Sunday, October 31, 2010

Journal Entry 31: STRIKE!!


I woke up one Monday to discover that there were no more University classes running because the teachers were on strike. Apparently, they haven’t been paid in months, regardless of the University’s promise to pay them by a certain deadline. This is pretty fascinating for me because I’ve never experienced a school strike. Some professors agreed to teach only international students so that we could still get credit. At first this kind of annoyed me because I saw it as the privileged kids always getting their way, until I found out that we (international students) actually pay a lot more in tuition than Ghanaian students because their tuition is covered by the government (and of course we have a contract that cannot be extended). The strike lasted for three weeks in total, but caused even more chaos. The international students for the most part will be learning the same material that they learned during the strike, and no one is really sure what to expect for the exams. The schedules are now all scrambled, and it turns out that the Ghanaian students will have to stay in school until January 6th, only getting Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off. To make things even worse, the teachers didn't even achieve their mission of getting paid. It's pretty fair to say that I've been on vacation thus far, but in some ways, a very hectic one!

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