By Kelly O’Connor
July 8, 2008: It is a hot, dusty day as I sit scrunched in my tiny plastic chair, lap overflowing with binders, papers and pencils. My Ghanaian research partner, Sandra, is seated in an equally elementary school-sized chair, occasionally fanning herself with extra interview guides. It is our first day of conducting interviews in an elementary school fairly bursting at the seams with screaming children in northern Ghana through the World University Service of Canada’s (WUSC) 2008 International Seminar, trying to divine the local challenges that were causing a disproportionate number of these pupils to drop out of school.
“What is your name?”
….silence….
“Do you understand English?”
“Yes!” followed by an enthusiastic nod.
“How old are you?”
The pupil looks anywhere but at us, Sandra and I look at each other, and I can tell already this is going to be a very long day.
This process repeated itself in various ways over the next two weeks as we traveled through small cities and the most rural parts of Ghana, conducting interviews with parents, administrators, teachers, children in school, and children out of school. With Sandra, Gifty, and my other Canadian partner Katie, we interviewed a village chief, talked to groups of mothers crushing groundnuts (or peanuts) under the shade of broad trees, ground entire schools to a halt with our cameras, and shooed away curious pupils hanging out of the windows to listen to our “confidential” interviews. We learned about the challenges of being an underpaid and incredibly overworked primary school teacher, heard the struggles of the students trying to break through the glass ceiling of primary school and those still just trying to break in, and the passion of the illiterate parents willing to work to the bone to ensure their children have a better future than theirs. Put together with the two other research groups we worked with, we were able to talk to 314 people over those fourteen days in four different communities and seven different elementary and junior high schools. It was exhausting, challenging, frustrating, and incredibly rewarding work.
While the entire experience consisted of a very steep learning curve and I am still processing what I learned several months after the fact, there is one gift in particular I received from the parents that I hope never to forget:
“Do you think it is important for girls to go to school?”
“Yes, of course, we want her to be like you …”
Suddenly, all of my privileged worries about grades, assignments, and extracurriculars fell with a thud into sharp perspective. Sitting there sweating in my nice clothes, pencil poised over paper, conducting this research project with a foreign NGO and the Ghanaian department of education, I was struck dumb. How does one respond to that? You want your daughter to be like us, really? What an honour, what a wonderful honour. This realization, this gift from the parents of northern Ghana, is something I wrestle with on a fairly regular basis and thus far it has been kicking my butt; how do I use what I have so that your child can go to school, to university, have the opportunities I do? Would this research have any positive impact on her life, or yours? I am left with far more questions than answers while the voices, dust, rainy season thunder, and lingering scents of Ghana keep me coming back for more.
