By the Way...

And by the way, in direct contrast to me, Mus's mom is like the queen of street smarts. When she found out I was robbed, she gave me a big hug, and then proceeded to ask me questions about what sort of information I had stored on the computer. Now this is a woman who has never touched a computer before, who has never seen a credit card, who has never even heard the phrase "identity theft." And yet here she was, instinctively knowing that there could be personal information on the computer that could hurt me when put in the wrong hands.

Oh, and due to the fact that I can't edit my phoots or post them in a reasonable amount of time, nor edit videos, I'm reduced to my verbal posts again until I"m in the states.

In other random anecdotes, I heard a funny story on the news the other day. Apparently a 54-year-old chief has entered primary school because he wants to become a medical doctor. Can you imagine this old man sitting in a child's desk reciting nursery rhymes with the 2nd graders? And he's going to be almost 70 before he gets his MD... Craziness.

Oh, and the goat story had a happy ending- he was moved to another house with
a large space full of other goats where he can play and frolic until
it's time for his fateful meal. And this isn't like when you're a kid
and your parents tell you they took your old sick dog to a big farm in the
country when they really euthanized him- here, they don't sugar coat
things like that. When that goat is swimming in my soup, they'll just say so.

My Twi is improving slowly but surely. I now understand and can give an appropriate response to most phrases said to me on the street. I'm certainly not conversant yet. I've realized that this is a crazy hard language to learn for an English-speaker. See, in English we worry about consonants and vowels. Here, you not only have consonants and vowels, but also the tone in which its said, and that is information in which my English-speaking brain has no place to store. Maybe Sarah Rose could store them in her mind as musical notes or something. So, since they differentiate words often times by tones, the words all tend to sound the same to me. Also, you have to through in the fact that Twi is just one of a large group of Akan languages that use the same tones, but often have different consonants and vowels in their words. Akans can understand people speaking in another Akan language, but its beacause they decipher words by the tones. But for me, it just means that I get more confused about what word means what, since I never know which language someone is speaking.

However, I'm learning more of the words, which of course I say without the appropriate tones, and I've been here long enough with Mus interpreting for me that I can guess what someone would say in many contextx without being able to decipher the actual words. I've started to trust my gut on these guesses, and I've found that I'm right like 90% of the time.

But that doesn't mean that I don't make plenty of mistakes, especially when I'm trying to generate a conversation on my own. The other day Sweet Mother came over to Mus and I because she needed help with putting her watch on and getting all her zippers zipped and ribbons tied. Mus was tying her up and I said, "W'atadie wo fitaa paa." She looked at Mus and asked what I had said, not sure if it was in English or Twi or what. Mus told her that I said her clothes looked nice on her, which is what I meant to say, and instructed her to say thank you.

Once she had left, he turned to me and said, "You told her that her clothes are very white."

Her clothes were bright blue.