Remembering

I am a bit under the weather with a cold, but I didn’t want to let Anzac Day pass by without a brief comment. For the first time ever, I watched the Anzac day coverage on TV, including a doco on Australians in France during WW2 and the dawn service at Villers Bretonneux.

Anzac day always affects me powerfully. I have never been to the big Sydney march because I’ve been afraid of being too overwhelmed by it. So yesterday was an excuse for an emotional binge. I’m not sure why it affects me this way. My father is a veteran of WW2 (he fought in Papua New Guinea – Kokoda, Sanananda, Gona & Bune), so perhaps I cry because it reminds me how much I love him, and that his life will be over soon (he’s 94). Perhaps it’s because I grew up surrounded by people who had lived through WW2, and whose fears about war had resurfaced with the conflict in Vietnam.  Perhaps it’s just because of the tragic loss of so many young people’s lives, and the horrible stupidity of war. Perhaps for all of these and many other reasons.

At any rate, I know I am not alone in having these powerful feelings, and I have made a decision to face them. A pastor at the Villers Bretonneaux service yesterday (still today, in France), said: “Let the memory of those who suffered and died here inspire us to be peacemakers.”

To me, that is the core message of Anzac day. Not to glorify war, or to build up nationalistic pride, or to bolster feelings of bitterness and revenge; but to remember, and in remembering to grieve fully for what has happened. And in grieving – through all its stages of disbelief, anger, sadness - to heal. For it is only in healing that we can ensure that such horror doesn’t happen again.

This, I believe, is why wars keep happening – people don’t heal from the experience and thus keep perpetuating it.  Of course there are economic and political pretexts, greed and imperialism, but if people could really deal with the emotional legacy of war, they – we – would not allow it to continue.

So that is why, this year, I really allowed myself to grieve on Anzac day. And also to contemplate a hopeful future. There were Asian faces in the various bands that acconpanied the parade. Unthinkable 50 years ago. An elderly white man marched with a child who appeared to to be of mixed Asian background – perhaps his grandson? Representatives of the ‘fuzzy wuzzy angels’, men of Papua New Guinea who assisted Australian troops, marched proudly in the parade. The school children of the village of Villers Bretonneux, ‘liberated’ by Australian soldiers in WW1, sang Waltzing Matilda (how delightful to hear it sung with a french accent ). Less than a century before WW1, Britain and France had been at war.

There is hope for the future when people overcome their differences and recognise and love each other’s humanity. And this is where I put in my plug for mixed couples and families. This is what we do every day. Congratulations to us all.

The Lingo Limbo Part 3

For years, I have been wanting someone – The Ghana Association perhaps, or DadaK’s church – to start Twi language classes for children. But, perhaps for the reasons I’ve speculated about in Lingo Limbo Part 1, no one has. And at some point last year I finally realised that if you really want something to happen, you have to do it yourself. Not that I wanted to start a language school – I’ve got quite enough on my plate thank you – but I decided to find a tutor.

My first step was to advertise on AfricanOZ, the website for all things African in Australia. I’d seen ads there for tutors in other languages, so I thought I’d try my luck – but got no reponse. I hope others were luckier than I.

A few weeks later at work I was talking with a worker from the Multicultural HIV and Hepatitis C website, and remembered that they had Akan transalations on their site. I asked him if their Akan worker would be able to help. (Twi is an Akan language & sometimes called Akan).  He got back to me a few days later with a recommendation that I try the Ghana Association. Der. Why didn’t I call them in the frst place? Well, I’d looked on their website & hadn’t found anything, I guess that’s why. But this time I called the President – whom I’d actually met (again, der!) – and he put me in contact with Tikyani (means teacher – you pronounce it Ticha-nee. More or less. For some obscure reason which one day I may discover, ”ky” in Twi is pronounced “ch”).

Tikyani, it turned out, had done the Akan translations for the Multicultural website, although he wasn’t the Akan worker there. (I felt I was going in circles at this point – you can see why I called these posts the Lingo Limbo?) I got the impression he was a bit of a Twi language resource, for his community, but he wasn’t actually a qualified teacher and hadn’t ever tutored anyone before. I was prepared to give him a try – at least he’d offered!

