Round One in the Land of Nod...

As Emily will gladly attest, I am not a very peaceful sleeper. In fact, my own sister refuses to share a bed with me. But Em, you will be happy to know, I think I've met my match...

Like a true soccer fan, Mus is a kicker. Every night he manages to kick all the sheets free from their nice, neat hospital corners and wrap them around himself like a cocoon. Without fail.

Although, on second though, maybe he isn't my match. After all I did manage to deck the cement wall the other night with a fierce left hook. That wall never saw it coming. Then again, neither did my knuckles, which are now sore and covered in scabs.

On Wednesday my new friend Maya stopped by for a chat. She's a fellow obruni who came here from Germany to volunteer as a French teacher at one of the schools and she lives just two houses down from us. She is a trilingual 19-year-old who is about to start her university work. And she made a startling revelation.

She doesn't know how to type! She's of the hunt-and-peck category of computer users. She told me that in the schools that prepare you for university work they don't teach you about computers or typing because they assume that whatever job you occupy in the future, that you'll have a secretary. She was the first to admit that this was stupid, however, since in college she's going to have to type her term papers.

But still, can you imagine meeting a 19-year-old in America who couldn't type reasonably quickly?

And speaking of friends, the other day we received a call from our friend who's known to have some influence in the spiritual realm here. He had heard about the robbery, and wanted to offer us his sympathies. He also said that if Mus searched hard for the computer that he would find it and that he has asked the spirits to punish the thieves. Personally, I am enjoying a mental picture of the little dwarves surrounding the robbers while they sleep and poking them with sharp little sticks.


On a more mundane level, Mus is off this weekend to Accra to take more of his end-of-semester exams. His parents are here in Obo, though, and his mom is staying with me. Mus's great aunt died and so they are here for the funeral. I'm going with them, and believe it or not, it's my first Ghanaian funeral, which are supposed to be very different and interesting to us Westerners. I went to the burial today and took some video- generally speaking, funerals here are much less somber than they are in America. This funeral in particular is not so sad- the lady who died was 100 years old- but at all funeral there's dancing and stuff. It's a three day event, so I'll keep you posted on the rest.

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.