit frustrating at times.  But even with the talking and misbehaving, the field trip was a lot of fun, and the kids really enjoyed it.  We are now getting close to the week of final exams, so we have a lot of grading assignments to do in the next couple of weeks.  It's crazy to me that we are only a few weeks away from the end of this term..  The time has really flown by.

This past weekend, Jennifa and I were invited to Mrs. Nnurom's friend's house.  Her friend, Carmen, has a bunch of Ex-Pats(Ex-Patriots, the term given to any foreigners, which I just learned this weekend) come over with their kids to do an art club.  I didn't get too involved in the art, I guess it was just a little too much art for me.  But it was fun to hang out at Carmen's house.  She lives in the nicest part of Kumasi and the house she and her family live in is incredibly nice.  We walked in and I really didn't feel like I was in Africa.  The house was decorated very nicely on the inside, and we go out back to a patio area where they have a large yard with.... a swimming pool!  So my Saturday morning was spent hangin out on Carmen's back porch, feeling like I was in Florida or some other nice vacationing spot, due to the palm trees around the yard.  It was nice to go relax and hang out over there, and I even met another American, a lady from Maryland.  After this we went shopping a bit in town and then headed back to school.  Yesterday was very relaxing, I got to sleep in some, went to church here at the school and then took a nap yesterday afternoon.

I got to get back to work, preparing for the week and whatnot so this will be all for now.  I will be posting again in a day or two so be sure to stop by again soon!

I sincerely hope life is going good for everyone reading this, whether family, friend, or friend of a friend of a family member.  Thanks for being interested in what I'm doing here.
Much Love to everyone

Peace