Runaway Train, Runaway Schedule

On Saturday, the gap years went to Gold Reef City to see Nick Abrams, one of our classmates from high school. Yet despite the improbability of the reunion, the entire trip belonged, without a doubt, to Julia.

Gold Reef City has a casino, hotel, and restaurants, but we focused on its medium sized amusement park. We went on a few rides, most notably “The Anaconda”, which was incredibly disorienting and full of twisty loop-the-loops. Gaciru could barely stand afterwards.

Actually, that was a complete lie, because as adrenaline filled as it was, the most notable event was not The Anaconda. No, it was the “Runaway Train”, a ride that could only have been aimed at children aged thirteen and under; the biggest drop was about 30ft, and we were “held” into our carriages by a bar about six inches our thighs.

Yet if you’d been going by Julia’s cries, you’d have thought the Runaway Train was worth three Anacondas. Actually, you’d probably have renamed it “The Basilisk”. She screamed the entire time with a terror normally reserved for bungee jumps, and a look of absolute horror painted her face. Julia was genuinely petrified, and if my eardrums hadn’t been telling me otherwise, I would have thought she’d seen Medusa. On the plus side, she gave Gaciru and I the funniest two minutes of our stay in Africa; as long as she was screaming, we were laughing. Thank you Julia!

Out of all the cartoons I’ve drawn, that one required the least imagination.

Just as I thought my week couldn’t get any more eventful, the new schedule arrived. And my God was it difficult to understand! Apparently we’ve converted from a leadership academy into an espionage school. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to receive my classes in code. We are leaders, not crytographers! It feels like we’re living in a gigantic Sudoku puzzle. Expert level.

Anyway, I opened up the document, and found that some of my blocks had been coloured in. Delightfully aesthetic as it was, there were no actual classes in it. So I set to work with diligence and hope. But after staring at the four Excel matrices we’d received for an hour, I had only managed to fill in French and Swahili (in Gyampish, orange and pink). I was determined to find the other 2/3 of my classes though, so I went and found Mr. Gyampo, and he explained his colour-coding system with pride and his trademark dignity. Unfortunately, most of his instructions involved “blue”, “pink”, maths, and English, none of which I had, and I left the conversation even more bamboozled than I had been going into it.

ALA should include its schedule in the admissions process, because if you can understand it in less than three hours, you definitely deserve to use it. And if you can understand in under one, you are pretty much the textbook definition of "the power of one".

On the other hand, I entered the first day of the Gyampo-cipher-mystery-schedule with only two of my classes down on paper. I wasn't unique though; students and teachers alike surrounded the notice board with all of the scheme’s different components posted on it, and the whole morning was a chaotic battle for classroom privileges, with a little bit of hide and seek thrown in.

Even more unfortunately, I missed my Yr2 African Studies class. The good news is that during my ‘free’, I created a parody timetable to depict of what students actually see when they look at their schedules:

This makes more sense if you read it day by day, not from left to right. Definitely click to enlarge.

Three caveats:

1) This wasn’t actually my idea. My high school once created a test week centered entirely on lacrosse tryouts and meal-deprivation, and the newspaper published a satirical schedule the next day. I daresay it was also much funnier than mine.

2) The actual schedule has Saturday classes. Yuck.

3) The real problem turned out to be that the Mr. Gyampo hadn’t sent out the Leadership, Entrepreneurship, African Studies (LEA) matrix, and those were the missing 66% of my classes. And he didn’t do that because his all-school email was down. So in that sense, the whole thing was much more complicated than it should have been. That having been said, I still think it would have been easier to decipher the Rosetta Stone whilst writing with my non-dominant hand, warding off a tickle attack, and filling myself with absinthe. And since nobody will technically ever prove me wrong, I stand by that.

Welcome to Bi Akala’s Magical Mystery Tour!

Power cuts: three and counting. This is most baffling; Mr. Peter wasn’t even on campus during the first two. His abilities are even greater than I thought.

As we get back into the swing of things, the part of life that is returning to me slowest is Kiswahili. Apparently my brain is a sieve, because I remember very little of the first term’s lessons. But that’s by the by, and I hope that all of my vocabularly will boomerang back to me.

There are two things that one must know about Kiswahili, and ALA Kiswahili in particular:

1) Kiswahili has around 40 demonstrative pronouns. There are four in English. This, that, these, and those. Why does Kiswahili have so many more, you may ask. Well, it has seven nominal classes (different groups of nouns that follow different rules), and about six demonstrative pronouns in each one. Yep. 42.

Learning the nominal classes has been an emotional rollercoaster. The first one we covered contains all animals (and technically all protozoans and bacteriae as well). At that point, I was pretty optimistic about the language’s simplicity, imagining words would be grouped on a sort of animal-vegetable-mineral basis. How wrong I was.

Then we did the inanimate objects nominal class, which includes things like chairs, tables, and handicapped people (a source of great controversy and self-examination to many Kiswahili speakers. Mhmmm.) It also includes a brilliant way to insult people. In Kiswahili, you can add “ki” to the beginning of nouns, automatically making them smaller. Examples include: “I hate you, tiny boy!” or “Be gone with ye, miniscule farmer!”

