Anthologies from The Future Leaders School in Ghana

I already hated it. I stared up at my new bedroom ceiling with the single fan. No AC, no fresh water, and chicken every single day for both lunch and dinner was not how I wanted to spend the summer. On the bed next to me lay my roommate, who I guessed was also pondering about what she was doing in Ghana. 

We were both Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) students volunteering at a local school, The Future Leaders School, in Legon, Ghana. When I first stepped into the small Intervention classroom, a class composed of students of all ages who couldn’t keep up with the core curriculum, I was speechless. The classroom resembled a wooden shed, lined with cramped desks and names etched on the walls. The kids in the Intervention class stood up and waited. I looked around, wondering what they were waiting for. The teacher motioned for me to ask them how they are. 

“I am fine. Thank you. How about you?” they responded unanimously. 

“I am fine, thank you,” I said. They continued standing up. Again, the teacher motioned to me to tell them to sit down.

This became my daily routine every time I entered one of the classrooms at the Future Leaders School. The school was pretty and colorful. The lower grades, from preschool to fourth grade, occupied the main building, which consisted of two floors and one playground. The classrooms for the nursery and kindergarteners were so bright with the ABCs and nursery rhymes painted on the walls. Dances to afrobeats, chants from hand games, and the energy from new friendships during lunch breaks vibrated from the walls. All of the CIEE students were surrounded by what would be our peers for the next three weeks. Every day, little kids would hug our legs and beg us to pick them up. I was met with a chorus of “You are welcome, Madam Obroni” (Obroni means “foreigner”), and “Where are you from?” I showed them pictures of New York City’s iconic skyline and summers in Japan. They sat in wonder. In return, they taught me small fragments of Twi, their local language, as well as some local hand games. This exchange of culture felt so inspiring. We were all the same age, shaped by experiences that were literally half a world away from each other. 

EXAM SEASON

During their exam season, I decided to teach the Intervention class. Students were reviewing their English phonetics and their simple addition and subtraction. The teacher ripped pieces of paper from the single blank notebook in the classroom and distributed them to each student. He asked me to pronounce each word from the English vocabulary list and make sure that no student was cheating. He asked me to do the same for the math exam. I saw most of the students eyeing the paper adjacent to theirs and whispering answers cleverly mixed with the quiet, incessant chatter. Some of the students sat quietly, though, staring at the wall in front of them. The small classroom seemed to have unified the students’ thoughts and stress about the exams.

MY CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL

The teacher’s name was Michael. As the class was dismissed from their exam and all the kids rushed to change into their soccer clothes and play in the nearby field, he came up to me and asked me how the United States was. I also showed him pictures of my life in the city, and similar to the reactions of the students, he confessed that he didn’t know what New York City was. I told him it’s a diverse urban center composed of tall buildings and rats. 

“Wow,” he responded. “Why are you American if you are Chinese?” he then asked me. 

“Actually, I’m only Japanese,” I corrected him, “and I’m half Italian as well. My parents just live in the city.” 

“But isn’t Japan and China, like, the same country?”

“No, it isn’t. They are right next to each other, if that helps,” I responded. 

There was a moment of awkward silence. 

“Have you been outside of the country?” I asked. 

“No, I love staying in Ghana. It’s where I grew up. I went to the University of Ghana here, and I have always wanted to teach students so that they could succeed. Ghana is building up now, and I want to contribute to that.” 

During the bus ride to the CIEE center after volunteering at the school, I replayed the conversation I had with Michael. I couldn’t believe that the person who taught the students in the Intervention classroom never set foot outside the country. It seemed like in Ghana, a world outside its borders didn’t exist; all the other countries seemed like a hazy dream. Living all my life on New York City streets, I was also shocked to learn that the city I grew up in, which I assumed was one of the economic powerhouses of the world, was barely even acknowledged as a real place in the back of this teacher’s mind. This made me realize how narrow my perspective was. The world is huge.

THE GIRL WHO LEARNED TO TYPE

The students were coming back from their soccer matches, and they asked if I could take out my laptop. They loved looking at pictures. As I scrolled, the youngest girl from the class, a nine-year-old, asked if she could learn how to type. It never occurred to me that, though the school contained a computer room, most of the students would never be able to learn how to type. Typing lessons were only reserved for the few students who could get sponsored to go to university. I took her small hands and placed her two index fingers on the small bump on the “J” and “F” key. I taught her how to type out her name, “J-a-n-e-t.” By then, the entire class was watching her small fingers navigate through the keyboard and helping her figure out where each letter was. 

