Where did July go?

July 10, 2009

I haven’t written in my journal for a while. There hasn’t seemed to be a whole lot worth writing about. Whenever we go to the villages, children shout “sinaminga!” and wave to us. Sinaminga means white person. Today when we visited one house, all of the children started saying “sinaminga bah tow fee.” I asked Abraham (employee) what that meant, because I thought it was all Dagbani. Apparently “bah tow fee” is supposed to be English, “buy toffee.” I have never seen toffee in Ghana, so apparently somebody once brought them toffee and somebody else made up the chant and taught it to every kid in the district. After learning what it meant, EVERY time some kids would start shouting at us, I would hear at least one would ask us to buy them toffee. A couple of adults even said it to us.

In the evening we went to Zagyuri, my favorite village. The kids in this village recognize me and come to say hello whenever we are there. Today, they taught me a hand clapping game and another game where you stand in a circle and sing a song and take turns dancing in the middle. It was really fun to play with them. One of the girls (I think she is our sales agent’s daughter, and she is kind of defensive of me as “hers” and always pushes her way right next to me) tried to climb into the truck with me when we were leaving, which I thought was cute. I’m sure she would have been crying within the hour if we did take her home with us.

We started taking Dagbani classes this week. It has been really useful to start to understand what people are talking about, and to have a few words to communicate with them. After our first class, we were discussing African languages with one of our employees, and he told us that if we were to learn Hausa (a Nigerian language) it would confuse us because Hausa has “he” and “she.” Dagbani, and other Ghanaian languages apparently, do not have words for “he” and “she” so it is basically impossible to know a person’s gender when somebody is talking about them. It is really confusing for someone to be talking about someone you know is a man and say “she goes to school for such-and-such.” The idea that a language with “he” and “she” would confuse us was hilarious to me, because we are native English speakers and “he” and “she” are natural to us. I told him this, but I don’t think he understood.

July 16
There have been a few things I have wanted to write about over the past several days, but today is the first time I’ve been able to get the computer to myself.
A couple of days ago, we were in Zagyuri again. My little friend who tried to climb into the car with me put a very small (about fingernail-sized) chunk of dirty coconut into my hand and started saying “Eat! Eat!” I was very touched by her generosity, but I really couldn’t eat the food she was sharing with me because it would make me very sick. So I smiled and said “You eat it,” and she did and she giggled. I don’t think she was offended. Still, in a place where people are so poor, and perpetually ask you to give them things, sometimes you find truly selfless giving. On a visit to another village, the woman we were interviewing had another business selling earrings, and she gave me a pair. They were cute, but gave my ears a nice infection so I haven’t worn them again. We offered to buy them from her, but she said she just wanted to give them to me as a gift. It was really touching, because most people here have not been generous to us.

Something else I have learned about in the last couple of days is the Ghanaian naming system. Everybody here is given the name of the day of the week they were born on, a Christian or Muslim name depending on their religion, perhaps a traditional African name, and a family surname. Yaw is the name for Thursday, and Kofi is the name for Friday (I didn’t learn the rest of the days of the week). I now understand why I see these names everywhere, and I think it would be terribly confusing. What if all of your children happened to be born on a Thursday?
I asked Ernest why everybody has such a hard time with my name, because it is a Bible name and very common in the US. He told me that people “only know the names of important people in the Bible, like Sara, Ruth, and Hagar.” Hagar??? I didn’t even remember who Hagar was (she was Abraham’s other wife, the mother of Ishmael). And maybe this is just prideful, but I always thought Rachel was kind of an important person in the Bible. Not here. Leah is a similarly unheard-of name in these parts. I guess the story of Israel isn’t so popular here. Then Ernest told me that people think Ernest is a name from the Bible (apparently only Christian men are named Ernest), even though it isn’t. Weird.

July 18, 2009
This afternoon, we went for a drive to Yendi. Yendi is about an hour’s drive from Tamale, and it is the ancient capital city of the Dagomba kingdom. The chief of all Dagombas still resides there. He is the chief over the chief of Tamale, and all the other chiefs here in the northern region. About 7 years ago the chief died, and there was an outbreak of violence about who should be the new chief. I’m not sure if the fear of renewed violence is why there are no white people in Yendi, but everybody stared at us as we drove through and we didn’t see any other foreigners. We went to see the chief’s palace, which was surrounded by a dilapidated barbed wire fence, and there were a couple of sandbag bunkers with machine guns to guard the place. One of the machine gun guards motioned to us like he wanted us to come in, but then another man told us not to come in. He came out to talk to us, and Fred told him that Peter went to school with Obama’s cousin and that Peter knows Obama, so the man thought we were important (I guess) and asked if we would like him to arrange for us to meet the chief. Normally, you can only see the chief on Mondays and Fridays (today is Saturday). However, we were not interested in seeing the chief, so we kept walking. The chief also had a horse and a couple of nice cars (a Ford truck and a Mercedes, I believe). There was also a very small tank parked at a building next to the chief’s palace. It seems like the violence and tensions were very real concerns not too long ago, and they are still keeping up appearances. Or maybe there are still threats against the current chief by those who wanted somebody else to be there.

After walking around the chief’s palace, we took a little walk through the village. We happened upon a group of people sitting, talking, and listening to very loud music. A couple of men were playing a game similar to checkers for money. Beth, Fred and I stood by the checker players, and Peter wandered off and I was afraid something had happened to him, but then we saw him just as we were about to go. It turned out that the party we crashed was to celebrate the seventh day of a newborn baby named Wumpini, or God’s Gift. The baby’s father welcomed us, and he told us that there is no need to be afraid in Yendi of violence, even though it has a violent reputation. (Fred had told him that there used to be seven in our group, but three were shot at the chief’s palace so we were the only ones left. He likes to tell stories.) I enjoyed our trip, and I was glad to visit another city.

July 21, 2009

We have our first illness of the trip. We think Peter has food poisoning, although we're not sure how he got it since he ate the same food as everybody else yesterday. However, he doesn't have a fever so we're pretty sure it's not one of the serious illnesses you can get around here (malaria or typhoid). We're hoping it gets better in the next 24 hours, and not worse.