Destination Charti – An Article by Mawuli Fianyo, Ghana

My future instantaneously turned bleak the moment I found out I had been posted to Charti M/A Primary School. Accra was my home and the pursuit of my ambitions was a guaranteed smoother process with me in Accra. For that reason, I wanted nothing more than to be posted in a school in Accra to teach. But, in as much as I harboured a strong hope of being posted in Accra, I was also a realist enough to know the chances of that. So in efforts to manage expectations and avoid disappointments, I let go of my hopes of an Accra-based posting and lowered my expectations to anywhere with network connectivity and electricity. It seemed a very low expectation and there was no way I would be disappointed. Or so I thought.

Charti M/A Primary School is located in a very remote village in the northern part of Ghana. Specifically, the Oti region. The village goes by the same name as the school: Charti. It has no network reception, no electricity, no safe source of water, and the road leading to the place was horrendous. The whole thing seemed like a prank cooked up in hell. I couldn’t think of a single thing I had done in my life to deserve such a posting. My options were either to drop out of the teaching profession or take a difficult leap of faith and go to Charti.

It is going to be temporary. You would apply for a transfer after a year. It will be an adventure. You will come out of this with great stories. These were all promises I made to myself to ease swallowing my pride and go to Charti. The external promises from the government about teachers in rural communities receiving incentives also helped.

It was after I went to Charti that I learnt that promises are easier made than lived out. Externally, there were no extra incentives from the government. Not a dime. I was completely at the mercy of the villagers. They gave me a place to stay and although I am appreciative of that kindness, a view of the place made me question if the people really cared about my wellbeing as much as they claimed.

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The house was arguably the most outdated in the entire village. It was a typical Ghanaian compound house made of four flats of rooms arranged in a square-like manner. The centre of the house which was open to the sun was its kitchen. There was a smaller kitchen at the entrance which I figured was for the rainy season. The room I was given was right next to that kitchen. The roof above the room had turned black from smoke from the kitchen. There were holes all over the floor and the walls. The floor was geometrically uneven, and don’t even get me started on the mice. The more I looked around the room the worst it got. All I could do was smile and say “Thank you.”

I was brought to Charti to teach and although the circumstances weren’t conducive, I still had to do my job. I probably would have done a decent job if not for the endless obstacles that made teaching and learning next to impossible. The school building is the worst I have seen. It was so horrible, it had no business being a school. The mud classroom walls had broken off all over and its highest points were around three feet high. The thatched roofing was held up by some wooden pillars.

Inside the classrooms, there were a few desks that had been provided by the district office. In front of the class were boards made from worn-out plywood smeared with carbon electrodes from batteries. The chalk used were mostly broken which made writing on the boards tedious and very uncomfortable. The only textbooks in the school were very few books from UNIAID. And on top of it all, the entire teaching staff of the school were three; myself, the Headmaster, and one other teacher who had been there a year before me.

Of the three staff, only the headmaster spoke and understood the language of the locals which was Kokomba.  The children didn’t speak or understand English. The only bridge across the enormous language barrier was the Twi language. My twi was bad and theirs was worse. In between the bad and worse, we found a way to communicate.

I estimate only about thirty per cent of the children in the village came to school. They came enthusiastically. I suppose a lot of them came to see me, the new teacher. The headmaster performing his head-masterly duties wasn’t around most of the time so the running of the school fell to me and the other teacher. Being new, I taught two classes: classes five and six. The other more experienced teacher juggled the rest.

I was newly trained, inexperienced, and left unprepared for village life by the privileges of growing up in Accra. Most of the time during my early teaching days, it felt like I was talking to walls. The children had no idea what I was saying. I got frustrated trying to get through to them and that only made things worse for me.

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Life outside the schools wasn’t any better. Adapting to life in Charti was nothing short of hell. Every second was a pain. My efforts to endure stressed me to the bone. It was psychological warfare I wasn’t prepared for. The frustrating days turned to stressful weeks and the stressful weeks grew to depressing months. Those first couple of months were the hardest of my life. The hardships reaffirmed my belief that the entire experience would make an amazing story I would get to tell one day with me at its centre. So I lowered my guard and allowed myself to get closer to the natives of Charti and that was when everything changed.

I got to learn that the people of Charti weren’t any different from the people in Accra or any part of the world. They were mostly uneducated and steps back in civilisation, but at their core, they were humans who loved, laughed, cried, danced, and did every other thing humans across the world did. Most importantly, I realised the people of Charti had stories too; Stories that unfold day to day as their lives go on. Due to the unintentional isolation brought upon them by the settlement choices of their ancestors, their stories die with them.

As I adapted better to Charti and got to see its raw beauty, I felt compelled to make myself a promise to do my possible best to call attention from the outside world to Charti. It may be a long shot and may take an even longer while but this write-up is the first of many steps towards the fulfilment of that promise.

This article was published in the December 2021 edition of the WSA magazine. Please click here to download.