I was taught how to type at school in third grade. I remember loving it, the way my fingers clicked on each key, navigating through the confusing placement of each letter. I assumed that this was normal—that once everyone was eight years old, they were able to translate their thoughts on a Google Doc. I felt horrible when I had to tell the others that I didn’t have time to teach everyone how to type. Practical, digital skills aren’t taught in the classroom. Rather, I realized from the exams and the single book they are given at the start of each lesson, the students are taught based on a rote teaching method. This means that students are expected to memorize so that they can get sponsored quickly. The digital skills could be learned later once they succeed. 

A SOLDIER OR A NURSE

“If you could go anywhere, where would you go?” I asked the students in my class. 

“I would go to France because it’s so romantic,” one of the boys said. “I want to see the Eiffel Tower and eat bread all day, every day.” 

“I would go to Korea because I really want to learn how to dance to K-pop,” Vanessa said. She was one of the most prized dancers of the school, and she taught me some of the dances to Afrobeats. I was never able to keep up with the sway of her hips nor the high notes she hit for every twist. It was so cool. 

We were all sitting in a circle outside the classroom flipping a plastic bottle. The air was too sticky to spend the free period inside the wooden classroom, as it had no windows. I then asked another question.

“What do you guys want to be when you grow up?”

“A soldier!” 

“A nurse!”

… and really, nothing else. I found this to be really interesting. I heard from my CIEE peers working in the nursery that nursery songs in Ghana have guns in them, and I noticed that the students hit each other very often. I’d witnessed a five-year-old girl ripping open the shirt of her classmate and 13-year-olds slapping each other during classes. 

Being a soldier or a nurse, I assumed, provided the respect and economic benefits that looked appealing to the kids who knew that they wouldn’t be the one percent sponsored and attending college. 

WHO GOES OUT TO WORK?

The kindergarteners were sitting at their tables, putting princess stickers on each other’s arms. The teacher passed around a worksheet for the students to complete. It was a multiple-choice question that described daily chores, and the students had to answer whether their mother, father, sister, or brother would be in charge of every activity. 

“Who goes out to work?” Father.

“Who cleans the house?” Sister.

“Who cooks for the family?” Mother.

These gender stereotypes that are taught to Ghanaian students impact the way the students see themselves in society. This was reflected during my time in my homestay. As my roommates and I left for CIEE for the day, we made sure to say goodbye to the grandmother in the kitchen and the grandfather sitting on the couch in front of the television. Therefore, this early exposure to gender inequality shapes not only how they understand family, but also how I understood my host parents. 

I am a girl who can receive a great high school education and participate in extracurricular activities for free. It never settled in how much I should feel grateful about that until then. 

BEDROOM CEILING TALK

So there I was again, staring at the single fan in my bedroom at my homestay. 

“How many more days do we have left?” I heard my roommate mumble in the dark. 

“I don’t know, like, 13?” 

“Guess what I dreamed about last night,” my roommate said.

“What?”

“Shake Shack.” 

“I also had a dream last night,” I added. “About hot water.”

“And an AC.”

“Honestly, though, I think I’m getting used to it,” I admitted. 

“What do you mean?”

“Like, I don’t mind the cold shower. And all you have to do is boil the water to make it hot. As for the AC, it’s not even that hot anyway. And I absolutely love the school.”

My roommate turned to face me. 

“Same. I love the school.”

“My favorite part was when we all started dancing today and when we got to hang out with the three- and five-year-olds.” 

“They really are adorable.” We smiled in the dark. 

“You know what? I don’t mind it. 13 days left.”

“Same.” 

Why would anyone want to go to Africa when they can go to Paris? I have been asked this question many times. It is because one rarely gets the chance to see a classroom with no windows or lights but still lit up with giggles, drawings, and Afrobeat music. I got to learn and understand a world different from my own, and I left realizing that the connections you build with people are so much more important than the numbers or grades that have often come to mark our capabilities. What mattered most were the conversations and the shared moments of discovery about each other’s cultures—everything that stayed after the summer was over.