Eliza Epstein, known for her elaborate fashion show dresses and what she described as her disturbingly loud voice while at Fieldston, has already started making a positive impact on the world.
After graduating from Fieldston in 2018, Epstein completed her undergraduate education at the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated last year, after majoring in biology and criminology. Her thesis was on the health care systems in prisons. She plans on attending Yale Medical School this upcoming fall; after years and years of schooling, however, she has decided to take a short break before attending medical school. So, taking a pause from learning in the more traditional sense, Epstein taught kindergarten at a school in Ghana for the past ten months.
Epstein states that her decision to teach abroad for the year was somewhat spontaneous. One of her favorite professors, Kobina Pfosu-Donkoh, is from Northern Ghana and started an elementary school in his home town in 2018. He retired from UPenn in 2022 to go back to Ghana and put all his energy into his school. Epstein approached him at the end of her senior year and offered to volunteer at his school for a few weeks. She said, “in turn he asked if I would be willing to come for the whole year.”
Soon thereafter, Epstein found herself on a plane to Ghana knowing her return would not be for another ten months. After arriving at Maame Amponsah Memorial Academy (MAM Academy), the elementary school, a classroom was turned into a bedroom for her and she began to teach kindergarten (or as they call it KG2).
On top of teaching the children at the school, she also worked on the management team with four other people to help develop MAM Academy. The premise of the school is to have an affordable, high-end private school for families who would not otherwise be able to send their kids to private school. According to Epstein, MAM Academy is especially important today due to the instability of many government schools in Ghana.
The current president of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo, recently made all schooling free, a positive move because it increased the amount of kids attending school. But, at the same time this means that all of the money going into the schooling system was lost. This has resulted in mostly all schools being overpopulated and underfunded.
MAM Academy has almost ninety students now compared to a few years ago when they only had thirty. The school is growing fast, and with people like Epstein helping out, it will continue to grow faster. COVID hit when MAM Academy was only in its early stages, giving the school a rocky start. But, with more and more people putting time and effort into MAM Academy’s potential, many more children in Ghana have a chance for better educational opportunities.
Experiencing a learning environment so drastically different from Eptein’s own at Fieldston was quite eye opening for her. “Especially having been a student at Fieldston, it was very striking to see the other end of what a classroom could be: having absolutely no resources,” she says. She elaborates, “I was teaching students how to read without books, and I was teaching students how to write with broken pencils.” “Most days ,” she added, “we lost power for at least an hour.” She noted, however, that, despite the conditions, the children were still so motivated and so eager to learn, and Epstein quickly fell in love with teaching them.
Not only were the physical conditions different at MAM Academy, Epstein noted there were extreme cultural differences as well. “The biggest thing culturally that was shocking for me to see was how much children learn how to share at such a young age.” She also said that “I was the only teacher in the school that refused to beat the kids.” She became best friends with some of her coworkers who would beat the students, and learned that the beatings were not meant in a malicious manner; it is just their way of life. But, she expressed that it was extremely striking to see firsthand.
Although Epstein’s year in Ghana has come to a close, she will no doubt use the skills and new perspectives she picked up at MAM Academy in her future work. Her ultimate goal is to complete medical school and eventually end up working as a physician in prisons. However, working with children this year made her realize that she might also want to work with children who have been touched by the criminal justice system as well.
Epstein rounds out her influential experience in Ghana by noting the differences from her own time at Fieldston. “Throughout my time at Fieldston and then at college, I was constantly reading and learning about the inequalities in the world. But then, this year – when I was living in a world where my best friends didn’t usually eat more than one meal in a day, if that, and had points in their lives where they had one outfit and one pair of underwear – I think I was really able to internalize everything I had learned at Fieldston. I think, going forward, while I always knew that my future patients are definitely going through so much more than they give off, I think now, really understanding a world so different than I grew up in, will hopefully make me a much more compassionate doctor and much more passionate about serving people who otherwise wouldn’t get adequate health care.”
