ALA Fairy Tale Tidbits

Cleaning up the dregs at the bottom of my ideas pot:

Chapter One: Mohamadou’s Adventures in Birthday Land
Not many weeks ago it was Mohamadou’s birthday, and we had surprise party for him. Nothing new there. What was new was the way that we got him to turn up. Somehow, Madia, convinced him that the Ambassador of Senegal was visiting to meet all of his country’s students in the side dining room at 7:30pm. Dutifully, Mohamadou cleaned up. He shaved his head, and put on his nicest, whitest shirt and his swankiest shoes. When he arrived looking very dapper, he found a cake and candles instead of a diplomat.

Chapter Two: The Amazing Mohamadou Part II, Return of the Scudder
Some of you may also know Mohamadou as ALA’s resident human flea. He can touch the lights hanging from the dining hall ceiling from a standing start. I’m serious. Whenever we play frisbee, he catches anything within a 10m radius.

This is a cartoon I’ve wanted to draw from a while, but, ladles and gentlespoons, please welcome The Amazing Mohamadou!!

alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5577981023792950258" />




I have no idea how to get rid of the html script in the middle of the comic. It's likely that even Mohamadou's inexorable powers couldn't help me to overcome Google's bewildering linguistic underbelly.

Chapter Three: Lucky Teboho
Have you ever wondered how student government officials get their names?





Chapter Four: Mr. O has a Bee in His Bonnet
While we were at Kruger National Park, Mr. O performed one of the most thorough bee-killings I have ever seen. After circumnavigating his head for five torturous minutes, the insect made a fatal mistake and flew right into his Sprite can. It most likely drowned instantly, but Mr. O wanted revenge. He stopped squawking in fear, bellowed in masculine triumph, put his hand on top of the can, and shook vigorously. The bee's dead body was pummeled in a sea of carbonated lemon-froth.

Final Score: Mr. O: 1, Bee: 0



The End.

L. I. Am says…Bring Back Axl Rose!

The first time I saw I saw the Superbowl I was fourteen, and it didn’t really count. American football is incalculably difficult to watch when you don’t know the rules, and even once I got over the sheer foolishness of the sport’s name (honestly, they might as well have named croquet “football” as well), I was mystified. All the commentators did was spew random combinations of numbers separated by the word “in”. 1st in 10, 1st in 4, 4th in 1, 2nd in 9… Tutankhamen would have had an easier time with Linux.

Somewhat inevitably, I fell asleep early on. The sport’s players might have been the scariest behemoths I’d ever set eyes on, but they took way too many breaks. It was baffling to me that someone had taken rugby, chess, batman’s suit, and Hagrid’s naptime, and slammed them all together into one three hour activity. I woke up to see one of the Mannings lifting a massive trophy.

As time went on though, I grew to love the Superbowl. After learning the rules, I realized football is very cool. Of course, there was also something much bigger at hand: the ads. The Superbowl had brilliant and funny promotions, and like millions of Americans, I preferred them over the actual sport.

Unfortunately, ESPN does not extend the commercials to South Africa. So this year, we had to watch this:

NBA All Star Game
Self explanatory.

ESPN Sports Center
Man wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey dragging people into a parking lot during a fire drill as a bizarre group of individuals, including a dwarf and a Viking, watched on. Eh?

The Daytona 500
I have a theory on how NASCAR started. Basically, there were loads of people in the 1940s who made really fast cars to smuggle alcohol past the police, and then one day, they decided to race. Unfortunately, all that booze had given them this rare disease that erased their ability to turn right. It was horrible; every time they wanted to do it, they had to rotate 270˚ in the other direction. So they designed a track that even non ambi-turners could manage; they created a massive oval to drive around for hours at a time (anti-clockwise, of course). Thus, NASCAR was born.

Today, it is amazingly popular, including with some students at ALA. When I found that out, I was mortified.

Tim Richmond to The Limit
NASCAR does have one excellent element though: its drivers. They have elegant handlebar moustaches and daredevil courage, “because life doesn’t have a warning flag”, and they sweat beads of godly nectar. Tim Richmond was one such man. It wasn’t really clear what he did, but he it was clearly awesome. The highlight of the commercial was him pouring a small paper cup of water on his face. Get in there!

ESPN’s Logo
Naaaaaah nahnahnah. Nah!!

