The Beautiful Tree (11 page)

Erskine greets Mary, and together they sweep the schoolyard, getting everything ready for the new school day. Erskine is the only teacher in the school who doesn’t live in the village itself. Last year, he had graduated from senior secondary school. He had wanted to go on to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, but couldn’t afford it. So to try to save some money, he looked for work in his and neighboring villages, and found this vacancy at Supreme Academy. He loves being a teacher. He loves it that the children seem happy when they are around him. He feels proud when he can impart something new to his charges. And he reflects on the happy memories of his own school days and is continually astonished at his own achievement of now being a teacher, and no longer a pupil! And not only is he able to teach his own class, but he also teaches computer science to all the classes. Crammed into the tiny room that doubles as the proprietor’s office, he shows them how to format a disk, what a computer monitor looks like, and all the basic computing skills of the Ghanaian national curriculum. He’s sorry that so many children must cram into the classroom with only one computer because they rarely get to use it themselves. He’s not unhappy with his wages. The 200,000 cedis per month, about $20, enable him to save toward his goal of higher education for himself.

Other children filter into the compound, and by 7:30 a.m., the schoolyard is buzzing with children. One of the last to arrive is Victoria, a beautiful child of 11, tall for her age, and already very elegant. Her family lives nearby, in a large block house they share with three other families. Victoria’s father is a fisherman, and her mother is a fishmonger, who smokes the fish caught by her husband for the market and also runs a small store in the yard, selling canned goods and dried milk. Victoria’s home is more or less adjacent to the government school compound. Her parents had started her schooling at Supreme Academy, the closest private school to them, in the nursery classes, but then had fallen on hard times. The owner of the fishing boat who had employed her father went out of business, and they could no longer afford the fees. So for a year, Victoria went to the government school. They had worried about her progress there. Before, she had been so bright and keen to learn; now she seemed listless. She didn’t tell them what was happening in the school—somehow it wasn’t her place to tell them. But most days, she knew that the teacher did very little; he arrived late in the morning, wrote a simple exercise on the blackboard, then went to sleep or read the newspaper, ignoring the children. Sometimes he didn’t show up at all. Most days, she sat in the classroom, eager to learn, eager to do something. But it was impossible. As the other children ran riot around her, she’d given up.

Fortunately, her father, Joshua, in his late 30s, was hired by another fishing boat. And with income once more assured, he managed to send Victoria back to the private school. Indeed, having saved arduously for the last two years, he himself was now the proud lessee of a fishing boat and employed five other men from the village. He could see the problem in the government school with crystal clarity—the proximity of his house to the school meant he didn’t need Victoria to tell him what was going on. Like Mary’s father, he was out on the ocean by 3:30 a.m., to return home by 10:00 a.m., when he lit the fire in the blackened mud bowls of the kilns in readiness for smoking the day’s catch. But often when he returned home from fishing, he could see the children still playing in the adjacent government schoolyard—even though the school day was supposed to start before 8:00 a.m.! Sometime later, as he helped his wife carry the fish on wood slats, buzzing with flies, across to the smoking kilns, he’d see some of the teachers saunter in, waving the children into their classrooms. But in only a few hours, he’d see the teachers pack up and leave, their work finished at midday, to enjoy a beer in the chop house on the corner, before flagging down the buses on the main road back to Accra. Nice work if you can get it! he thought. Joshua knew from his own experience now as a businessman and employer that the private school had to be different. There, the owner is totally dependent on fees from parents like him—if he removes his daughter, the proprietor will lose income, and that’s the last thing he wants, since he needs the income to pay his teachers and make a profit. So he’s bound to watch his teachers closely and to fire anyone who doesn’t pull his or her weight, just as Joshua would do if one of his employees didn’t show up. It’s simple really. It’s the way his own business works, and that of his wife, too. If she doesn’t smoke the fish properly, her customers won’t like her offering and won’t return. Nothing complicated here. It’s all so different in the government school, he can see that; “Government jobs,” he mutters to himself, knowing exactly why it is so hard to discipline the teachers.

