WAWA

About the Book

WAWA introduces you to the colors, smells and tastes of West Africa and is a poignant blend of romance and danger experienced during the course of life in a third-world country in 1966. There are humorous, sexy and tense cultural exchanges between the droll English, the inhibited Germans and the loud and exciting Americans, Polish and Australians.

T.J. and Carolyn James come to Ghana where T.J. is joining an international group of architects and engineers to form an experimental faculty at the University of Science and Technology.

The faculty must confront the real and imagined results of their creation of a school of architecture in a country struggling to survive independence.

About the Author

TEACHERS DON’T START OUT HEROIC, THEY SNEAK UP ON IT ONE STUDENT AT A TIME. Thomas L Turman is an architect and engineer who has practiced his profession in Northern California for the last 35 years. He has taught in all the major schools of architecture in the San Francisco Bay Area and was Department Chair of the Architectural/Engineering Department at Laney College in Oakland, California until retiring in 2004. Tom recently returned to the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana where he visited friends, taught and helped with accreditation at the Architecture Department he helped start in the 60’s. He has been writing and publishing short stories and essays for the last 1 2 years. TEACHER! dispels the myth that all racial minorities are criminal punks; confronts the pompous blowhard who parrots the saying, “Those who can, do; those who can’t do, teach”; and rejects the idea that there is a difference between the “real world” and “academics, or teaching”. I’m a teacher and I love it. This book provides my colleagues some examples of success to give them some hope and reminds them why we do this. I also want to engage non-teachers in the curious, difficult but fulfilling drama that is education. I want you to laugh, weep and feel pride for that bunch of fellow Americans who have devoted their lives to helping raise, teach and direct our children, so read on. Remember, teaching is not for sissies.