titles are hard

wow the internet has not worked this well in so long! i must make up for lost time and upload old photos and blabber random things in my brain. unfortunately my digital cam has been wack recently. i don't know what's wrong! boo! so i stole these from julie's snapfish.

jules, me, vera, and biz at dickson's daughter's wedding (dickson is our housemate. his daughter got married in cape coast, a raucas affair at a methodist church with the words KWAME weds MILLI spray painted up near the altar. and their university friends splashed water instead of rice at them after the ceremony. it was a sweltering hot day. at one point in the afternoon liz commented on my huge shades and said, "oo jane you look like a movie star" and i replied.. "i feel like a sweaty little girl.")

parade during the odwira festival. my favourite part were these MASSIVE velvet fringe umbrellas! they would wave them up and down and they looked like killer jellyfish.

local queen being paraded in a palaquin (these ostentatiously adorned gold seat contraptions that take 6 able bodied men to carry)


a family down the street set up this backdrop on the road... so we took a picture with them


olympic day: sally was ten times better running with a cup of water on her head than in her hand


edward going at the kenkey (corn mush wrapped in leaves) for the eating competition

HELLO KITTY: we gave out lots of prizes for olympic day winners, and besides pencils, pens, puzzles, notepads, and other goodies that the deckers generously brought over, i had about 50 or so Hello Kitty pins from taiwan (mostly thanks to my mom and tiff&girls at TPR- they were giving them out at 7-11 all last year). anyway, so now girls and BOYS of middle school age are sporting hello kitty pins on their uniforms. it's just a funny site. while in some ways african men really hold onto old school gender stereotypes, sometimes they act so un-homophobic. middle school boys and grown men alike hug each other and hold hands while walking. it's refreshing.

DWARVES: i might have mentioned before that whistling after dark is big faux-pas here. i used to just assume the reason was that it attracted vague evil spirits. but it's been cleared up that acutally the whistling attracts dwarves. yes. little people. they are serious about this superstition. i've been chastized. i hum and whistle a LOT here. i think it's the lack of radio/tv. so whenever i accidentally catch myself, i can't help but picture a dwarf walking through the front door waving HEY GUYS.

BOOK: totally forgot to rave about The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. lauren brought it over in august, and we ate it up, and then gave it to julie and she loved it. and i read it twice. this memoir is just the most uplifiting hilarious quirky read. it makes me feel like a glutton seeing as how she and her three siblings grew up poor skinny runts in arizona and w. virginia. they ate a can of beans for weeks. and butter sprinkled with sugar was a tasty treat. snot locker! you'll have to read it to know what i'm talking about.

HOLIDAYS: i've been trying to enlighten my students on american holidays/customs. halloween was interesting to explain (they probably think we are freaky pagans dressing up as ghosts and witches and forcing candy on kids). thanksgiving is not too hard a concept, though it makes me wonder why are buckles the major accessory of pilgrims that i can think of? christmas is hilarious though. a few of them have heard of santa but i had to give the breakdown of north pole and the flying reindeer. thank goodness that the Only song i know the lyrics too is Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. so we sang it in class. they loved it! they know a lot of other songs.. feliz navida... joy to the world.. one girl knew all the words to the 12 days of christmas! i can barely get past "5 golden rings."

EUGENE: one of my favorite all time students is Eugene. he is so smart and has the brightest smile! he is also really skinny and sometimes has cute effeminite mannerisms and pretends to be shy. during a letter assignment he opened with "I hope you are swimming in the pool of health." he's just so original! one of my journal assignments was asking students what their number one superpower would be. many of them did the usual, flying, being super strong. two of them wanted to turn oil into water (confusing... water is really scarce here.. but i would say oil is even more?) but no one had a more original answer than Eugene:
"The superpower I have is that I can cry like a hen. This power was possessed to me by God. I have this power because at first I tried to cry like a donkey but I couldn't. I used this power to wake children up. I would wake children up because I would like them to go to school early."

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT: another assignment i did was describing people. i had students in JSS1 (7th grade) describe each other but they had to leave out the name and we guessed the identity. these are two funny examples, mainly because of the not so subtley underlined part.
Collins wrote: "I have chosen a classmate to describe. She is a girl. She is 13 years old. She is six feet tall and dark in complexion. She has plain hair. She has teeth. She attends Akuffo Tom School."
Dorothy wrote: "I have chosen a classmate to describe. His favourite hobbies are eating and playing. The food he likes best is Banku and Okro stew and turkey. He likes beating and insulting people. He is a special person to me because he likes playing."

LIVE! with liz decker

Hello all you loyal JaneInAfrica blog readers! Jane has so graciously allowed me a guest spot on her blog, so I’m going to tell you some things we’ve been up to recently.