Joshua is proud that his daughter seems to be doing well again now that she’s back in the private school. She has regained something of her old spirit and enthusiasm. He loves his daughter very much—his only child with his wife, although he has five children from another marriage across the village. She’s so dear to his heart, so intelligent and bright. She will go far, he knows. One day, she will become a doctor or lawyer. That makes him very proud, to think he, a humble fisherman, with such an accomplished daughter.

His wife Margaret had easily persuaded him when she stated that education for girls was just as important as for boys nowadays. “Anything a man can do, a woman can do too, sometimes even better than a man,” she had said, and he’d had to agree. And while he was out fishing, he knew that she’d been gossiping with the other village women, comparing notes about the respective merits of all the private schools in the village. In the end, none seemed better than Supreme Academy, where they knew from their previous experience that the teachers cared and taught well. Indeed, Margaret had persuaded her sister to move her children there only this last year.

Victoria’s mother, Margaret, is preparing the baskets to take to the lagoon to pick up the fish, and sorting firewood in readiness for smoking the day’s catch. From where she is gathering wood, she can see the fine buildings of the government school, newly improved thanks to the generosity of American benefactors. “What’s the point of having such nice buildings, if learning doesn’t go on?” she muses. She wishes that Supreme Academy had better buildings, however. Perhaps if the teaching improves at the government school, she can send her next child there.

Theophilus Quaye, the proprietor of Supreme Academy, has been working since about 7:00 a.m. in his small office that doubles as a classroom and computer room. He’s 32 years old and proud of the business he has built from scratch in the last six years. Just seven years ago, he was unemployed and wondering what to do next. He’d been a teacher at a small private school in a nearby village but had lost his way in life and did not show up at school for a few days. The school owner had promptly fired him, despite his pleading that he would never do it again. Fed up with seeing him hanging around in the village, his pastor persuaded him to take a basic course in preprimary education. He then helped his friend Edwin establish a private school in the village, Brightest Academy, just across the main road from his mother’s house. Seeing Edwin’s success and encouraged by his new wife, Theophilus decided to open his own school. He saw that several hundred children in the village still did not attend school. In talking to Edwin, he realized that the main reason those children weren’t in school wasn’t because the parents didn’t care about education, but because they thought the government school wasted their children’s time. If a private school were available, they would clearly jump at the chance to enroll their children.

Theophilus persuaded his mother to let him start teaching on the veranda of their concrete-block house. He began with 14 children. At first he charged no fees, but then plucked up the courage to ask the parents to pay a small amount. A few said no and promptly withdrew their children; but most agreed, if they could pay daily when they could afford to do so.

His enrollment grew, and he borrowed money from people in the village to construct the wood building along the edge of his mother’s 70- by 100-meter plot. He now rues that decision: he’d selected what he thought was the most affordable option (he didn’t want debt hanging over his head too long), but the wood building turned out to be just as expensive as a concrete-block building, although he’d been convinced that it would be cheaper. If he’d only chosen concrete blocks from the beginning, he could then build a story building and expand upward to cope with the villagers’ increasing demand. One day, he will have to raze his building and start again. His outstanding debt is 10 million cedis (around $1,100), which he’ll finish paying off this year; then he can start his expansion plans. Anyway, parents keep sending their children to his school, apparently unconcerned about his wood building, which has not aged well in the salty wind, provided that his teachers care about their children, which he is proud they do.

