First, I forget to include some interesting things that happened to me the last time I was in Osogbo after I finished my interviews. While I was walking around with Dele, he pointed out the house of the late Susanne Wenger to me, and introduced me to her "heir." Most of you probably haven't heard of her before, but she's here's the first link that came up under her name on google:
http://www.geocities.com/adunni1/sw.html
The place was beautiful, and yes I did get pictures mom! The entire thing was one huge sculpture, and there were Olorisha(orisha worshipers/devotees) all over place. I didn't get the name of the lady to whom Dele had introduced me because she was pretty busy ordering people around, but she gave us some ground nut and told us that we should come back any time to have a meal there and look around the house! I think I will go back to Osogbo one more time to interview Dele's dad again, and maybe if there's time we'll come by again.
On the way back to Ife that day there was a lady sitting next to me on the bus with a baby wrapped to her back (this is usually how women carry their babies around in Nigeria), and all of a sudden I felt a tug on the left side of my scalp! The little guy thought my hair looked like apull chord and was really excited to be playing with it. His mom appologized quickly and laughed when I told her it was alright and handed a few dread locks back to him. All of the little kids love staring at me, and usually are even more surprised than the grown ups when I speak some Yoruba to them. I told the son of one of Uncle Funso's friends that I spoke Yoruba better than he does when he was too taken aback to answer me when I asked him how he was doing :p
Another thing I like noticing is what people wear. I love the traditional clothes (aso), but I've seen all kinds of other things too. Some people dress really nicely, some people try to dress really nicely, and I'm just not quite sure what other people are doing. Yesterday I saw a guy wearing a tux shirt, flip-flops, and some cut off shorts. I almost wanted to take a picture because I thought there was actually a natural law that kept those thigns away from each other. Some people asked me why I only wear traditional clothes to dress up here, and I say it's because they were made for the weather and I feel bad for people wearing 3-piece suits when it's this humid! That and my aso are much more comfortable and easy to manage.
I got sick of working inside on saturday so I decided to go into town and price (or haggle) for some thigns at the market. As expected everywhere I went people would quote exorbitant prices for me since I'm clearly a foreigner, and would pretend to get offended when I laughed at them. I made this one lady give me 2 times as much of something as she had originally for a lower price, and afterwards she looked kinda bewildered and asked me where I was from. I told her in Yoruba that my father is an Ijebu-man, Ijebus are known for being very "economic" in spending their money, and she laughed really hard. She said that made sense, and that next time she would give me an "Ijebu" price.
Unfortunately I also found out that the cheap knock-off soccer jerseys from Indonesia that we used to buy en-massse at the market are practically gone. In just about the pasy year or so, they have been replaced by the more up-scale Chinese knock offs that I have to say look almost exactly like the real thing. It's really a shame (not just because the new ones are from China) because the old ones were ridiculously inexpensive and you could find all kinds of obscure shirts that you'd never be able to find elsewhere. Oh well...
I talked to Aunty Bimbo yesterday and she is going to be in Ibadan this Friday, and since I want to just do a few more interviews here in Ife (since I heard different things in Osogbo than I did from the Awise here in Ife), I'm going to try to plan it out so that I can finish up by Friday and maybe meet up with Aunty Bimbo by Saturday.
I think that's all the news that's newsworthy, oh except that Nigeria tied Tunisia 0-0 over the weekend which means that we're 2 points behind Tunisia in our group for World Cup qaulifiers. That means we're right behind Tunisia, but since only the first team in the group immediately qualifies, we need to keep wining and hope they drop some points. Maybe Ifa can tell me if we'll make it to South Africa...
~Deji
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