We’re really sad that Julie left us on Monday – she had been living in the house and volunteering at Akuffo Tom with us for two months. She totally kept us occupied with her stories of life in LA, her perpetual bug bite problems, and her overall hilariousness. (miss you Julie!)… While she was here, we had a good two months of the school life. Each of us have been teaching different grade levels (Julie with the youngest kids, I have the middle ages, and Jane has the middle schoolers), so between all of us, we’ve really gotten to know all the kids at school. They are so cool in so many ways. I think Jane and I have both found that teaching this second term as their primary English teacher is so much better than jumping into a semester, taking over for another teacher and not knowing any of the kids. I found that my students were quite confused about some of the basics, so being in charge, I’ve been doing fundamental parts of speech and writing review. It’s so amazing when you see the change in how much they know – I swear my students are better writers already!

It was also quite helpful that the three of us knew all the kids so well… because we planned OLYMPIC DAY on October 27th. It was fun to think back on all those years of Olympic Days in elementary school and figure out how to replicate our favorite games (such as obstacle course…a bit difficult without cones and hoola hoops!) But everything went really well (though us white girls got really burned from being outside all day!) – we had sack races, egg on spoon races, running races, dizzy bat (hilarious). The highlight of the day was definitely the eating contest… we made the older students eat this food called Kenkey (which is like a huge ball of doughy, dry maize mashed up… ), which they usually eat with sauce. We made them eat it alone and it was hilarious... some of them stuffed their faces and it took them forever to chew it all. Then they had to peel and eat an orange… they got creative and just stepped on the orange to “peel” it. We were cracking up the whole time. I think the most interesting event was the water bucket relay, where you have to carry water in a small cup from one bucket to another bucket to fill it up. Well, part of the way through the day, a couple kids started carrying the water cup on their heads instead of in their hands… so brilliant and so Africa!! Kids in the U.S. would drop it in a second, but our kids were AMAZING at it! I loved that…

So the end of Julie’s stint here actually coincided with a visit from my Dad and sister! It worked out perfectly so that we could travel a bit together. But before we left, we all spent a few days here in Akropong. My Dad and sister came to school to meet everyone (the students were so psyched to see my dad… “Madam, is that your father?” they’d ask totally appalled) AND to bring my classes (class 4, 5 and 6) penpal letters from the U.S.!!!! My mom’s 4th grade class and the other two 4th grade classes at her school wrote letters to my kids (and sent pictures, which were clearly ten times better than any letter). My students LOVED this, they were so excited to have “friends” in the U.S. and to learn about their lives there. I think the most interesting thing about letter writing here is how they generally begin letters: “I am very happy to write you this letter. I hope you are fine by the Grace of God...” Kinda formal, but really nice. I bet the kids in the U.S. will be surprised by that… All in all, penpals are a great invention! It’s so exciting!

Molly and Dad were also here for… HALLOWEEN! We didn’t have many resources for Halloween, so using Jane’s brilliant idea, we bought a watermelon that could stand on its own. So on the night before Halloween (we were traveling on Halloween, and really no one here knew the difference in dates), we cut the top off the watermelon, scooped out all the juicy insides and my Dad carved a super cute face into the melon. It worked SOOO well, I could hardly believe it! I think it may have even looked better than carving a pumpkin! We forced some passing children to come look at the pumpkin and to take some candy corn (that my mom sent over with my dad… they definitely don’t have candy corn here!) I found out a few days later that one of my students, Benedicta, saw us and the melon-o’-lantern from afar, but was so scared that she didn’t come near us! (I think they thought we were practicing some sort of witchcraft or something… I guess if you think about it, it is a bit strange!! But still amazing!)

So that week, we traveled again to the coast of Ghana, heading, of course, to our favorite place in this country: the Green Turtle Lodge. My dad and sister enjoyed the place as much as we did the first two times we were there. We sat on the beach, played beach games, ate good food, and visited our friend Emmanuel (who works there and essentially runs the place… he grew up in a neighboring village). It was blissful. We later stopped by a very nice beach resort (actually a bit of a non sequitor after driving through some poorer coastal towns) on our way back and had some nice pool/beautiful sunset time. We also were invited to our housemate’s (a 60 year old man who is the bank manager in our town) daughter’s wedding in Cape Coast. We were a little late, but it was a very lively wedding (they had a huge fluorescent sign in the front of the little church that said “Kwame weds Millie” and their friends danced for about 20 minutes in the front during the ceremony).

Having visitors is so great here – just to see familiar faces, but also so that they can see how we’ve been living and so we can see how they acclimate to being in Ghana. All of our visitors did a great job and really added a lot to our time here (when you get to teach others all you’ve learned, it feels like such an accomplishment. And it will be great when trying to explain how different things are here to have some who understand!).

Now Jane and I are busy explaining where all our obruni friends and family went … And we’re just enjoying our last month here. It will be a very sad thing to leave Akropong and all our friends and the students. But I am certainly looking forward to seeing everyone at home. And for a hot shower! However, we are trying not to think too hard about the shocking cold weather in December… We seriously can’t remember what cold feels like!

Well, that’s life here in Ghana! Hope all is well with everyone!

1. crazy obrunis lighting fruit on fire 2. a contumbre leaf, yes we eat them! 3. jules and i hiding out in our hole, a favorite beach pastime 4. enjoying the view