Actually the lack of qualifications hasn’t been too much of a problem for me, but I think it would be helpful to ActionMan to have more structure. Our lessons are fairly informal & involve a lot of chat about the language. He gets a bit bored. I really enjoy them, but then I have a bit more of a grasp of the language than ActionMan, and I’m also not embarrassed to make a fool of myself trying to pronounce things. But when you’re 13, almost everything is embarrassing.

What I am embarrassed about is the fact that I first spoke to Tikyani last October and since then we have only managed to have three lessons! There have been good reasons for this – illness & injury (AM’s recently become very accident prone), holidays, work commitments, the burden of travelling half way across Sydney, a death amongst our friends which threw us into a time warp for several weeks, and all the kerfuffle surrounding DadaK & Co’s departure for Ghana last month.

However perhaps the most significant obstacle was ActionMan’s point blank refusal to continue with it, after suffering more than usually acute embarrassment in our third lesson. It went like this: in lesson 1, we did the alphabet & unique Twi sounds. In lesson 2 we looked at personal pronouns, and Tikyani set us the homework of tryng to construct some sentences. When we came to discuss these in lesson 3, one of AM’s sentences was “I’m going to eat you” (as in “I, the monster, am going to eat you”).

The problem is, as we soon discovered, that in Twi you cannot put the words “eat you” togther in that order unless you are asking someone to have sex with you. Need I say more? Actually Tikyani handled it well, but ActionMan was squirming.

It was after this that ActionMan announced he didn’t want to have lessons anymore, and I plunged into a “bad parent” trough of depression. Why didn’t I start when he was smaller? Am I wrong to force him? He’ll regret it when he’s grown up! Will Tikyani teach me if AM’s not doing it? Oh I’ve failed, failed, failed!

Of course troughs of depression are seldom useful in taking your life forward, unless you take the opportunity to have a good cry, after which you feel much better. So that’s what I did, and managed to climb out of the trough and gain a better perspective.

I do think it’s important for him to learn the language – it could make a big, positive difference to his life. He said he just wanted to wait and learn while in Ghana, but I think he needs to have a bit of a head start & some of the basics before we get there. 

So I decided to stick to my guns, but to try and make the lessons work better for him - perhaps he only sits in for a short, structured session & doesn’t have to hang around for the chat. I also decided that I would resort to a parenting strategy of which I normally don’t approve: Bribery. I’m doubling his pocket money on condition he does classes and worksheets (that I’ve devised). It worked – or has worked so far. He’s wanting to pay for a new i-pod, so he’s been doing the worksheets, and our first class, after a long hiatus, is tomorrow afternoon. I’ll keep you posted.

The dreaded locks

ActionMan took me by surprise yesterday when he announced that he intends to go to Obapaa’s salon just before we leave for our overseas trip and get dreadlocks, so he can see what it’s like to have them. (Of course, at the rate at which he has(n’t) been combing his hair, I reckon he could have dreads tomorrow at the cost of only a little judicious teasing.  In fact, we could even have online support for this project.)

Then while we are in the US (it’s a round-the-world ticket) he’ll have The Haircut. We had already agreed, you see, that while in Ghana he would have short hair out of respect for his Nana (grandmother) .  The less family confrontations the better, in my view. 

Well it’s not a bad idea, except that I think he should get the dreads sooner, because while we won’t have to pay for the dreads, we will have to pay for whatever product’s used on them, and I don’t want to fork out money for a hairstyle that’s going to vanish within two weeks. And for the same reason, I think he could delay the cut until we get to Europe. So, any suggestions for African barbers in Frankfurt?

He’s not actually keen to do the dreads sooner because he doesn’t really want them, he just wants to try them out. I’m not sure why he doesn’t want them. When I suggested cornrows a while back he rejected that because he associates it with gangsta style and, unlike a lot of African boys here in Oz, he doesn’t want the gangsta look.

In fact, the only thing Actionman really wants for his hair is for it to be long without him having to look after it. Last year for a school assignment he created a poster – which sadly, I don’t have a picture of – promoting “The Afroizer – from knots to fro in seconds”. I’ve never seen him so enthusiatic about a school project. In your dreams baby.