ESPNsoccernet press pass
Annoying British man named Adrian Healey with an ugly tie sitting at a desk and promoting a press pass to some event. I couldn’t understand him, but he might as well have been saying, “Haha Liam! Look at me, I’m boring, and you have to watch me, even though I am not a 2011 Superbowl ad! Which, by the way, you will never see, because your school doesn’t even allow Youtube! Muahahahaha!!”

By the end of the night, we had seen all of the advertisements about six times each, and I hated Adrian Healey.


Fortuitously, the Superbowl has one other bonus that we did not miss out on: the half time show. This year it was the Black Eyed Peas. The performance was essentially a fluorescent version of the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, and it was quite entertaining, especially the two guest appearances. One was Usher, who jumped over Will. I. Am. and landed in the splits (!!!), and the other was Slash, the former Guns N’ Roses member and probably the second best electric guitarist of time after Jimmy Hendrix. Interesting African fact: he is also half Nigerian.

Unfortunately, there was one major drawback: Fergie. Not only did she ruin her own songs, but she butchered absolute classic, “Sweet Child of Mine”. She sounded like seasick bagpipes. She was also dressed like the world’s most top-heavy prostitute; glittery football pads and a leather mini skirt did not suit her, especially when she started grinding on Slash. I felt for him.

Artist's impression of popular reaction to Fergie's performance

All in all though, the game itself was exciting, and it was an excellent Superbowl, even if I was rooting for the Steelers.

Vlad the Impala

Okay, alright, I shall now try to up my post rate. Things have been lagging recently, but lots to write about now.

Yesterday, Julia, Tim, Luisa and I returned from Kruger National Park with our intrepid guide, Mr. O. And how awesome was he! Not only did he show exemplary choice in picking which roads to go down (he managed to drive us past a leopard in broad daylight, even though they’re nocturnal), but he even bought us food, and kept us happy by rapping sporadically. He also learned to drift while we were in the car, but that’s by the by.

Kruger National Park is South Africa’s flagship game reserve and safari. It houses 8 million plus impala, and over two thousand shirtless, middle aged Afrikaaners, all in their natural habitat, the braai. Braais are South African barbeques, and more streamlined than their American counterparts. For instance, they leave out superfluous additions such as vitamins and carbohydrates. Braais are 100% red meat. Republicans would love them.

I also made that impala number up, but there might as well have been that many. Impala are medium sized antelope, and they were absolutely everywhere. If you ever go on a safari, you’ll quickly experience The Law of Waning Interest, which basically says that one gets very picky, very fast. By the third day, the impala were about as interesting as washing machine lint. As a matter of fact, even the elephants and rhinos weren't that captivating. That wasn't always true though...

Our first activity was the “morning walk”, which was so early it should have been called the “yesterday night walk”. In retrospect however, I have never woken up at 3:45am for anything so worth it. We were the only five people who had signed up and had two guides to ourselves: Jacob, and “Talkative Man” (I can’t remember his name). They took us through the bush, pointing at giant spiders, “massage trees” (where pachyderms go to scratch themselves), and dung. We also went to the top of a hill, where the view was unbelievable.

As we descended, we crept up to a large rock, and were told to hide behind a tree about 20m away from it. Then the rock stood up, and looked at us with beady eyes and a massive horn; it was a pregnant white rhino and her calf. The species have horrendous eyesight, so it couldn’t really see us, but it suspected something. It lurched towards us, covering ground very quickly considering it was basically a blind, 5-ton tank. Julia thought we were going to kebabed, took ten steps back, and leapt into Mr. O’s big strong arms. It’s worth noting that she ignored two important arguments for staying put: one, remaining close to the guides meant remaining close to the shotguns, and two, it was unlikely she cold outrun a rhinoceros anyway. Meanwhile, Talkative Man threw a rock in front of the advancing beast, which decided enough was enough, and stomped away with its calf. It was clearly not that fussed.





That turned out to be the high point of the trip, but many awesome memories followed. That night, we rode a souped-up Toyota Hilux with six lager chugging locals. We saw a herd of buffalo, elephants, another rhino (which was subject to The Law of Waning Interest), and about four hundred copies of the word “Amarula”. I always thought Amarula was type of tree, but apparently it’s also a sort of creamy liqueur that sponsored everything in Kruger, including all of the spare tires.

The excellent moments continued. We saw all of the “big five”: elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion, and leopard. The leopard almost gave Luisa an aneurism; whoever proposes to her is going to have a lot to live up to. We went swimming, tried to teach Mr. O to kick more efficiently, got sunburned, and had our own braai, turning the sausages with a Leatherman and chopsticks. Julia changed under the covers and in the parking lot, and Tim took over 800 pictures, often while pushing the “remain in your car” rule right to the limit.



