First day of school....kind of

Remember when you had your first day of school. That whole week in preparation, buying new supplies, getting new clothes and then debated what would be the best thing to wear for the first day of school, getting excited to meet up with all your friends again, and just that excitement for one more year of friends and fun. Well here it's a bit different.

School was suppose to start last Wed. This is the date that the Ghana Gov't decides and then tells all the high schools, so everyone knows that this is when school starts. However, since we're a boarding school (and this might be true with non-boarding schools), no one wants to travel all the way here for 3 days of school just to go back home for the weekend. So the remedy for this unfortunate timing? No one comes! No students, no teachers...no one. And really who can blame them I guess. It's like a predetermined agreement. In fact there was so little school preparation that I totally forgot that school was suppose to start until Friday when I realized that no one was here and our school bell rang, so in truth there were a few students that actually came, but they all live in town and aren't boarders.

Well, I was expecting a bunch of teachers and students to be arriving this weekend, since I figured school would start today...I mean it's Monday! I got about a 30% turn out rate for teachers and I haven't even bothered to count the students. Although JB and I got a few students that came to our door this weekend to greet us and let us know they were back. Which was very nice of them. :) So today's the day when school starts...right?

Well....not really. Today's the day when students clean the campus. So no one really wants to come for this and most students (if not all) know that this is going to happen, so many don't show up for the first week either, cause what's the point. And since the teachers know that this first week (but in truth should be the second) is pretty much a bust, they don't want to show up either. So our compound will be quiet for another week. Most students don't want to clean the campus (and who can blame them), so an activity that should take a day since we have about 1000 students and the campus really isn't that big, truly takes the whole week to complete. Sigh...I guess school starts next week?

In truth it's really quite effective in it's strange kind of way. Everyone (besides us) understands all these unsaid, unwritten agreements. So these first few weeks of school function pretty smoothly. It's like slowly easing into the new year of school, as if jumping right in might be too much of a shock to the system. For me it's pretty relaxing, since I don't worry if school doesn't start. I figure that someone will come tell me when classes actually start and then I'll start going to class. I can't really prepare notes until I talk to the classes and see how far their previous year took them. So I'm just calmly waiting, reading some good books, and enjoying the rains. There's none of that anxiety of a new school year that you get in the States. This is a very calming way to start. Interesting how that is.