Hi Ho- 2

In Ghana, children with severe Visual or Hearing Impairments (VI and HI), are taught in specialist boarding schools, where teachers are skilled in Braille or Ghanaian Sign Language, and use adapted teaching methodologies. Sending a child away to school for a whole term is a wrench, a serious separation, and contrary to the African custom of close family ties and communal living. But with extreme difficulties and the expense of transport, and a shortage of appropriately trained teachers, the boarding school option is at present the only realistic compromise.

Explaining to parents the importance of specialist education:- Haruna advises  parents of two children who are deaf. The parents are subsistence farmers and without education. The schoolboy with the bicycle acted as our guide to this remote rural location

The children who we want to enrol into Gbeogo School for the Deaf.

For children with mild to moderate VI and HI, and with other disabilities, the local mainstream school is the only option. Actual attendance depends on many factors: the child themselves, family commitment to education, teachers able to accommodate within school, location and logistics. With class sizes of 50 to 100, and schools equipped only with basic classrooms, chalk boards, minimal text books, and often, but not always, furniture, teachers face huge challenges.

Atimpoka:-an admirable young woman, attends her local school- travelling either on her adapted tricycle, or when her machine is "spoiled" dragging herself in a crawling movement across rough ground and into school. Haruna and I visit her at home to arrange Social Welfare support- and give a timely warning to the extended family about sending all the other children to school.

Atimpoka taking her place at school. The head teacher  welcomes all pupils into his school, setting an ethos of inclusion.