March 2022, Ghana

On 14th March 2022, I left London Heathrow and boarded a flight to Accra for my first volunteer teaching trip to Ghana. I travelled alone, but shortly after landing I met the other volunteers taking part in the IVHQ programme. We spent our first night together in Accra before setting off for Frankadua the following morning.

Frankadua is a rural community situated in a more central part of Ghana. The journey from Accra took around four hours, much of it along dirt-track roads. Travelling together gave us plenty of time to get to know one another. The group had an amazing range of skills and experiences, and they would all prove to be valued members of the Frankadua community during their stays.

My role was to teach at the local school in the mornings and coach football in the evenings. The afternoons were often far too hot to do much of anything, so everybody would take a couple of hours to rest before the temperature became slightly more manageable.

I taught alongside another volunteer called Colin. We each had our own class, although we also shared the same classroom. There was a whiteboard drilled into the wall at both ends of the room, so Colin’s class faced towards the back while my class faced towards the front. It was an interesting arrangement.

The two classes were different ages and followed completely different syllabuses. This meant Colin and I regularly found ourselves talking over one another while attempting to teach two separate subjects at the same time. While I might have been explaining a maths problem, Colin could be delivering a lesson on Ghanaian history just a few metres behind me. It was organised chaos, but somehow we made it work.

Between us, we taught English, Maths, Science, Creative Art, Ghanaian History and Computing. Teaching Computing in a school without electricity or computers was particularly challenging, but it forced us to be creative with our lessons.

The school itself was a large, L-shaped concrete building which seemed to appear suddenly from the surrounding bush. It was constructed entirely from concrete blocks and featured what can only be described as some fairly “creative” roofing work.

There were five classrooms in total, although only two were operational. The other three had no floors or roofs. Despite this, they certainly weren’t going unused. The children had decided to grow maize in the soil inside the unfinished classrooms, so during break time they would take out machetes and maintain the crops.

My class had three designated machete holders, who looked after the maize while the other children collected litter from around the school. It was certainly a different lunchtime duty rota from anything I had experienced in England. We also devoted a good amount of our break times to learning secret handshakes, which I’m sure the children considered to be just as important as their lessons.

The working classrooms had no doors, windows, electricity or many of the other facilities we would consider essential in the developed world. The children shared wooden benches and usually had one textbook between four or five pupils. For nine-year-olds, they were remarkably good at sharing and making the most of what they had.

In the evenings, I coached football with Shark Football Club. The club was extremely welcoming and its manager, who was known by everybody as Shark, was incredibly passionate about football. More importantly, he saw the club as a way of helping local youngsters find something positive and productive to do with their lives.

The players ranged from around eight years old to 26. We often trained and played together, trying to balance the teams by ability rather than age to keep the matches competitive. Training sessions regularly involved around 30 people, but the club only had four or five footballs between everyone. Another volunteer was arranging to donate additional equipment, which would make a significant difference to Shark and the way he could run his sessions.

I love my football, but I can’t say I had ever played on a pitch quite like this one. It was part grass, part dust and part mud. The goalposts were broken, while the patches of grass that remained had become heavily overgrown.

Early in the trip, I donated £50 to the club. Shark used the money to buy a lawnmower so that he could begin maintaining the pitch properly. It was a relatively small donation, but it provided the club with something practical that could continue to benefit the players long after I had left.

The two weeks flew by. I felt incredibly fortunate to meet such a brilliant group of volunteers, and I couldn’t have asked for better company during the trip. The people of Frankadua made us feel welcome from the moment we arrived, and I left knowing that I wanted to return one day.

More importantly, I didn’t want my involvement with the community to end when I boarded the flight home. The school was doing an incredible job with extremely limited facilities, and the children deserved greater access to books and a suitable place in which to learn.

One of Village Projects Foundation’s future projects will therefore be to build a library for the school. Once that has been completed, I hope we can also find a way to provide further support to Shark Football Club and help Shark continue the fantastic work he is doing for the young people of Frankadua.

This trip was only two weeks long, but it was the beginning of what I hope will become a lasting relationship between Village Projects Foundation and the Frankadua community.