After that came the trees, which turned out to be a separate from the other living things. This was really the turning point towards hopelessness. Trees have their own grammar class and rules?? Whyyy??? And to make matters worse, I discovered that the tree nominal class doesn't even include fruits. I spent a lot of time confusing orange trees and oranges.

The next nominal class was basically random. It contains cars, some body parts, and some fruits. I almost despaired.

And that’s as far as we’ve gotten. I can only imagine what the other three classes are. Maybe one is chapattis. I do hope so; I love chapattis. If anything deserves its own set of grammar rules, they do. Then again, the mystery of where the other fruits go still endures.

2) Happily, our teacher makes Kiswahili a delight. Bi Akala is a joyful, friendly, slightly matronly woman who teaches us as much about Kenyan culture as she does about her language. She is also a psychology instructor, and she taught health last year. This year, she teaches it vicariously through Kiswahili. Sometimes I think Bi Akala suffers from Wellness Education Withdrawal Syndrome.

Zweli left (sob!), but while he was here he brought a whole extra dimension to our class, partially because he used his newfound language skills for intraclass proposals, but partially because he was somewhat unaware of some social and sexual realities. Without a hint of compunction, Bi Akala boldly stepped in to fill in all of Zweli’s gaps in knowledge. I was impressed at how easily one can link Kiswahili to sex changes, STDs, and circumcision. Zweli was particularly boggled about the sex changes.

Yet even more wonderful is Bi Akala’s pseudo-maternal willingness to use somewhat sensitive topics during grammar demonstrations; she realises more than anyone else that humans should never feel awkward about human matters. Death anecdotes play a bigger part in Kiswahili classes than I expected. The clothing unit turned into Valentine's Day shopping advice. And you haven’t lived until you’ve had the M-WA nominal class explained to you via a discomforting yet funny story about expectant mothers.

None of those things truly explain the complete Kiswahili class experience though. To do that, I have drawn a cartoon with a few of last term’s memorable moments stitched together. It is also an attempt to show how one can mix marriage, life and death, and basic linguistics. It involves Bi Akala, Julia (who had some troubles at the beginning...), and myself.

Two days ago, Bi Akala said that being a teacher is sort of like being a pastor. Even if a pastor knows a member of his parish is not going to heaven, he will still prepare that person for it. Likewise, a teacher will never give up on a single one of his or her students, even when that student seems beyond hope, because each one is a personal, emotional investment. That's why we love Kiswahili.

It's All About the Wordplay.

(Lyrics from a song by Jason Mraz)

I’m not at ALA, but I keep a running list of ideas on my desktop to tap into. Today’s idea is really punny.

My grandfather loves corny jokes. He has an affinity for them. It’s like he has a gigantic list of homophones in his head, and just sits there waiting to use them. He called while I was making bread the other day and started going on about how I’m a “crusty, crumby guy”. It was painful. But at least it was deliberate, and years of deliberately horrible jokes have led me to develop a love for them. I’m a big fan of “I’ve got her right where she wants me,” but this one is my favorite: (it is not from my grandfather)

“You look like you have a little Taiwanese in you. Would you like some?”

Yes, I am a teenage male. Insert any nationality that you can claim as your own and try it yourself!

Anyway, like I said, at least my grandfather is deliberate about his puns. Some people at ALA are not. In fact, they’re not even aware of their own wit. And neither is anyone else; they foolishly think of it as ear-paining mispronunciation. Well I alone have seen the hilarious brilliance of it all. Today I shall focus on the two main ones:

The first isn’t that common, but if you listen for it, Mr. Peter says “pacific” instead of “specific”. Normally, it doesn’t make much sense to have the name of the world’s largest ocean just slapped into the middle of a sentence, (“Child, that makes no sense! Give me more Pacifics”), but sometimes it does, in an odd way. I like to play those conversations out in my head, often with a touch of elemental magic:





I wish.

Second are the West African Anglophones, pacifically the Ghanaians. Nothing is more typically Ghanaian than saying “aks” instead of “ask”. At first, it annoyed me. For goodness sake, “aks” is not a word, and saying it makes you sound like a fool. Hearing it is like watching someone cut hard cheese with the wrong edge of a butter knife; it’s almost correct, but it’s also excruciating to sit through. Then it dawned on me… “aks” IS a word, I just spell it with an “x”. In fact, axes are as old as civilization itself. Ghanaians are very connected to their roots.

So now, whenever I hear a West African attempt to use the word “ask”, I just think of how excellently passive aggressive they are. As with Mr. Peter, I imagine playing along.

SOON AFTER...

This is one of the first cartoons I’ve ever done without a fountain pen. I used to use them, but my room kept flooding and I got tired of mopping up...

But seriously, if you are a West African Anglophone student, most Americans do not listen to you with cartoon opportunities in mind, and there is still time for you to change before college.

Lastly, a bit of unrelated advice I once saw on TV. I can’t say I follow it to the T, but a lot of ALA’s Francophones do, that’s for sure (and in particular Michel). Here it is: “Only say God if you want to talk to him, otherwise say Gosh. Don’t distract him from helping the poor.”

Good stuff.