Letter from Ghana
David Stephens, a lecturer at the University's Institute of Education, has spent the last two years on unpaid leave with his family in Ghana. There he has been working as an educational adviser for the Overseas Development Association. He describes here what his life was like in Africa:
If there's one thing I can advise on, it's the nocturnal habits of the Ghanaian fruit bat. For the past six months we've been woken at dawn by the return of thousands of twittering creatures landing in the mahogany trees at the back of our house. They are about the only unfriendly aspect of life here though - and probably the only thing to run on time!
We live above the shop, which means that mornings see an endless arrival of landrovers, secretaries, gardeners, day guards and consultants keen to start work before the humidity makes life slower and stickier.
Ghana has only recently begun to emerge from the desperate economic crises of the 1980s and is now trying hard to improve the quality of its schools and colleges. My work takes me all over the country, though as often as not I'm heading out of Accra to spend the day at the newly-established University College of Education at Winneba. 
There we're helping to orientate the college towards primary teacher training. We're also trying to launch a distance learning B.Ed - difficult in an environment in which a photocopier is quite a luxury. We've managed to set up a link between Winneba and Sussex too which will enable my involvement to continue. An interesting part of my work here is liaising with various aid donors and getting a sense of how international aid works from the inside.
A major reason for taking unpaid leave and uprooting ourselves from Sussex was for me to have the chance to return to the field and carry out an extensive piece of research. With support from the ODA and UNESCO, I have managed to put together a team of Ghanaians, and we're now analysing a vast pile of teacher and pupil life histories. We're looking in particular at cultural factors that keep girls in and out of school. Ghanaian colleagues have taught me a great deal, not least of all how to eat a huge plate of foo foo and chicken without making a fool of myself.
By lunch time, it's started heating up and so afternoons are usually spent talking to colleagues, arranging workshops or running out to a local school to deliver some chalk or a spare part for the community generator.
Has it all been worth it? For me, taking time out from Sussex to learn more of the practice of what I teach has been worthwhile. And I've had time to research and write. For Claire, it has probably been more of an adjustment giving up a job and becoming an ex-pat parent and being pregnant in such an enervating climate. Benjamin has left well-versed in Ghanaian English and hopefully more aware of what it means to be different.
We returned for the new academic year, back to our small Brighton terrace without a fruit bat in sight!