RIP-PBR

It was a fine February evening, when Chief (a colleague who is chief of some small village somewhere) arrived at my gate with a box on the back of his moto. The box was jigging around a bit which could mean only 1 thing! A puppy!!!!!!!! And the cutest puppy ever! I know all puppies are cute but this little fella was the most beautiful pale fawn & white & bright bright blue eyes! Puppy love at first sight.

After a few whiney nights of missing his mammy & sucking, Puppy (to be a temporary name only) settled in well. The weather was getting hot & his favourite place was inside under the fan with his chin on an icepack. Luckily Aunty Michelle (VSO now gone home) was around & happened to be a puppy expert so she helped out big time with the toilet training & within the month, Puppy was sitting & fetching! Clever pup – much to the amusement/ dismay of our Ghanaian neighbours who figured talking to / bathing & teaching dogs tricks was pretty mad. And cuddling! It’s probably similar to running out onto the street and grabbing a goat for a hug! They’re all meat. I got corrected a few times – Puppy’s not a he, it’s an it. However, I’m sure everybody liked him, even Baba (my Muslim watchman- they don’t tend to like dogs too much) and he liked everybody. I mean everybody. He followed strangers trying to greet them which totally freaked people out in a country riddled with rabies. Absolutely useless as a security dog but that’s because I was too soft on him or so I was told.

As the weeks moved on, Puppy got braver & braver & moved from the house to the veranda, to the garden & to the neighbourhood (estate), where he quickly made new friends. He loved roaming with his 2 doggy friends. Dogs liked him too cause he was completely submissive & not the alpha male at all. “Puppy” stuck though he was growing fast & would soon need a doggy name. He became a real creature of habit. I’d pull up at the gate on my moto & beep. Puppy would bounce down the garden & greet me (jump up on me & wreck my clothes). He’d then run round estate a bit. I’d move my bike into the house, he’d come running back in, greet me again, turn round & run around estate for about half an hour, meet his friends, smell things & back again for dinner!

How and ever, it wasn’t all sweetness & light. There was the time he chewed through my laptop cable. Bad dog. I really didn’t like him eating shit either. Literally. And he liked to chase the chickens (in a friendly way) – just playing but it freaked them out. He also bounced around the garden after butterflies. Cute. I was regularly missing a shoe or a sock only to find them down the bottom of the garden. And there was the biting, well not biting but constant mauling. Wasn’t that bad, kinda funny but it soon earned him the new extended name of Puppy Bitey Reilly or, in the great African tradition of acronyms, PBR (thanks Ellie for that one!).

Then along came Pussy. Pussy is my new housemate, Gladys’ tom cat. A small small but fully grown cat. Pussy was totally freaked out by the move & really hated Puppy. It was very funny watching the pair of them. Puppy was kinda indifferent/ a bit nervous of the cat when it was having a hissy fit. He tried to be friends as he did with everything but Pussy was having absolutely nothing of that & really nastily spitted at him & went for him. Puppy occasionally chased it but was generally indifferent & occasionally helped himself to pussy’s dinner. Bonus! I figured on a new name for him too – Chopper. But it didn’t get the chance to stick.

It was a wet Sunday evening last, Holland was playing Spain in WC Final & I was still getting over a small bout of malaria. I was lying on the couch & Puppy comes over, jumps up on me, half on the floor, half on the couch & starts chewing on fingers, hands etc... We played for about 10 minutes, was nice. Was thinking we’d not really hung out in a while. Gladys was on her way out to town & he clocked her & went for the door. I wanted to sit up & tell her not to let the dog out – he’ll follow her & she’s going to town with the real big bad road. But I didn’t have the energy to say it & in seconds they were gone. A half an hour later, phone rings. Puppy was hit by a speeding STC (big) bus. He wouldn’t have known what hit him. Poor little fella. Anyways, with a big juicy body like his, he wasn’t left lying there for long...

