PHOTO: Class 1 Pupil forced out of school to care for sick grandma

• Posted on March 16, 2015March 16, 2015
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

THE aspirations  of  13-year-old Ago Anita, to pursue her academic dreams and to contribute meaningfully to her society and nation as a whole, hangs in  the balance after she was forced out of school by her parents to care for her sick grandmother.

While in Class One at Mangotsonya Basic School in the Ningo Prampram District of the Greater Accra Region, Anita was impressed upon by her parents to leave school and give care to her grandmother who was terminally ill.

The reason for her parent’s rather unconventional decision is strongly bedded in superstition and traditional beliefs.

Anita narrated that the only explanation given her by her parents was that she was the only child   in the household, then,  whose blood was ‘compatible’ with that of the sick grandmother and hence the  only person that could touch her during the period until she got well.

It was believed that her grandmother’s condition would getting worse due to a believe that the mother who was at first giving her care was spiritually not compatible with the sick person.

“My mother said because her blood was not compactable with that of her mother, so each time she touched her [sic grandmother] her whole body got numb. So I was asked to leave school to care for my grandmother,” Anita narrated.

She narrated that although her duty to her grandmother ended last year August when she passed away, she still looks forward to getting back to the class room.

Anita is strong willed and has a burning desire to get back to school to pursue her academic dreams; as a result she has enrolled in an educational programme for out-of-school girls in her former school where she receives an hour of lessons.

The programme, MGCubed (Making Ghanaian Girls Great) is a component of an ongoing educational  project delivered by  Gems Education Solutions a UK consultancy funded by Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID) as part of its Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC), which aims to help a million of the world’s poorest girls improve their lives through education.

Weekend Finder followed up Anita’s story by visiting her parents at home together with a Community Committee Secretary to the MGCubed project, Mr George Huno, to appeal to them to give Anita a second chance at school.

Mrs Abena Addo, Anita’s mother explained that although she would have wished her daughter to be in school, there were other competing family demands that were putting pressure on her finances.

“Already two of her siblings are in school,” she explained.

But upon further explaination on why it was important for Anita to be in school, she agreed to make the necessary provision to ensure that her daughter is back to the classroom but with one condition-she must not make waste her effort by getting herself pregnant while in school.

-The Finder