This week I am en route home spending endless hours in various airports trying not to feel like a victim but instead, like a beneficiary of hundreds of flights grounded in the name of safety. The delays have provided much time for reflection on the theme of development as experienced by life in Anguilla and from a visitor’s perspective of New York and the tiny portion of Ghana that I have enjoyed immensely for the past fortnight.

As usual my thoughts turn to education and though I know that any comparisons I make may be useless, I am making them anyhow. As I awaited the taxi that would take me to Kotoka Airport in Accra, I was struck by the fact that every school child passing by on the road said a loud, clear good morning, reminiscent of Anguilla past. On Friday, as I awaited the arrival home of my grandson, several children of various ethnic backgrounds passed by, some looking me in the eye, some looking away, all without so much as a grunt. I therefore waited with baited breath to see if my seven-year old grandson would be just another American child or whether his mother was taking time to inculcate in him, the values still imparted to Caribbean children by those parents who still understand the importance of good manners in building a sense of community. He wasn’t properly down the steps of the school bus when his enthusiastic “Good Afternoon Grandy” was followed by a running account of his day at school before I had even a chance to answer. Of course I was more than pleased and was happy to have his greeting interrupt my thoughts about the efficiency of life in the USA. Usually his mother brings him home but on that day traffic had backed up because of a serious accident and it seems as though an entire fleet of school buses was quickly deployed to assist parents in getting their children home. Right after my daughter called to let me know that he would be coming on the school bus, the phone rang and a recorded voice informed me of the same thing. I could not help wishing that we had a similar system of accountability for our school children during the course of the school day.

My thoughts then turned to the students at the Purity Preparatory and Junior Secondary School adopted by the Empress of Zion Collective, under whose aegis I had travelled to Ghana. It is a small rural private school whose children pay fees as best they can and the Principal seemed quite excited by the prospect of being adopted by Empresses. I was a bit uncomfortable posing for photographs that captured an instance of charity and goodwill more so than development but I thought that good use would be made of Brother Capleton’s “Reign of Fire” exercise books and that with our help, the school would one day erect a building in the small spot designated for its library. The owner of the school is a Pastor whose thinking I found to be quite enlightened and he laughed when I commented on the very blond Euro-centric image of the Christ that graced the walls of the Principal’s office. I laughed when someone else whispered that the Principal goes off every now and then to do his traditional worship rituals at the shrine of his people. I couldn’t help smiling broadly, when I heard the expression T I A one more time and asked what it meant. It stood for “This is Africa” in much the same way that Anguillians mean it when we say, “This is Anguilla”. But I must continue the account of our visit to Purity Prep. The school provides for children from kindergarten right up to Junior Secondary but I noticed that some of the students at the upper level seemed so much older than the others. It was explained that there is no school leaving age and students who did not pass the entrance exam to be transferred to the Secondary level could return until they did. Some of them were in their late teens. I then inquired about any social challenges encountered in this system and was not surprised to learn that one challenge was the prevention of inappropriate student teacher relationships as the staff were also quite young. This was not something that I could claim we did not have in Anguilla but as occurs elsewhere, when such relationships are discovered, they are not tolerated. I returned to the USA to learn of yet another female teacher who had been arrested and charged for such a relationship with a student in his early teens.

While the school building was not as decrepit as one visited several years ago in a South African township, it was pretty bad and, as if to prove some point, during our visit it began to rain and student had to scramble from one side of the room to another to avoid getting wet as the windows had not yet been installed. It also occurred to me that no teaching could take place during a heavy rain on the galvanized roof - a sound we love to go to bed to in the Caribbean but which is now seldom heard with improved concrete housing. It was not a single roomed building but several smaller buildings some shared by two or three classes. Most of the students were engaged in revision exercises as end of term exams were pending. I was privileged to have a peep at the papers being graded by our host the following week and pleased to note that the effort had paid off. In admonishing her eight year old daughter to become more serious in her study of Twi, I was amused but not amazed when the daughter retorted that she had done better than some of those students for whom Twi was a mother tongue. It reminded me very much of the struggle that many Caribbean students have with Standard English but our students could remind us if they knew, that English is not our mother tongue.

One of the other differences of note is the speed and accessibility of email in the West. It was like torture to have to wait for what seemed like a lengthy period for connectivity at the various Internet Cafes without which Empresses like me would be lost in Zion. and so I made a mental note about the virtues of a slower pace of living. However, I did not manage to convince myself so I thanked JAH for the gift of adaptability instead. The cost of Internet service in Ghana was low compared with Anguilla though and on review, I realised that last week I (again) misinformed you regarding the exchange rate. It is 96 US cents to the Ghana cedi. Today I am in the US visiting a neighbourhood library where Internet connectivity is at lightning speed and free even to visitors. In Ghana, I left a home where television is a week-end pastime. Here, as in many Anguillian homes, television seems to be a continual presence whether someone is watching or not.

During our last visit to the town of Koforidua, traffic was slowed down by masses of young people in the middle of the road engaging in all kinds of performance from acrobatics to cross dressing in what was an obvious pantomime of some sort. For their antics they came up to the windows of the tro tro where passengers who were willing and able contributed a few coins for the moments of amusement. We learned that they were university students fund-raising for some cause. Once again, I made note of how we have learned over time to touch each other less and how homophobic our culture has become so that men can no longer hold hands or hug each other while walking down the road without being suspect.

Another difference that became obvious in Ghana was the modest dress of the women there. As usual, I looked forward to seeing the African women that I think of as the best dressed in the world and I was not disappointed. Even among the young girls, traditional prints could be seen but older women lamented the arrival of tight jeans and feared that worse would be coming. Only one day in a mall in Accra did I see a young woman with much more revealed than concealed . Alas, I see this in Anguilla too and I do not wonder why. My American children in Ghana are holding their own at school, my grandson continues to hold his own as a seven-year old third-grader in an accelerated programme in the USA and I can only hope that my daughters at the ALHCS will excel in their upcoming exams. I also hope and pray that those promising students at Purity Prep and JSS will remember my words to them about their role in reclaiming the greatness of the continent that birthed them and that gave life to the human race.

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