Welcome to April! In honor of April Fool’s Day, Emily emailed her friends back home that she’s gotten malaria. These things are funny in our Ghanaian humor.
I was thrown up on again this morning by Beauty. She has now left every non-blood bodily substance on me, vomit twice. She’s easy to forgive, though, because this was after she reached for me to pick her up immediately upon my arrival at 6 AM, when she and all the other little ones were clustered around Ma. Ma smiled at me and commented on how much Beauty has taken to me. Aww.
Our morning break has been a productive one. After breakfast, I took the essential hour-long morning nap before Emily and I hit the (two) streets of downtown Dodowa to look for fabrics. She found one at the seamstress so is now getting shorts made. It’s 3 cedis for one yard of fabric and the shorts-making itself brings the grand total to $4 US for a pair of custom-made shorts. Absurd.
The rest of the morning before a ramen-and-cabbage-with-egg lunch was filled with the latest load of washing and meeting our newest volunteer. Washing-wise, I’m definitely improving. George gave me some tips yesterday when he was doing his washing at the orphanage, especially helping my scrubbing form with regards to using my stationary wrist actively in the process. Volunteer-wise, our newest is Jackie from Chicago. She’s here for a month and has survived the initial information bombardment quite well. I like that she’s nice, especially as it’ll be just the two of us and Zach for five days while everyone else is at Mole. (Mole – MOH-lay – is a town sixteen hours north of here by tro and bus, nearly at Burkina Faso, where an hour-long walking safari (with an armed guard, of course) costs only 3 cedis.)
Let’s switch tracks for a brief lesson on Ghanaian culture. Whenever you walk past someone on the street, you must greet them as you come into close proximity (within a couple of feet). Failure to greet is considered very rude. Greetings are very structured. Recall that this is a land of rote memorization; this fact permeates all aspects of culture.
The greeting should reflect the time of day. Your four options are “good morning”, “good afternoon”, “good evening” (used from about 4 PM), and, rarely, “good night”. This is optionally followed by the proferment by the greeted party, after replying in kind to the offered greeting, of “How are you?” The correct response to this is “fine” or, alternately, “I’m fine, thank you.” One is never good or okay or well, always fine. (That said, the occasional unorthodox “good” serves as the exception which proves the rule.) The truly bold, or anyone feeling a smidge reckless, may even extend the response to “I’m fine, thank you. How are you?” The acceptable response, of course, is “fine”. Here, then, is a standard pre-noon greeting (extended version):
- Good morning.
- Good morning. How are you?
- I’m fine, thank you. How are you?
- I’m fine, thank you.
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| Along the way to the orphanage (use greeting here) |
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