February 5^th

More notes from the little orange book that I was instructed to take everywhere – I have time for this this morning because after I arrived at UCI and was told the class was ready, very few students were on hand. Finally one of the female students had the courage to tell me that since they will have a big state-mandated exam next week they were told that they could have three days off to study and prepare. I suspect that the leadership was aware of this, but didn’t tell me for whatever reason (politeness?).  So I don’t know (yet) whether I even need to be here the next two days. (Later: I do. For a different class)

Most recent from the orange book first – A thought this morning – My existence here is a moment-to-moment struggle (too strong a word). At home my existence was day-to-day or week-to-week.  Moment-to-moment makes me more aware, more mindful of everything in each of those moments.

Red clay – The soil here is red clay and so the dust in my room is red, and the sheet where my feet lie on the bed after I wear my sandals is red. And the mud after a rain storm is red.

Rain – We had our first rain storms, not last night, but three and two nights ago. Big, loud, lightning-filled, drenching tropical downpours that were wonderful.  And the following mornings were cooler.

Speech patterns – Some things I have noticed as the people speak English. They pronoun or don’t pronounce “H” in ways that I am not accustomed to. For example, they mostly say “hour” with a hard H that is pronounced. And they may pronounce “half” as “alf”, said “af.” I suspect these patterns may have arisen from mis-remembering or mis-learning the way the British spoke when they were here.

Another interesting pattern that I first noticed as I listened to them lecture, and later heard in regular conversation: They will say a sentence such as “The color of the ocean is blue” as if testing you. “The color of the ocean is –what?- blue.” I could understand this pattern used in lectures, although it was used in just about every other sentence which is somewhat distracting, but I don’t understand using it in regular conversation. Perhaps people here at this academic institution have just become so used to hearing it that they have absorbed it into their own speech.

Another pattern I have heard less often is in a word such as “triangular,” which they pronounce “trianjular,” with the sound of the J.

Hymns – One hears all religious music, all the time here – on the radio, cell phones, Ipod equivalents, everywhere. A hymn I heard the other day on the radio was sung to a tune very similar to This Land Is Your Land, and the words were “I have a boyfriend, and his name is Jesus.”

A game – I have watched the men at school playing a game called Mueso or Soro in the local language, Luo. It is a board game. The board is a thick plank, about 1.5 by 2 feet in size,  with 32 two-inch diameter oval concave pits carved into it, 16 on one side and a parallel 16 next to the first 16, arranged thusly:

                Player

X    X    X    X       X    X    X    X

X    X    X    X       X    X    X    X

X    X    X    X       X    X    X    X

X    X    X    X       X    X    X    X

                Player

It is played with 64 small (1/4”) round balls, and begins with 2 balls in each pit. When the game begins one player begins to very rapidly move balls around, toward what end I don’t know, so it ends up with varying numbers of balls in each pit, from zero to 6 or so. Then the other player does the same thing from where the last player left off. For the life of me I can’t figure out what the goal is, and they are playing so fast that I have hesitated to ask them. Concentration is intense. I will eventually find out. Sam says it was taught here by the British so the Africans would be so involved with the concentration on the game they wouldn’t rebel.

Uniforms – The second and third year students at UCI wear uniforms. The first years don’t. Some of the uniforms are green- and some are cream-colored and both look like scrubs. I had theories about which classes wore which colors, but it turned out that part way through one of the years the colors changed from cream to green, probably for ease of keeping clean, so both classes wear a mixture of each, although more third years wear cream.

Bird calls - They are fantastic and so varied in the mornings. I wish I had a tape recorder to capture them.

That’s enough for now.