Theophilus now has 367 children—up from last year’s 311. He is not surprised that his numbers increased this year: the government school was finally free to parents, having charged about 30,000 cedis (around $3.30) per year previously. But the class sizes had doubled since then, and several parents, dismayed by this, had moved their children to Supreme Academy. They more than compensated for the few parents who had moved their children from his school to the government school to save money. At Supreme Academy, parents pay about 30,000 cedis per month, or 270,000 cedis ($29.70) per year. Many still pay daily—1,500 cedis (17 cents)—although he’s gradually persuading parents to pay monthly or, if he is lucky, by the term. Twenty children attend for free, however; they are mainly children whose father died or disappeared, leaving a mother unable to afford the fees. Because of his expanding enrollment, this year he added two extra classrooms in another block building, which he rented from the family living on the adjacent site. His rent for each room is 100,000 cedis ($11.00) per month.

He’s proud of his achievements; he knows that as he walks through his village, the villagers look up to him because he has become a distinguished figure. He’s pleased that his school is now government registered—since October 12 last year. That had been a real struggle, keeping the inspectors at bay, as they threatened to close him down. But he’d been unable to become registered because such a school couldn’t occupy the same site as the principal’s home, which his clearly did. He’d tried to get a loan to buy the adjacent plot that was for sale but there was a Catch-22—no loan if your school is unregistered, the bank had said. Eventually, he had managed to persuade the inspectors to overlook the deficiency (the persuasion amounting to a one-time payment of about 4 million cedis, [around $440]) and was now the proud owner of a temporary three-year registration certificate.

At exactly 7:45 a.m., Theophilus goes into the school compound to lead the assembly as one of the older boys rings the bell. The children stand at attention as the flag is raised and sing the national anthem, followed by the hymn “Amazing Grace.”

All his 11 teachers are present, as usual. No teacher appears ready to make the same mistake that he did, all those years ago. He’s certainly told them what would happen if they did. All but Erskine live in the village itself and so have no distance to travel. The third-grade teacher is 24-year-old Gyimaclef Oladepo, who has taught in the school for three years. He studied automotive engineering at senior secondary school in Accra and wants to continue his studies to fulfill his life’s ambition of becoming a marine engineer. So he is putting money aside from his monthly wages of 200,000 cedis ($22), although he thinks he’s paid too little, recognizing that it’s an uphill slog to save. If he can’t save enough, he will remain a teacher, a job he really enjoys—apart from the financial aspect. He loves the respect he gets from the children and from the parents in the village, where he was born and now lives again. His mother is a trader in Accra and lives there now. His father disappeared about 15 years ago; he doesn’t know his whereabouts. He was a “driver for a certain company,” also from the village.

Another teacher is 21-year-old Julius, who is from the village itself. He also has taught here for three years, after senior secondary school. His father is a fisherman, his mother a fishmonger. He wants to be a professional teacher, to acquire his teacher-training certificate from the University of Education at Winneba. From there, he will be contractually obliged to work in a government school for two years, but then he wants to teach in a private school, perhaps even open one himself. Daniel is 26, although he looks much younger, a very small, slight young man. Like Julius, he attended junior secondary in the government school in the village, completing his basic education just two years ago: he’d started school very late because his parents—again, both fisherfolk—had needed him to work for them. He’d been glad to find employment in the school when he graduated.

Ebenezer is 30 years old. He has taught at Supreme Academy for four years. He’s the second-grade teacher. He also studied automotive engineering at senior secondary school at the Accra Technical Training College. When he studied for his junior secondary certificate in the Bortianor government school, only three teachers had ever showed up, for the entire school of about 200 children. He wonders what might have happened if he’d been able to get “a good training.” To be frank, he couldn’t find any other suitable employment, which is why he became a teacher. But to his surprise, he loves teaching—it is an “offering job,” he thinks, one where “you sacrifice yourself for the children.” He knows his children would miss him if he were to leave. He earns 300,000 cedis (around $33) per month, higher than the others, he knows, but still very low pay. He has a wife and two children to support, 9-year-old Joyce and 18-month-old Jonathan. He’s happy that Joyce is in his second-grade class at Supreme and that she is doing well. Being able to keep a close eye on his daughter is one of the perks of the job.