Corpsmen in Ghana

As 50 volunteer teachers from the U.S. Peace Corps descended on Ghana last August, even the most sympathetic of observers in Africa were skeptical. Recalls one foreign-service veteran: "I was convinced that the Peace Corps would be just another hit-and-run set of do-gooders in Bermuda shorts and button-down shirts." But in Ghana, where it is undergoing one of its first real field tests, the Peace Corps so far has been a most pleasant surprise.

One of the seven corps groups now abroad,* the Ghana contingent went well prepared. Before departure, the young teachers (21 of them women) spent eight hard weeks of cramming at the University of California, studied African history, jungle medicine, and a little Twi from a staff that included three teachers from Ghana.

Toilets & Air Conditioning. After further indoctrination at the University College outside Accra, the Peace Corps teachers were assigned to 27 secondary schools scattered across the country. Compared with Peace Corpsmen elsewhere, those in Ghana are well off. In addition to their Peace Corps stipend of $75 a month, they are paid $1,960-a-year salaries by Ghana's government. Most of Ghana's schools are less than three years old and come complete with faculty homes that have two bedrooms, running water, flush toilets, electricity and, occasionally, air conditioning.

A handful of the volunteers drew hard ship posts. Ray Spriggs, 24, one of two Negroes in the group, has to walk eight miles from home to his school at Sekondi on the Ghana coast. Harvard Graduate Roger Hamilton, 22, teaching in the coastal village of Assinie, is cut off by tropical rains for nine months of the year, shares his house with a herd of goats and an occasional snake, sometimes needs eleven hours to Jeep 18 miles over Ghana roads to collect supplies. Hamilton has no complaints. Says he: "It's a good thing I don't mind isolation."

Enthusiasm & Experience. The Peace Corps' youthful (average age: 24) teachers seem to make up in enthusiasm what they lack in experience. One of those with a classroom background is Dorothy Dee Vellenga, 24, who last year taught biology at the expensive Foxcroft school for girls in Middleburg, Va. Now she is in charge of all-male classes in biology and chemistry at the West Africa Secondary School in Accra. "It's certainly a refreshing change," she says. "The boys here are much more enthusiastic than the girls were at Foxcroft. They pay perfect attention, and you can hear a pin drop during lab sessions." Ghana's volunteer teachers seem not to mind their long classroom hours--up to 24 hours per week--but complain about the lack of teaching aids, notably for science courses. "There's no electricity for physics demonstrations," says Penn State's Donald Groff, 22, who teaches in Accra, "so I have to rig up homemade apparatus with wires and batteries. But we manage somehow."

At first, many Ghanaians were suspicious of the Peace Corpsmen. But most have since come around handsomely. At Tafo, natives wanted to make Barnett Chessin. 23. a tribal subchief in gratitude for his contributions to town life. In Dodowa, one of the few school districts with no faculty apartments, the local chief volunteered to share his own modern home to accommodate Peace Corps Teacher Thomas Livingston. Ghanaian students, used to the magisterial ways of British-trained masters, have responded well to Peace Corps teaching. Says Martin Larbi of Accra's La Bone Secondary School: "They're better than our other foreign teachers." Enthuses Nadio Baako. a student in Kumasi: "It's like a fresh wind off the sea, having these teachers."

* The others are in Nigeria, Tanganyika, Chile, Colombia, St. Lucia, and the Philippines.

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