The Volta School for the Mentally Challenged is a smaller offshoot of the marvellous Volta School for the Deaf outside of Hohoe, Ghana, which is sandwiched between the largest man-made lake in the world, Lake Volta, and the West African nation of Togo. There are sixty students with a wide variety of disabilities ranging from physical abnormalities such as cerebral palsy and mental disorders including a large population of children with Down syndrome. The student body is divided into five sections: nursery I, nursery II, moderate I, moderate II and pre-vocational training. The class sizes ranges from ten to fifteen students each with absolutely no regards to mental ability in division. With only five teachers on payroll, there is the chronic inability to keep track of every child. During the off-hours, the sixty children are watched by only two women; because of this chronic shortage of staff, children are prone to wandering off. This is completely unacceptable but also, sadly, very unavoidable.The pre-vocational class is trained to make a variety of handicrafts. When the raw materials are provided, these children can make very high-quality works. However, because of the lack of funding, the class is unable to purchase the needed supplies. To compound this problem, the people of Ghana, especially in Hohoe, are not able to make large purchases to benefit the school. While the children are pitied, little help is offered.
It is the aim of this website and organisation to raise funds to improve the school for the good of the students. There is so much that these children could learn but are unable to because of the poor arrangement of the school. Unlike the School for the Deaf, which is an amazing school, the School for the Mentally Challenged receives very poor funding from the government and is quite honestly largely ignored by the School for the Deaf, which claims most of the previously mentioned funding.
If you have Facebook, please join the group for school. Until the page gets up and running, the Facebook group is the best place to keep up-to-date on information benefiting the school.
To see our 2007 Advent Calendar, please click here. The Advent Calendar will introduce everyone to the students of our school!
