Learning Small Small

This is a geek post. If you don't want to read some pretty nerdy content (seriously, verb conjugation figures fairly prominently in this), then instead you can go to www.google.com, type the word 'fart,' and click the search button. You can come back here when you're done.

I'll give you a minute to make up your mind.

Now, for those of you still here, I'd like to begin today with a brief discussion of the Romans (hey, you were warned). So, the Romans didn't write spaces between words. This is, of course, because the Romans were stupid. I mean really, other than rule of law, and the aqueducts...

That last part was a Monty Python reference. Are you sure you're in the right group?

Anyway, I was sitting under a tree today reading Tristram Shandy and a man approached me. He leaned down to me and said:

'Agbeleklem'

I flashed him my signature look (confused, apologetic stare), and he pointed at my book. 'Gbele.' he said. Then he pointed at his eyes. 'Klem.' Then he walked away.

And I sat there for a minute, sort of puzzled, and then somewhere in my brain two neurons gave each other a little fist bump and I went 'Ohhhhhhhhhh!'

'Agbeleklem' is 'A gbele klem' and that means that suddenly, after three weeks here, *all of the phrases I've learned are made of words.* I spent the next half hour rifling through my notebooks for Ewe phrases and rewriting them with spaces. 'Come back soon' isn't 'Nagbokaba;' it's 'Na gbo kaba,' with 'gbo' meaning 'return' as in 'Magbo,' which is actually 'Ma gbo,' 'I'm back.'

THIS IS AMAZING!

'See you tomorrow' isn't 'Etcho miadogu,' it's 'Etso mia dogo,' 'Tomorrow we meet.' Because 'dogo' is meet. And 'mia' is we!

Ma gbo, I'm back, a gbo, you're back, e gbo, he/she is back, mia gbo, we're back!

'Mie gbo,' Dickson corrects me.

Wait, what?

'Well, we came back together. Mia is for things that we each did individually, mie is for things we did as a group. So if we leave together from somewhere, it's "Mie dzo," but if we leave and go our separate ways, it's "Mia dzo."

'OH YEAH dzo like how goodbye is "Ma dzo!" so that means "I'm leaving!"' I say, crossing out 'Majoo' in my notes. Wait. I have it written down that 'dzo' means 'to fly.' I have this written down because earlier I was asking about the high school motto, 'Dzo lali,' which means 'Fly now' (as in 'or never').

'No, "fly" is "dzo." This is "dzo."' He repeats the two words for me so I can hear the difference, but all I can think is that he sounds sort of unsure about the second one but really definitive about the first one.

And then I realize that Ewe has tones.

(Shit.)

And that's bad enough, but then he starts explaining how the together/individually distinction somehow also applies to the first person *singular* pronoun, and he tries to clarify this with some example about eating an orange, but I am really not having an easy time seeing which of my actions are things I am doing *with* myself and which are things I am doing as an individual. If that is even the distinction, which it probably isn't.

My hosts see me struggling and comfort me. 'You will learn small small before you go,' they say. 'Congratulations! You are trying!' It's totally sincere and not at all condescending, which I think you have to be Ghanaian to pull off.

So, in the end, I had about an hour of feeling like I suddenly was really getting the hang of this Ewe stuff, followed by a heartbreaking realization that languages are hard, and that in all likelihood, every time I've left a room for the past three weeks, I've been telling people that I'm flying.

On the upside, I now know that if you mispronounce the high school motto, it means 'LEAVE RIGHT NOW.' I've got to remember to ask someone whether that's as hilarious to a native speaker as it is to me.

Delightful.

Hey, So, How About This Weather?

Yesterday I woke up at 4am. I've been doing this a lot, and I started to wonder what's wrong with my sleep cycle that I keep waking up in the middle of the night. And then I remembered that I go to bed at about 8pm every night. So actually that's probably why.

After lying in bed staring at the ceiling for a little while, I heard raindrops pinging into the roof. Then it started raining a little harder, and then a minute later it was, as they say, pissing it down, coming down in sheets, straight up somebody ticked off Poseidon and we're all about to be washed out to sea kind of weather. This lasted for half an hour, then it stopped. The compound was flooded and thousands of tiny black almond-sized frogs had come out from wherever tiny black almond-sized frogs stay when they are waiting for it to rain and were jumping around having the time of their lives.

I was a little surprised by this whole series of events, because I had thought this was the dry season. I mentioned this to someone and was told that, no, the rainy season ended in June but the dry season won't start until October and this is an entirely different season known as 'not the dry season.'

Stupid, stupid equator.

Upgraded!

So I am no longer merely Yavu.

Some of the kids have started calling me 'Yavu Yavu Gaibo.'

I'm not totally clear on the translation, but I think basically it's 'Whitey Whitey Beardface.'

I mean... I can't argue that it's not accurate.

Specifically, these kids.

Earning My Gold Stars

The way to eat most soups and stews here is to dip a ball of dough into it. Depending on the kind of dough (and the local language where you are), this is called akple, banku, fufu, kenke, or any of a dozen other things I am useless at keeping straight. It is always served with a little basin of water, and the idea is that you wash your hands in the basin, pull off a piece of dough, dredge it through your food, and eat it.

