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.

If Only British Airways did Snow Ploughs like they did Croissants

That was a lovely Christmas break. Back to the blog. Ingvar is no longer in Africa; he’s in England. God save the queen! Not feeling the same sort of pride for Her Majesty’s airlines though. When my flight back here took off on December 18th, the departures board read: BA054, London-Heathrow, 21:35, Gate A18, Delayed until 21:00. To the casual observer, it would seem as if it took off 35 minutes early. But no, it was actually delayed by 47 hours and 25 minutes. A bit of snow, and Heathrow, the busiest airport in the world, just stopped working.

From my experience, the English have a poor idea of what constitutes ‘extreme weather’. When it’s 23˚C out, the BBC warns of heatstroke, and when it’s snowing, everyone just gives up. No! That’s not what you do! When it snows, you move the snow away. Ice is neither radioactive nor dark magic, so attack it with steel brushes and grow a pair. If you can invent a jumbo jet, you should be able to clear some ground from which it can take off! I read an article on Helsinki airport the other day, and it received 188cm of snowfall during the past winter alone but last closed in 2003 for THIRTY MINUTES. Britain used to be a glorious world empire, so much so that loads of people kept our colonialist sports, tea, and religion (shhh…they don’t like to think about that last one). How far we have fallen. It is time for us to step up, meet Finland’s majestic, golden standard, and not do this:










The good news is that during my two extra days, British Airways put me in a very nice hotel, where I had my first full English breakfast, ever. That might seem odd, given I lived in Cambridge all year round for twelve years, but my parents are both vegetarian and not British, so bacon wasn’t a big part of my childhood. For those of you who don’t know, a full British fry-up is baked beans, fried mushrooms and tomatoes, sausages, hash browns, bacon, scrambled eggs, and then maybe some toast and black pudding. The British Empire wasn’t fueled on Weetabix with skimmed milk you know.



Good news is, I finally discovered the point of the fried tomatoes! For years I’d heard about them, but I was always baffled. They always seemed like the worst way in the world to cook tomatoes (and they are), but I then realized that they serve two vital purpose in the heavy, grease laden mosaic that is a British fryup. First, they provide moisture, and second, they provide sweetness. Because everything else on that plate is unnecessarily dry and salty. In the sarcasm world, I’m British. In the culinary world, I’m not; the second day, I had some delicious croissants and guavas.

I did eventually catch my flight, but not before I conquered the mammoth line at the BA counter, which had three days of passengers in it. Thankfully, I managed to move forward about 500 places in 3 hours…or was it 3 places in 500 hours? Tough to tell sometimes. But now I’m back here, and I'm delighted. I’ve also realised that the best thing about England is its names. Our towns sound ridiculous; it's almost as if Britain exists to make maps funny. All of these places are within driving distance of my house: The Gog Magog, Orton Brimbles, Six Mile Bottom, and Nedging-with-Naughton. The last one could be a whole upper-class sentence on its own.

“What are you doing dearest?”
“Nothing, I’m just nedging with Naughton!”
“Oh splendid!”

Naming your places like that is one thing, but naming your people like that is another. A few days ago, my sister, Sinead, met a family with the surname “Snodgrass”. How fantastic is that?

In the end, this holiday was all about Christmas, which was wonderful. We celebrated with a traditional Christmas dinner of Chinese noodles, a hard boiled egg/carrot/mushroom dish, tofu, and apple pie. In my family, the Asians do the main course, and the Americans do the dessert. For any of you who have ever tried to eat a Taiwanese cake, you will understand why it is that way round.

Service will resume as normal on this recently neglected blog, but in the meantime:


2010 was awesome.

Communications; Internet is Back!

Internet is back!! Oh I could not be more thrilled!! ALA has taught me to appreciate three things: internet, forks, and chairs. After four months of using them in scarcity, I can’t get enough of them.

On the other hand, I’m getting pretty used to these utilities shortages. In fact, when power came back Saturday night, I wasn’t even excited…although that was because I knew that there would still be no Internet. In my opinion, communicating is the only thing that you genuinely need electricity for. Think about it: all other power cut problems can be solved with bonfires, pens, and candles. With those three things you can cook your food, write your papers, and see your papers. Some would say the last one is a luxury. What more could an ALA student want? (And what more are we encouraged to do?)

There’s a famous quotation by John Donne that says, “no man is an island”. Well, it’s wrong. If you live in a 200 student school and there’s no Internet or cell phone access, you are an island. You’re a small lump of rotting wood that nobody even cares about, floating around in the Atlantic Ocean with a single sea cucumber attached to you for company. I love over-extending metaphors.

After a few days without links to the outside world, I was getting desperate; I was about ready to build a gigantic lighthouse, right in the middle of the quad, to transmit morse code messages to Jo’burg.


..- .-. --. . -. - .-.-.- … . -. -.. …. . .-.. .--. .-- . -. . . -.. -- --- .-. . -.- . - -.-. … ..- .--.*
(U-r-g-e-n-t. S-e-n-d h-e-l-p w-e n-e-e-d m-o-r-e k-e-t-c-h-u-p.)

We might ostensibly be about leadership, but we’ve got our priorities straight.

Anyway, it’s obviously not that bad, because we have people here to talk to. But face-to-face interactions have a problem as well: some of us have no feel whatsoever for appropriate conversation volume. This is most obvious in group settings, notably these two:


Listening to one person speak.
Picture this: you’re sitting with 200 other people, listening to a renowned guest speaker, perhaps the CEO of a major bank, or the founder of your school. The audience is quiet and attentive. People are wary of even shifting too loudly in their seats. Then some fool next to you turns his head and begins a normal, well-projected conversation, without a hint of compunction or remorse. He doesn’t even lean towards you! Does he have no sense of shame? Can he not hear himself? Murmuring is a vital life skill, and some would do well to learn it.

