Overview
About Crossover International Academy
Crossover International Academy was founded by Mr. David Yayravi. It is a school dedicated to helping children who are former slaves from the nearby fishing industry and children who are orphans. Crossover serves as a home, a school, and a family for children in the Lake Volta region of Ghana. Over the last couple of years, Crossover has established itself as the leading educational institutional in the region.
The Children of Crossover International Academy
According to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), more than 200,000 children work as slaves in West and Central Africa. Ghanaians around Lake Volta estimate that the number of slave children on the lake is in the thousands. Dave Yayravi, a Togolese refugee living in Ghana, founded the Crossover International Academy in Tongor-Attokropo to house and educate former slave and orphaned children.
David Yayravi is the Principal and Founder of the Crossover International Academy
To best understand the foundation and history of Crossover International School we will first need to understand the environment around the school. Crossover International School is located in Tongor-Attokrokpo, Ghana on the shores of Lake Volta, roughly 3 hours drive north from Accra, the capital city of Ghana.
Lake Volta is a human-made lake, one of the largest in the world, stretching through the middle of Ghana. It was created in the 1960s when the Volta River was dammed by the Akosombo Dam, which provides energy for much of Ghana, including Crossover. A major industry on Lake Volta is fishing; the lake is filled with tilapia, which is both farmed in aquaculture tanks by international companies and caught from canoes by local fishermen. Tilapia farming is a major facet of the Lake Volta regional economy. In fact, Crossover is financed through tilapia fishing; teachers and some older students net tilapia and then sell the fish on market days at the nearby city of Dzemeni. At Dzemeni, each tilapia can be sold for good prices by local standards.
However, the money to be made from fishing does not come without a price. Many Ghanaian boys, some as young as 6, are enslaved and forced to work long hours on fishing boats and canoes in the lake. When the Akosombo Dam was built, riverbanks flooded, creating Lake Volta; in consequence, there are still trees under the lake which frequently snag fishing nets. Many of the child slaves have to swim down to untangle the nets when they get caught, placing them at risk of drowning and/or contracting a parasitic infection called bilharzias; if they tear the nets, they are beaten. Other child slaves paddle the canoes, bail water from the bottom of the boats, or pull up the heavy nets full of fish. Young Ghanaian girls are forced to work in other areas; for example, as domestic workers, with jobs that include cooking, cleaning, and making clothes. In this form of indentured servitude or slavery, the girls are at the mercy of the person who pays for them, and thus encounter sexual abuse as well as general harsh treatment. Even if these child slaves are rescued, many have nowhere to go, leaving them vulnerable to recapture, or are forced to move to faraway refugee camps. This problem is especially hard for orphans, who have no family to return to.
Into this breach stepped the Crossover International Academy, founded in 2008 by David Yayravi, himself a refugee, to serve orphaned children rescued from lives of slavery. Originally, Crossover was housed in a small schoolhouse, but when Lake Volta flooded in 2010 due to the Akosombo Dam, the entire building was wiped out. Currently, the school is composed of two thatched schoolhouse structures (one of which doubles as sleeping quarters for the boys), a dorm for the girls, a small administrative office, and a tank, which holds water that the students bring from Lake Volta, about 1/4 mile away. The office, which houses the computers, was the only enclosed building. The other buildings were simply huts or shacks, with a roof supported by poles, dirt floors, and walls that either do not exist or are simply woven mats leaned up against the supporting poles. Since there are just two classrooms, there is not enough room for all the students inside, so some students have classes outside.
At night, the students had to sleep three or four to a mat on the hard dirt floor, with no sheets, blankets, or pillows. When it rained, the water washed out the sleeping quarters; the students spent the night huddled on benches, soaked and cold. Sometimes, they are dispersed to local churches and to homes of the local villagers.
Wings for Crossover set out to build a permanent structure for the children at Crossover and strive to create a sustainable source of income for Crossover International Academy.
***See the rest of our website for the list of accomplishments.