One of my first times eating akple (at least, I think it was akple), I pulled off a hotter-than-expected piece of fresh dough and burned my fingers. Fred, who I was eating with, saw this happening and said 'Oooh, quick, put your fingers in the water.'

This was a sensible solution, and I feel kind of silly for not having come up with it myself. At home, if I ate a piece of food that was too hot, I would reach for my drink without thinking about it. But I remember this happening when I was a little kid, and having to have my mother tell me 'Oooh, quick take a drink take a drink take a drink.'

This is what fieldwork feels like a lot of the time. It's a reversion to childhood, where you have to be explicitly taught the things that any reasonably competent adult knows instinctively. Blunders are patiently corrected. Small triumphs, like doing my laundry or knowing the proper way to shake hands, feel like major accomplishments, and are basically treated as such by others. 'Very good, Yavu!' they seem to almost be saying. 'You did that all by yourself?' And then I squeal with delight and trip over my shoelace.

I should say that this is to the enormous credit of my host communities, both here and in Bolivia. If I hadn't had the good fortune both times to stumble upon people willing to adopt a fully-grown special needs child, by now I probably would have accidentally set myself on fire or shot my eye out or something.

On Being Famous

It took me about this long to put together that the word I thought meant 'hello' actually means 'white man.'

Every day here, when I leave my compound and walk the 15 minutes or so to the district hospital, or the 20 minutes or so to the internet cafe, or wherever, I am stopped at least a few times by people calling 'Yavu! Yavu!' I smile, and I wave, and sometimes we chat a little and I try to speak some Ewe and they laugh at me. This was a much more idyllic scene before I realized they were SHOUTING RACIAL EPITHETS AT ME. The fact that this is done in a consistently friendly manner is, in its own way, all the more unsettling.

Also, apparently the women who live in the compound have nicknamed me 'bread.'

So here I am, a genuine curiosity of the first order and a local celebrity. Walking down the street to constant cries of 'hey whitey!' I always knew someday I would be famous. I had... well, I had just hoped it would have more to do with the content of my character, I guess.

Today an old woman with no teeth told me 'White man, I will marry you.' What can you say to that? You're all invited to the wedding.

The Importance of Being Perfect

On my first day back in Keta, Perfect introduced me to Success.

Wait. Let me explain.

The British give Americans a hard time for being overly earnest, but man. We have nothing on the Ghanaians. In addition to their local names (Korshie, Gobah, Kofi, etc. depending on what day of the week they were born), everybody has an English name, some of which are actual English names but a lot of which are just English words being used as names. A lot of them also have religious overtones. So you'll meet people named Perfect, or Success, or Innocent, or any of these other things that we would never use as a name because we believe in irony and we believe in jinxes and we know that when our children grow up to be flawed, underachieving or guilty then having a name that proclaims the opposite is just going to invite mean jokes.

While the names given to children might display a simple, heartfelt religious devotion, the names given to businesses are pious beyond any consideration for relevance. For some reason this is especially true for hairdressers, which all have names like God's Grace Barbershop or All Things From Jesus Hairstyles or Thy Will Be Done Beauty Saloon.

That last one is not a typo, and it's not just one place. There is a whole group of hairdressing establishments here that advertise themselves as Beauty Saloons. Which is amazingly great. Because, firstly, once it's pointed out, salon and saloon are totally the same word. Or once were, certainly. Plus, it suggests any number of bad jokes about beer goggles. 'My wife looks good when she's been to the salon, but she looks better when I've been to the saloon.' That sort of thing.

Here's the rule: Anything that combines etymology, booze and jokes gets an automatic thumbs up.

My Weekend With The Geeks and the English

After Monday's double scoop of clusterfudge ice cream (extra nuts), the rest of the week's research time was spent interviewing hospital staff, which was entirely successful and therefore not very interesting to write about. So I won't bother.

I spent the weekend in Accra, kind of because MakerFaire Africa was in town but kind of because I really wanted to get out of the village for a few days. Having said that, MakerFaire! What a strange and surreal thing. For those who don't know about it, MakerFaire is sort of a Bay Area institution in which weirdo hobbyists get together to show off all their DIY projects. In San Mateo it's a kind of 'hey look at this bike I made out of hemp and an old Nintendo' atmosphere but it's an entirely different beast in the developing world where small-scale innovation could actually be Kind of a Big Deal. I made a few good contacts, basked in the air conditioning and free wifi, and fell a little bit in love with this girl I met. This was probably just because I hadn't spoken to a white person or an American in two weeks, and she was both so it seemed like we had *an incredible amount in common.* Anyway I'll never see her again so let's assume she was a lesbian.

The other surreal event of the trip was stumbling into an English pub (well, walking in, stumbling out). This was not an Irish pub, which usually seems to be the only kind that gets widely exported, but an actual, honest-to-god bangers-and-mash carlsberg-by-the-can watch-the-manchester-city-match have-a-portion-of-chips-and-rest-a-while English pub full of drunken English expats.

Mind you, they didn't have pints. Right. No pint glasses at all. Other than that I have no complaints. And I guess you've got to leave something out or what would be the point of actually going to England? I'll be there in under seven weeks now.

Weird.