kar0ling

Word for word, this blog is taken from lasselantha. It's hilarious and true and I wish I had thought of it first: Our weird and wacky language...with a twist English is full of homophones. You know, homophones... those words that they make you practice spelling over and over in elementary school... the ones that sound the same but are spelled differently. Those confusing words like... "leave" and "live" "sheep" and "ship" and most especially... "hat" and "heart"

The description of the family’s financial affairs was something to that effect in an article on young football players in Cameroon. I read it unblinkingly, conjuring the usual thoughts of “oh the destitution! That she should be consigned to that for survival.” Then, it hit me. Wait a second, I know better than that! All these years journalists have been creating these sob stories—and don’t try to tell me it wasn’t on purpose—around a perfectly normal way of living. EVERYONE sells fish, or plantains, or even shoes off the sidewalk. That the way their whole microeconomy works in Cameroon. It’s not a sign his mother is poor or unable to find a proper job, it’s a sign she’s a normal woman with an entrepreneurial spirit! It’s just another example of how we in the West picture “the poor Africans needing aid”—which is one of the reasons the poor Africans are still needing aid after all these year and nothing is improving. They’re people, just like us. They have their seemingly bizarre, cultur...

I am thoroughly confused by the Oroko/ Bantu/ Cameroonian/ African (pick your generalization) approach to children. On the one hand, children are very important. In the village, it is more important for a woman to have proven her fertility than that she be a virgin when she gets married. It’s not at all unusual for high school girls to be pregnant, and thoroughly it’s normal for the bride to already have children on the wedding day. The only couples without children are ones who are physically unable to produce them—there’s no such thing as choosing not to have kids. So important are children, that adults are identified by their names of their children. Friesens (and everyone else in the village) call their neighbours Sanga Grace, and Nyanga Grace (meaning father of-, mother of Grace—their oldest daughter), rather than Matthias and Judith, or Mr and Mrs Mosongo. That’s the “children are very important” part. But then there’s, well, everything else—which is where I get confused. Kids ru...