The Lingo Limbo Part 2

When I was about 11, I read the first two books of Lord of the Rings. Like Sam & Frodo, I got lost in the dour lands of Mordor; unlike them, I didn’t make it to the end – at least not that time. LOTR made a lasting impression on me in many ways, but in particular, it left me, as it did many others, with a strong desire to create my own fantasy world, complete with maps, languages, and mysterious dark strangers. And that’s how I spent much of my early teens. (This was pre-internet – there are now whole websites devoted to Tolkien’s Elvish).

What I didn’t realise at the time was that Tolkien was a language expert. He was professor of both English and Anglo Saxon at Oxford University, and the languages he created were far more than just collections of nice-sounding syllables. I guess that’s why he managed to create a satisfactory language, whereas I got seriously distracted by the mysterious dark strangers

It’s really only since getting to know Ghanaians that I’ve come to appreciate the uniqueness and complexity of languages, how profoundly they differ, and how they enable you to gain a deeper understanding of culture.

Learning a language opens windows in your mind, especially when it’s a language that’s very different from your own. When I first heard DadaK and his friends talking together, I was astonished. It was an incomprehensible flow of sounds like no other I had ever heard. With time, I began to recognise some specific words, and learned some basic things like hello, how are you, and thank you.

ActionMan, in his early childhood, also understood and could say a few simple phrases, although it was a bit of a joke between ourselves and another mixed couple we knew, that their son was good with the language but not the food, and ActionMan was the opposite: not crash hot with the lingo, but enthusiastic papapaaa (very) about his Dad’s cooking.

It was on my second visit to Ghana, when ActionMan was three, that I really started to make progress. I was there for about 7 weeks, and on many nights in the village I woud sit ouside after dinner, with a bunch of kids teaching me vocabulary.

“Banana – kwadu, onion – djenne, yam – byere“, they would chant, and I would recite them back. (Please excuse the spelling, I know it’s not right, but I don’t yet have a Twi keyboard).

By day I would ask people to help me with common phrases, and by the end of the trip I could say things like “where is DadaK?” DadaK wa hin?  “I’m going for a walk” me ko nante, and even “circumcision is not good” kotiboto nye! (This last one shows how I was venturing into more sophisticated territory – the world of ideas – & caused much hilarity because no-one had realised I knew what they were talking gossiping about.)

ActionMan didn’t do so well. Had we stayed longer I’m sure he would have picked up the language but as it was, he found it very hard it be around people who didn’t understand him – or he them. He had a great time, but also had night terrors, which he never had back home.

After this visit our education stalled because DadaK and I separated and we no longer had the frequent exposure. And as I mentioned in the lingo limbo part 1, it’s easy for DadaK to communicate in English with us, so he does.

Over the years since our 98 visit , I have asked DadaK to teach ActionMan, and he has tried, when AM’s with him, to speak the language, but it hasn’t helped much. I think you do need formal classes, unless you’re living with someone full time, and there were none.

However with the arrival of Obapaa and subsequently of more children, our vocabulary has expanded again, little by little. We’ve now learned those phrases common to large families such as “He hit me”, “stop that or you’ll get a smack”,”be quiet”, “he’s sick”. (o yare) etc. Sorry, no translation for unfriendly phrases.  ActionMan particularly relishes the fact that he knows how to tell someone they are stupid in Twi.

So the time has really come for us to be able to say more than kotiboto kwadu (have you been paying attention? see above), and over the last few months I’ve sought out someone to teach us Twi. I have to rush off to the BMX track now (it’s school holidays), but at some point after I get back I’ll continue the lingo limbo saga.

The lingo limbo

Border Crossings was recently discovered by another blogger, Gori Girl, who is a white US woman married to an Indian man. She has written some excellent posts about learning her partner’s language (Bengali), which is a wonderful concidence for me because learning DadaK’s language, Ashanti Twi, is currently pretty high on my very long list of things to do.

It’s great to know there are other people out there heading in the same direction. Gori Girl also recommends some useful resources, which I’ll be taking a look at when I pause to draw breath from passport applications, vaccinations, buying luggage and general travel planning. Which may not be until I am actually in Ghana, in early June.

Learning Twi has been on my list for a long time, for many of the reasons Gori Girl lists – better understanding of culture, not getting left out of jokes, better communication, etc, but it’s been catapulted to the top because of the imminent trip to Ghana. I’d like ActionMan to be able to talk to his Grandmother, even if it’s just a very simple conversation, and I’d like to be able to do more than tell people what I want to eat (Me pe abenkwan).

However the main reason it’s taken a long time to get to the top is because – surprise, surprise – it’s not the kind of language where you can sign up for a course at WEA any day of the week. There are no courses. There are, as far as I know, no qualified teachers, at least not in Sydney. There are not even any classes for children, as there are in the Arabic, Vietnamese and other communties. I don’t know why this is so, but I can speculate.

English is the official language in Ghana and children are taught it in school, so perhaps Ghanaian migrants don’t think it’s that important for the children to learn their own language as other migrants do, because they can always communicate with their children in English. Of course children do learn at home from parents, but I don’t know if they speak it as well as they would if supported by classes. DadaK does complain that his other childrens’ grammar is all wrong.

Perhaps it’s just because they are a relatively new community (only about 20 years old) and small compared to the Lebanese, Vietnamese and other communties that have language classes. It could be that it hasn’t yet become a priority because they have been dealing with so many other issues related to settling in a new country. Also, because they are not refugees, they don’t get the same level of support & services that other African communities do. Tho I’d probably be hard pushed to find a Dinka class if I needed one, too.

Another reason maybe lies with the nature of Ghanaian, and perhaps all African languages. The Ethnologue.com language map for Ghana lists 67; Wikipedia reckons there are 79, although it could be that Wikipedia’s list includes some of the dialects as discrete languages. This is in a country the size of Victoria.

While most Ghanaians in Sydney are Ashanti Twi Speakers, there are certainly other language groups in their community, and this would have an impact on setting up language classes. First, there’s the practical difficulty of finding teachers and resources in exactly the right language/dialect. Then there’s the politics. Which I won’t go into, but you can probably imagine.

This also makes it difficult to learn the language independently. For example, I found a dictionary in a language bookstore which I’ve been using – but it’s Fante Twi, not Ashanti Twi. The differences are small, but confusing enough to be discouraging.

So all in all, it’s not straightforward to learn Twi in Australia, and I’ve had to put in a fair bit of effort to get as far as I have. But the more I learn, the more fascinating it is, and the more fun I’m having. There’s a lot to tell, so I’ll save my stories for another post.

Come back soon for Part 2 of the Lingo Limbo.

The Joy of Phone Cards

If you do not have family or friends living in developing countries or Asia you have probably not discovered, and perhaps will never discover, The Joy of Phone Cards.

Like many other things which bring people joy (food, sex, recreational drugs etc.), phone cards can be a mixed blessing. Yes, they offer many long moments of conversation with loved ones at relatively cheap rates, but man o man, do you get sick of punching in the long sequence of numbers: number, press 1 for English, pin, #, destination, #. And I’m sure they sometimes cheat you out of precious minutes.

Then, of course, it’s important to find the one with the best deal. I sometimes know which one that is, because DadaK tells me. But it seems to keep changing and he doesn’t always update me. I was merrily buying everyone Click Africa for Xmas, only to discover that they’re now all buying South Asia (yes, for Africa). To be honest, they seem the same to me, but then I’m not – or I wasn’t – calling Ghana every other day. I am now, & it’s not all for fun.

The combination of phone cards and developing country phone lines can try your patience. How’s this for a phone card adventure? I’ve recently had no outgoing calls on my home phone line (that’s The Joy of Phone Companies), so I have to use a special phone card to make local calls, i.e. to call the phone card number that I use for my international calls. So last night I was trying to call Ghana and on my first few tries the network was down. Ok, it’s not the phone cards’ fault, but by the time you’ve pressed 50+ numbers per call, you too would be a bit irritated to fnd it hadn’t worked. Plus, my local call card was almost finished, so as each attempt failed I watched my credit go down with an increasing sense of panic that I would never get through.

It was quite an important call. I’ll spare you The Joy of Children’s Passport Applications for now. I know DIAC have to be careful because some parents take the law into their own hands & abduct their children (click here for advice if this happens to you), but – come on – I need that passport so I can take my son to his father.

