My second day at the daycare center was just as interesting as the first. When I entered the room, the kids were practicing their shapes. The students came up one by one, grabbing the pointing stick to identify the shapes on the board. One boy came up and stood at the board with his head bowed down, fumbling with his pointing stick. “Hurry up, you’re taking too long” the teacher said as he remained still.
At some points the kids would talk amongst themselves, bored of having nothing to do. A couple of kids were speaking the local language and the teacher yelled at them, “Speak English, not vernacular. If you can’t speak English, just sit quietly.”
When it was time for them to go out and play, the teacher came up to me and handed me a book. “You will read this to them for storytelling time”, she said. She walked away as I glanced through “Lost in Piper’s Park”. I looked at the pictures and then analyzed the story, wondering how a bunch of Ghanaian kids are supposed to relate to it. I put the book down and caught one little girl staring at me so I gave a big grin and waved as she giggled. Another kid ran from one door to the other playing peek-a-boo with me and waving, and soon a couple of others caught on. Before I knew it, almost all of the kids were running back and forth from door to door, giggling and waving at me. They all crowded up to the window next to me and starting waving and chanting “Obroni! Obroni! Obroni!” (Obroni can mean foreigner, westerner or white person). It’s amazing to me that they learned at such a young age to identify me as an “obroni”. They ran back in the classroom to learn and smiled at “obroni”, so happy that she waved at them.
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