My Tasks and a Spontaneous ICT Class

- July 02, 2022

They say that the first month of the deployment is usually the most chaotic. And coming from my experience - amen, it's true. Culturally my month has been quite impressive and colorful. I've attended a funeral, a wedding, a church service, seen a local football match, visited a local school, and well.. taken into a hospital due to bad street food (the famous jollof).

I'm glad that in a short time I've experienced so many different (and mostly fun) aspects of Ghanaian life, so this eases the slight pain I've had with getting used to local meals, constant attention on the streets, understanding the local English accent, and working on my tasks.

Hello tasks my old friends

Obviously, I knew my tasks before arriving in Ghana. But one thing is to have them on paper, the other is their accordance with reality. You may be hired as a Financial Officer in the EU volunteer program, but in reality, you travel to another country to be a secretary and buy stuff for the office. Luckily for me, the tasks in the contract were the same that I'm doing in Ghana and in Rays of Hope.

To give you a better overview, I listed these here:

1) Assist with Social Media content creation

To see my daily work, keep an eye on these Instagram and Facebook accounts. ;) Since Rays of Hope doesn't have a responsible person for managing social media, I'm planning to create a content calendar and in the future train the staff to follow it to keep people updated with Rays of Hope's life.

The better the online profile, the bigger the chance to get donations for future projects.

2) Take photos

So did you already check their social media accounts? :)

3) Develop and update the website

The page I'm managing is here. I've made a couple of changes, published some news articles, and updated photos. In my opinion Rays of Hope website is actually already a decent one. The only things that I'd like to add are a subpage of partners and sponsors and highlight stories from former beneficiaries.

4) Collect testimonials from beneficiaries.

I will get there in a couple of months.

5) Give ICT lessons to beneficiaries

I started with ICT lessons at the end of June. Rays of Hope has two centres, which are 40 km apart from each other. During a work week, I need to give classes on two evenings in the WEM centre (biweekly) in a village called Ayikuma and on two afternoons in my current hometown Ashaiman in the centre named First Contact Place.

So far I've given ICT lessons only in the centre in Ayikuma.

The process was quite spontaneous. In my mind, the reason why I traveled to Ayikuma two weeks ago and stayed in WEM for a couple of nights was to get to know better the children and staff members. So in the evening, after the children had returned from school and I started to help them with homework, a staff member came and asked, why I'm not giving them ICT? Next, I was directed to a room with three computers (only one of them worked). Three 7th graders (luckily only three!), stepped in and sat down, unaware of how the next two hours will pass. Little did they know, that I was actually in the same situation as them. I aswell had no idea, what is going to happen next.

Anyways, I quickly switched from this "I'm observing" into "I'm serving" mode and started to freestyle. I introduced myself to the three students and asked them to list down ten things they wanted to know and improve about ICT. When I analyzed their papers then... a moment of "Ahhaa!" and relief. Apparently, all of them wanted in one way or another to know more about files and folders. So the rest of the hour they sat behind the only computer that worked and created folders, renamed them, deleted them, copied, and cut. In my mind, the task was quite mundane but the children still managed to find some kind of spark in it. And as a fun way to end our class, we tried to change different wallpapers. Yay, right!?

Anyways, don't worry - next time I am prepared and they can (at least in my opinion) do more captivating tasks. For example, I plan to find some fun programs to boost their typing and mouse skills.

6) Find donors for new projects

Currently, I'm working on a proposal to turn one room in our First Contact Place in Ashaiman into an ICT class.

7) Create an online database
...to keep track of beneficiaries and easily access their information.

8) Train staff to use the database

As you see, I have many tasks going on at the same time and I'm busy as an African bee.

To end the blog post on a lighter note, here are some of the photos of the past month: