The House

This is the TOB house where I stayed for the 5 weeks I was in Ghana.  It's one of the only two (almost three) story houses in Busua.  The only other larger buildings are the hotels and the Methodist church by the school.  Right behind the house, you can kind of see on the right-hand side of the picture, is the ocean.  The Atlantic Ocean, for those who aren't terribly good at geography.

The first floor has the kitchen, office, and after school room.  That's where we held the main part of the TOB program.  After school, which I'll go into detail later, is our way of helping kids learn basic literacy and numeracy.  The second floor is where the sponsored kids and volunteers live.  There's a main room which is where we do News Hour (I'll explain that fully later). The sponsored boys have their room, the sponsored girls have their room, and the volunteers are split between the other two rooms, boys in one, girls in the other.  When we got a big influx of volunteers, some of the girls stayed with the sponsored girls, and we made the side rooms downstairs into bedrooms for the overflow.




This is a view of the second floor main room from the doorway of the boys' room for the kids in the house.  The door you can see is the volunteer boys' room.  To the right, just off the frame, is the volunteer girls' room, and behind and to the left is the  house girls' room.








This is a picture of what the volunteer girls' room looks like.  The bed closest on the right ended up being taken out because it made more sense to have the group of new girls in the room downstairs, since they came in a group.  I was the top bunk by the window.



I spent most evenings in the house, since I determined I did not like the Ghanaian past times of drinking and smoking.  I also would sometimes walk along the shore at night.  Mostly, if I was in the house, I was relaxing.  Otherwise, I was outside working, downstairs (which didn't feel like the same house) planning/teaching, or  in Busua school down the street teaching. The house itself was pretty upscale for Ghanaian standards.  We had electricity and running water, if the electricity was on and the pump had water in it.  Usually, everything worked, but not always.  The ceiling leaked when it rained hard.

The third floor, which was never finished, everyone called the roof. There were drying lines hanging in the main part, and there was a little lean-to-type cover over the staircase from the second floor.  Almost no one went up there unless they were hanging laundry, and I found it was a good place to escape and watch the village life go on around us, or watch the ocean, depending on the side of the house I went to.  It became one of my decompression/thinking spots where I could really sit and reflect on everything happening in what seems such a short time.  This area just behind the half wall was where I went a lot.  I has a great view of the ocean, and is fairly hidden if people do want to come up to do their laundry.  I slept up here on a mat with my mosquito net more than once. :)