Meet the Kuapa Kids: Joycelin and Stephen
Stephen and Joycelin come from a small school of around 80 students in New Koforidua. New Koforidua is a small community about 30km to the east of Kumasi, the second largest city in Ghana where Kuapa Kokoo HQ is based.
Joycelin Segbedzi
I love all of them. The best thing about my family is that we all live together, everything we do is together. I get up at 5am when it is quite cold. When I wake up I pray to God, as I do when I go to bed. I kneel on my bed and pray for God’s protection for me and my family and ask him to give me another day. Then I wash my face, clean my teeth and do my housework. I sweep my room and my sister helps me sweep the house compound. I go to school around 6am. I do extra classes before school starts at 8am. There are ten of us who take extra classes. Our parents pay for them to help us prepare for our final exams. School finishes at 2:30pm when we go home to eat. Today for lunch I am having fried yam with shito, a spicy pepper sauce. Yams are big root vegetables – you can cook them like potatoes. After lunch I fetch water from a pump near my house. Later I help my mother to cook supper. This evening we are having fu fu and palm nut soup. Fu fu is a thick smooth porridge made from yams – you have it at the bottom of a bowl of soup and you are meant to swallow it without chewing. For the palm nut soup, we take palm nuts, which are like big red melons, cut and slice them, boil them, then pound them into a paste, sieve them to remove the skin and fibre and then make into soup. After supper I do homework or read through my notebooks. At the weekend I play a game with my friends called “ampe”. It’s a bit like “paper, scissors, rock”. You play with more than two players. The leader and another player jump up in the air at the same time, clap, and put one foot forwards. If the leader and the other player have the same foot forwards when they land, the leader wins a point. If they have different feet forwards, then the other player becomes the leader. If you are playing in a circle, the leader moves along the inside of the circle, playing against others in turn. If they are in a line, the leader moves on down the line. I attend a Roman Catholic church on Sunday, with all my family. I go early to the church at 5am to dust the seats, then go home to bathe and put on my best clothes, a white dress. White is a nice bright colour, good for Sunday because everyone is so happy to attend church. Sometimes when I’m just with my sister we play with my doll, Vestine. Vestine has a battery and when you press her, she sings and closes her eyes. My favourite subject is English because it cuts across the other subjects. Everything we do, we do in English. When I grow up I want to be a nurse. Why? Because in Ghana we have many hospitals but not enough nurses who can cater for the number of patients. Why don’t we have many nurses? Because the pay is often low. They need to be paid more. They don’t have much time and so they are stressed and often shout at you. When I’m a nurse I will make sure my patients are well treated and I won’t shout. My parents have a three acre cocoa farm, though my father is also a driver and my mother sells vegetables. At the weekend, we help on the cocoa farm by weeding around the trees and cutting off swollen shoots from the tree, where the flowers have not germinated. I would like to inherit the cocoa farm, even when I am a nurse. Fairtrade is a good thing for cocoa farmers. When you sell the cocoa you get a bonus, and Fairtrade helps with materials and other things like sending your children to school. In Ghana, we like the light brown chocolate, which is delicious. The dark chocolate is not so nice! I’m looking forwards to coming to the UK. I think the schools will be very different. We don’t have a playground, or many books and materials. I think that in the UK you will have all sorts of materials to help you learn. Stephen Amankwah
She has a cocoa farm, two acres in size, and she works on it on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. On other days, she does her duties as Queen Mother. I like helping her on the cocoa farm. Last weekend, we weeded under the trees together. It is nice to work with her. Fairtrade is important for us in Ghana. Cocoa farmers here work hard to produce good quality cocoa, so they should be paid a fair price. My mother lives in Tema, a port near Accra the capital of Ghana. She has a small shop selling household goods. My father lives in Kumasi: he’s a computer engineer. They are separated. I have three brothers. Two live with my mother. One with my father. I prefer to live with my grandmother here in New Koforidua. She’s a good grandmother and she likes children and telling us stories. She’s a great story teller. Most days I get up around 5:30am. I wash my face and fetch water from near the house, then I take my bath. I put some water in a bucket, then stand over the bucket to wash. I put on my uniform and go to school for 8am, finishing at 2:30pm. My favourite thing about school is that you acquire more knowledge. My favourite subject is social studies, where you learn about other countries and how people live. In our last social studies lesson we were learning about how the British colonised Ghana and how Ghana gained independence in 1957. After school, I go and fetch water for my grandmother before taking my lunch. Today we had “ampesi”, it’s a dish where you take the root vegetable yam, peel and boil it, then fry it and eat with a little bit of sauce made from chilli pepper, tomato, palm oil and onion. Then I do my homework and read my books before having supper in the evening. Yesterday we had rice and fish stew. I go to bed around 8:30pm. What do I like doing? I like playing arcade video games like Road Rash! We play sometimes at a shop in New Koforidua where you pay 20 pesewas (10p) for a go. I want to have a computer of my own one day. I like football. I’m very good at it! We play football on Saturdays and Sundays. Sometimes we go shopping. We buy things like milk and soap from a supermarket in Konongo, a bigger town about 5 miles from here. We go about once a month, when we’ve run out of provisions. We grow a lot of our food, so we only buy some things. Make Fairtrade your
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I am 15 years old. I live in New Koforidua with my parents and my younger sister Helen. Helen is 8 years old and is at primary school. I also have an older brother, Nicholas, who lives in Accra and is studying computers.
I am 14 years old. I live with my grandmother, Nana Agyeiwaah Marfowah II. She is the Queen Mother of New Koforidua. The Queen Mother is the woman who looks after all the women in the town. She is second after the chief, and the role passes from daughter to daughter. Every village, town and city in the Ashanti region of Ghana has a Queen Mother.