Everyone was sad & shocked by the news – kinda surprisingly so. Richard, my Ugandan friend sent me an email saying he hopes Puppy “rests well in eternal life”. Chief was particularly taken aback. So much so, he insisted on a funeral! No joke, it’s happening tomorrow at 4 over wine (no less!) & a fowl –chief mourners only – that’s me & Chief & our neighbour Miranda coz I happened to see her on the street & she reckoned it was a good idea. She & chief are Northern Region people who apparently believe that if you don’t have a funeral, all future pets will die young. Or it could just be an excuse to come to my house & be wined & dined. But, perhaps she’s right. All our favourite dogs died/ bunked off young – Hercules, Snoops, Dink...Maybe this funeral will put an end to that one.

Call to glory: Puppy, a.k.a . Puppy Bitey Reilly (PBR), a.k.a. Chopper. Will miss your bitey ways :)

Ghanainisms

Chop chop – Some of my favourite Ghanainisms

Here, to eat is to chop, edibles are chopables and restaurants are chop bars. It’s a great word and still after 8 months it makes me smile when people talk about chopping this and that. Of course, it can lead to misunderstandings like the time another volunteer had a Ghanaian friend in the kitchen helping her cook dinner and she asked him to chop the tomatoes, only to find him chop chopping!

Another great & overused word here is pick. You can pick a taxi or a taxi can pick you. You pick someone on the back of your moto. You pick water from the fridge, you pick a phone call or if you’re not answering you’re not picking. The funniest use of the word I’ve heard however was a colleague describing caesarean sections as a “cut & pick”. I’ve also heard cut and paste as “pick & put”. Cracks my up!

To flash means to call someone & hang up before they answer in the hope they will ring you and thereby save your credit. It does lead to pretty funny sayings like “he keeps flashing me”, “flash me”, “did you flash?”, “I will flash you later”, etc....endlessly amusing to us whites.

My all time favourite though is these high-pitched exclamations – oh! It has to be done in a proper high pitch & is therefore particularly funny from the men. I have heard a colleague on the phone answering only in these high pitched exclamations & hang up. It cracks me up. Then there’s the other o. Not high pitched & just put on the end of a sentence like “I am hungry o” or “we suffer here in the north o” or “i like your dress o”, etc... It’s nice o. To agree with something or if you are getting something (“are you getting it?”) it’s a kindof deep nasally “ahaaaah”. Everything is “ahaaaah”. It’s funny o!

Another one I hear a lot in Bolga here is Sollamia – meaning white person. “Sollamia sollamia I am greeting you”, “sollamia good morning”, etc... Or I might be sitting in work or on the bus & I hear blah blah sollamia blah blah & people are obviously talking about you, the only sollamia around. Sometimes I get called white lady, white man or my favourite, just white. Hello white. White, where are you going? I like it. I’m white, they’re black. None of this PC business.

Another incredibly overused word here is come. “I’ll go & come”, i.e. I’ll be back later or shortened to just “go come”. “I’m coming”. People are constantly coming. They make take a while to come but they are coming. The rain is coming. The cheque is coming. You regularly hear sayings like “let me free myself and come”, “let me bath and come” or as our secretary at the last Senior Management Team meeting said “let me urinate and come”.

Of course, if it’s not coming it’s finished. Like the rain is finished. The rice is finished. The chicken is finished. The photocopier is finished. It’s finished. I saw recently a picture of Jesus on the cross with the title -It is finished.

Funerals give rise to some funny use of words. So, if the person died recently, it’s a fresh funeral, meaning the body is “in the fridge”. Otherwise the funeral is not fresh, the body was buried ages ago but they are just having the party now. So, when you ask someone how their weekend was, they will invariably mention funerals – fresh & not fresh! Anyways, it’s getting to 9, gotta pick something to chop and comeJ

Other favourites:

• Are you sure?


• It is not the best. (could be a great understatement, e.g. The famine is not the best.)


• Let me land (let me have my say).


• Walloped! (enjoy something such as he walloped the money/ the girl etc... )


• But why? (with the upturned hands)


• How? (short for how are you?)


• By His Grace – way overused e.g. How was the weekend?

By His Grace.

How will Ghana do against Uraguay?

By His Grace we will score them!

• God is a Ghanaian!