However, I’m tentative about over-promoting whispering, lest the following situation become more common:


Room full of people, with many separate conversations.
Last Wednesday, all of the first years and gap years were in the back of the factory. We were in groups, and conducting an exercise centered around facilitation and NASA. Yes, ALA is a wonderful place. Anyway, things were going okay until a couple people decided to “speak up”. And by speak up, I mean make a light swishing sound with their lips. No matter how hard we tried to get them to be louder, they wouldn’t. We just couldn’t hear them over the eleven other conversations in the room. I’ve drawn a graph to better describe the problem:

(click to enlarge)



“Sotto voce” should be considered a real, medical affliction.


Finally, a fantastic piece of news! It’s almost more exciting than the return of Internet. We got our uniforms last week! Nope, I’m not happy because I’m obsessed with looking presentable. I’m happy because I only brought seven days worth of clothing to ALA, and now I can do laundry a little less often. Hallelujah!

Not sure I can vouch for their measurement process though…

(I drew this with inches instead of cm after the first panel. Ignore that. click to enlarge)



Some of the girls really are swimming in their tunics.

*This really is morse code

Thanksgiving in Jo'burg

Last Thursday, we celebrated Thanksgiving (!!), which was amazing because we had no concrete plans whatsoever on Tuesday morning. But Tuesday evening, Mr. Peter appeared out of nowhere, dragged us to a supermarket (even though Gaciru and I felt like we’d contracted the pneumonic plague at the time), and made us buy supplies. When he asked us how many people we wanted to cook for, we answered fifteen, which turned out to be a horrible mistake pretty soon after.

Then we started cooking. Actually, before we could bring ourselves to do that, we purged Mr. Peter’s kitchen, which smelled of not-so-fresh fish and coconut milk at the time. We were certain it was contagious; Gaciru though Mr. Peter was going to catch something when he made a piecrust with no shoes on (Mr. Peter that is; the piecrust was exceptionally attired).

Then we started cooking. At first the going was slow, because with the exception of Julia, who was well versed in the arts of cranberry jelly and apple pie, none of us knew how to cook any of the dishes that we were making. Undaunted, we took it upon ourselves to re-invent what felt like every single one of the USA’s traditional dishes. We peeled and chopped four bags of potatoes, boiled yams, prayed to the poultry gods that the turkeys would defrost in time, diced many onions, and tore numerous sprigs of rosemary. We even created a new type of vegetarian gravy with eggplant and soy sauce, although it quickly became clear why no one had done it before.

Regardless, we did pretty well, especially given that Mr. Peter’s kitchen was modeled after a shoebox and clearly not built to prepare large meals. He did save our turkeys (for which we are ETERNALLY gratefully), but apart from that we were triumphant and independent. When we served the food on Thursday evening, I was shocked and Julia and Gaciru were past delusional. Thursday morning, I would have thought it more likely that we’d end up hosting a family of triceratopses than finish preparing the dinner.

As is often the case whenever someone brings a holiday to another continent, we found ourselves explaining ours over and over and over again. We had numerous versions of the Thanksgiving fable, ranging from Julia’s



To Gaciru’s



After two straight days of cooking, we ate in a surprisingly familiar way. What makes Thanksgiving dinner feel like Thanksgiving dinner is not just its traditional spread of dishes, but a sense of family. And Thanksgiving at ALA was incredibly familial. I am grateful for Mr. Peter, and for all of the fourteen guests who came.

Following our meal, we engaged in a traditional dog pile on top of Akan. Trevor went first.



Unfortunately, there were a couple drawbacks to our feast.
One, none of us could move. I’m told we suffered from something called “the itis”



Two, Boubacar had difficulty concentrating on anything for about an hour.

The Legend of Peter the Positive and the Origin of ALA Power Cuts

Once upon a time, there was an isolated kingdom named “Swaniford”. And in that most diligent of lands, there lived a young population of diverse youth, who came from many distant nations. Granted, most of them were from Senegal, Nigeria, and Kenya, but indeed they were diverse. And in Swaniford, the young Swanifordians toiled all day, sweating their own caffeine-saturated blood over a variety of three letter acronyms: SRB, OID, CIE, CSP, SAT, and of course that most pervasive of abbreviations: TBA. It was rumored that the mighty founders worked with fiendishly complex combinations such as WDYDWYDWYDYDWYDDWDY, but reports were unconfirmed.

Yet because of their tireless work ethic, the scholars of Swaniford were not always cheerful, and in their times of need, they looked for a human of incredible bounciness, remarkable cooking skills, and immense disregard for humor boundaries. Thankfully, one such man existed, and his name was Peter the Positive. Peter the Positive lived in his den of joyfulness on the second level of the residential edifice, and almost all Swanifordian scholars visited him at one point or another to receive their dose of earsplitting sanity. Particularly the girls, because they lived on a fortuitous side of the building and could visit him after check-in, which was unfair. Anyway, Peter’s kindness was so overwhelming that the students were even able to overlook his kitchen, which was a borderline health hazard. Whenever the inhabitants of Swaniford were sad, they looked to Peter for guidance, and in that way, he kept happiness throughout the land.

Unfortunately, Peter the Positive could not continue so tirelessly forever, especially during that most hectic of times, the Christmas Holidays. He soon found it necessary to recharge periodically. So great were his energy needs that he drew his vitality not just from sleep and food, but also from his surroundings, and in particular the electrical sockets. Even today, you can always tell when Peter the Positive is in a state of deep-recuperation, for Swaniford is plunged into a period darkness. We mortals like to call these periods “power cuts”.



It seems that Mr. Peter is resting more and more these days.