Pre-School Grand Opening!

Thursday marked the grand opening of Titagya's first pre-school in Dalun, Ghana. It was a success, with more than 100 guests, who included our students, their parents, community members, village elders, district politicians, and headmasters of other schools.

The ceremony began with the arrival of the Chief of Dalun, whose entrance was celebrated with drumming. Next, there were several great speeches by the above-mentioned parties, as well as speeches by our Managing Director, Abukari Abdul-Fatawu and me. Later, we closed the event with dancing (where our Project Manager, Manzah Iddi Habib impressed the Chief with his moves!) and a ribbon-cutting. It seemed like everyone was happy, and Fatawu did a good job planning the program for it.

A few important points that most of our speakers emphasized were that community support would be essential to our program's success; active parental involvement would be needed to reinforce what children learned during the day; and Titagya must properly motivate and train our teachers so that they can effectively carry forth our mission.

Another comment that stood out to me had to do with fans. Anyone who has worked or studied in an uncomfortably hot environment for an afternoon knows that heat can distract you and thus hamper your ability to focus and learn. This scenario represents most afternoons during the dry season (the year is divided into a dry season and rainy season in Ghana) for children in many rural schools in Ghana. The only cooling mechanism in a school may be open windows in heat that can easily exceed 100 Degrees Fahrenheit. Getting back to the speaker's comment, it reminded me that small details can have a large impact and that creating a comfortable physical environment will help enable our children to focus on the activities at hand.

I'll try to post some pictures tomorrow.

Titagya was in the news recently, in the Sparta Independent and the New Jersey Herald. The former is the paper for Sparta, NJ, where I grew up for several years (Straus News is the Independent's parent company). Both stories were favorable, and we're glad that more people will be thinking about early education in Ghana. A small correction to the first story is that Ghana is in West Africa and Accra lies on the southern coast of the country. The photo in the second article was taken before we enrolled our students or completed the building, so some of them aren't current students and none are wearing their school uniforms.

http://www.strausnews.com/articles/2009/11/13/advertiser_news/news/56.txt

http://www.njherald.com/story/news/11GARZAGHANA