And all of us lost all feeling in our bottoms. Ten hours in a car will do that to you. But during those ten hours I realized that the animals around us were genuinely wild. We were visiting on their terms, and not vice versa. The best reminder came when we saw an impala carcass in a tree. I had to go to Kruger to realize just how different it was to a zoo.

It was an overall amazing experience. Thank you so much to Mr. O for driving us and putting up with our long conversations about prep school. We cannot express our gratitude enough (although we might clean your car), and we do realize we had abnormal, slightly spoiled high school experiences.

Moral of the story: it’s a good thing rhinos can’t wear glasses.

Piano is for Babies.

Aaannddd now, it is my great pleasure to bring back one of Ingvar in Africa’s regulars: Boubacar Diao Diallo

I’ve taught Boubacar many things, mostly about the differences between his image of America and reality. Boubacar has also given me many lessons in his country, Senegal, the most striking of which concerned their communal eating habits. Apparently, life in the “Peanut Basin” (the name of Boubacar’s region) is one big circuit-system potluck. On local feast days, which are both frequent and anticipated, Boubacar takes his trusty spoon, goes next door, and has a huge plateful of his neighbour’s best fare. When that’s done, he takes the same spoon, goes to the next house, and eats an equally gigantic meal. And so the routine continues until he and his spoon have completed their rounds, at which point he goes home and collapses on his bed, felled by the mother of all food comas. Now that is community.

It sounds like Boubacar just hoovers everything he sees in a fit of unstoppable gluttony, but it’s worth noting that every family gives as much as it gets. So actually, it's a brilliant system. When everybody donates 60% of his or her food to the neighbours, everybody gets full on a very diverse dinner.

At ALA, I do a lot of peer editing, so I see how a fair few students develop linguistically over their time here. Boubacar has quite possibly come the furthest. I put this down to both his work ethic, and his desire to practice through every possible medium. Recently, he started listening to English songs, and, astonishingly, Martin Luther King, Jr. I have heard the “I Have A Dream Speech” every night for the past ten days. When I asked Boubacar about his sudden passion for civil rights, he gave me a gorgeously logical answer: MLK spoke slowly. Ah yes, Mr. King might have focussed on the red hills of Georgia back in 1963, but little did he know just how instrumental he would be to the Anglophone development of one Senegalese man, 48 years later. It is also unlikely that he knew how much impact he would have on my sleep schedule, because Boubacar likes his daily dose of self-evident truths at about 11pm. Martin Luther King, Jr. might have had a dream, but he delays mine almost every day.

Boubacar and I also had a great moment of cultural bonding when he heard that I’d once been on a swim team (albeit a very slow one), and tried to tell me about his favorite swimmer, “Yantop”. Before you continue, try to guess who “Yantop” is.



Points for everyone who guessed “Ian Thorpe”!

Lastly (and unfortunately), there is one area in which I fear Boubacar and I may never see eye to eye: music. I think the chasm between us can be summarized with one sentence: “Liam, piano is for babies.”

Granted, Boubacar meant it as a joke, but classical music is definitely lost on him. He listens to hip-hop, rap, and R&B for variety. 50 Cent’s face is on his belt. In Boubacar’s opinion, if it can’t be blasted through a subwoofer and breakdanced to, it’s not music.

I live at the other end of the scale. I went to an Anglican music school for most of my childhood, and Schubert is my favorite composer. I gave a one-hour piano recital last spring. In fact, much of my iTunes library was written before Senegal’s president was even born, back in 1832 (okay that’s an exaggeration…more like 1895).

Just as I grew tired of Boubacar’s music at the beginning of the year, he frequently tells me to replace my “noise” with “real music”. The first time he told me that Akon was one thousand times better than Mozart, I was deeply affronted; I didn’t even consider them a part of the same species. It was like comparing pigeons to peregrine falcons, or Sodexo to Gordon Ramsay.

I have since learned to the see the funny side of it all though. As much as I love Rachmaninov, I also like rap. Plus, Boubacar and his music did something truly hilarious. I often have to work to find the comedy in ALA, but not this time. My roommate is funny enough.





All I will say is that Boubacar clearly started listening to the Black Eyed Peas before his English vocabularly had reached its current and expanded glory.

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.