At last I succeeded, with my two phone cards and by now over 300 pressing of numbers, in getting through to the Australian High Commission in Accra, only to be confronted with the ubiquitous Demon Phone Menu – “Press 1 for irritation, 2 for despair, 3 to throttle the electronic voice, etc.”. (Actually, the systems I really hate are the voice recognition ones, because they don’t understand swearing or tooth grinding.) Fortunately, this system understood me, I got through to the right person and – hopefully – sorted things out. And thank god I get my outgoing calls back today! Now I just need to get that passport and my blood pressure will go down.

Looking for Michael

I’ve been spending an unusual amount of time in Asian groceries lately. Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai if I can find them. I’m looking for Michael. Or I was looking for Michael until DadaK gave me some of the item in question and I realised I’d misheard him, and it was actually mackerel that I needed. It just goes to show, you can know someone well for almost 20 years and still have trouble with their accent sometimes. (He does with mine, too).

He gave me the mackerel just a week before he left for Ghana. My mission at the time had been for DadaK to teach ActionMan to cook Ghanaian food, so he woud not have to rely on my “disgusting, bland” food while his dad was away. (ActionMan’s words, not DadaK’s). In fact this has been my mission for years, but with the departure date fast approaching, I was feeling a little more urgent about it, with visions of ActionMan living on take-away and sausages for months on end. So he had several lessons, recited to the procedure to me, DadaK gave us the mackerel and a shopping list, and we were ready for a trial cooking session without DadaK’s supervision.

The mackerel I’d been looking for was a special ingredient that imparts a delicious, subtle flavour to the food, although you wouldn’t guess that from a product that’s fondly called stink-fish (because it does. The smell has been known to cause mixed-marital discord, altho not in our house). It’s salted fish. In the couple of decades DadaK has been in Australia, he has been experimenting with a range of preserved fish products, including gourmet smoked trout, and for the dish we planned to make – eggplant stew – the mackerel was the best substitute for whatever it is they use in Ghana. (Ghanaians rely heavily on smoked fish for protein, and often mix fish with meat – which can be a bit of a challenge for anglo Aussies).

I’d like to know how people discover these special substitute ingredients. I would imagine DadaK can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’s eaten Vietnamese food, yet somehow he knows that he has to venture into a Vietnamese grocery to get stink-fish. He also gets phone cards, stock cubes, plantains, tinned fish, frozen cassava, and if he’s lucky, very tiny eggplants that look like peas.

My fruitless – or fishless – search for Michael paused when DadaK supplied it. But now he’s gone, I’m going to have to find it myself, if ActionMan is to cook eggplant stew (froye). It’s a big if.

Whether it’s because we overdid the stink-fish, or because we didn’t follow the strict instructions to only use Santa Maria sardines, or perhaps it was the prawn stock cubes – our stew, was, well …. way too fishy even for ActionMan. Not subtle at all. It was very disappointing and a big waste of food. I think I had cereal for dinner that night. If we do it again, I’ll have to have a back up meal plan.

The other obstacle is that we’ve discovered the true identity of another of the special ingredients. Ok, it’s just a psychological obstacle. When we bought the corned beef (only Black & Gold), ActionMan read the list of ingredients on the can. I don’t know what got into him. I haven’t noticed him do this before, except for a school assignment last year. If ‘d been able to stop him, I would have, because I would prefer not to know what’s in tinned corned beef. It’s beef, ok, let’s leave it at that. But it’s too late now.

With a look of horrified disbelief, ActionMan read the label: “40% pure beef, 60% beef heart”. Right there at the checkout. Ok, I admit it, we are culinary wimps.

Well”, I said firmly, trying to ignore the rising nausea, “we’ve been eating froye for years and enjoying it. It’s one of our favourite things. We can’t stop eating it now just because we know what’s in it.” (wanna bet?). So I paid for it. And we cooked it. And it’s a pity it was such a disaster, because that’s done nothing at all to beat down our psychological obstacles. Plus we now have several cans of corned beef in the cupboard, which Obapaa left behind because she couldn’t fit them into her luggage.

I can’t say I’m in a rush to cook froye again, so it’s looking like a bleak diet of sausages and cereal for us, over the next few months. However, anytime I’m near an Asian grocery, I do look for Michael. Honestly, I really do.