First day of Dagbani and Math lessons (6/19)

Just jumped on the internet for a few minutes. It’s great to hear from you all but it’s bittersweet. Makes me miss home. Took 2 taxis from my homestay to the language training site. It’s 2 towns over and in a few hours I’ll return to my homestay city for math training. Taxis here do not operate like the ones in the US for the most part. Theyre more like small busses. They sit at a spot and wait to be filled. Once they fill they go to a pre-determined spot. You could of course get one for yourself to a custom location, but this is called a Drop Taxi, where you’re charged your fare plus the fares for the other people who would have been paying (and they pack in A LOT of people). Plus you have to add on the customary Obruni surcharge. The roads here are bad and driving is a speed obstacle course filled with quick turns to avoid potholes. The driver honks often to warn blind corners, people on bikes he’s passing, distracted pedestrians, and sometimes it seems he honks just for fun. These are small towns and people know each other. Pedestrians wave to our driver as he passes and he honks back. And of course there’s the constant "Obruneee" squeaked by a child, or the bass filled "Yo! Obruni-ey!" by an excited adult. And you gotta love the Obruni song. It’s literally a song that elementary school children sing. They sway back and forth, knees bent, with huge smiles, and sing in unison. It may be mockery, it may be harmless, but it’s adorable either way. Maybe they can teach it to me.

So I thought I would leave you with a really cool Ghanaian cultural fact that I’ve been long overdue meaning to tell you. In the African culture you are given 2 names. There is the name you are born with, say Guillermo, but also you are given a day name. It is a standard name that corresponds with the day you were born. 7 names for boys and 7 for girls. For example mine is Yaw (Pronounced like Yao Ming the basketball player, and the day name for Thursday). It is very commonly used, and many people only call each other by their day names, not their birth names. Example in his village everyone calls Matt Kwaabana (KWAH- bah- nah) for a Tuesday born male. However the reason I bring it up is this. Ghana and Twi have 2 names that instantly struck me and I thought were really cool. Friday born is Kofi (Like the famous African politician Kofi Annan). And guess what? Remember the African kid from captain planet? Earth? The first power shouted in the song, and easily the most level headed guy on the show? Guess what the day name for Saturday is in Twi. Kwame. So the kid with one of the coolest powers on captain planet, easily 12 thousand times better than Heart, was from Ghana. I think that’s cool as hell, anyways. I literally heard someone being called Kwame here in town, and was told it was another day-name, and put 2 and 2 together. That’s so freaking cool.

And by the way. Heart? Really? What a crappy power. Way to procrastinate the 5th member’s power till the last minute and turn in the first thing that comes to ur mind in desperation. There’s no way there was more than 20 min put into that weak ass power before they submitted the pilot episode’s script…. Heart… how gay.

-Yaw