What’s In a Name?

Today I was back in the office.  So a lot of the kids haven’t paid for lunch yet…so I had to put together a list of all the kids who paid (oh my gosh…I just spelled that payed = /…haha) organized by class…and match that to the lists of all the kids who’ve eaten so that we can see who’s eating without paying…does that make sense?  Anyways…one problem was that I couldn’t read the handwriting a lot of times (either because it was a teacher scribbling the name fast or a kid with some cutesy handwriting that makes an ‘e’ look an unknown geometric shape).  The bigger problem was that their names were often written differently on each sheet!  Like different spellings, names in a different order (most of them have three or four names), only a missing their first name…like SO confusing!  It probably doesn’t even make sense because that’s exactly how I felt!  I was wondering how someone could possibly spell their name wrong and why the order of their names would change!

Anyways…still not sure…but I did learn a little something about names here.  Everyone has the day they were born in their name.  Theresa gave me the Ghanaian name Ewura-Afua (Lady Friday - I misunderstood and thought she was asking what day my birthday was this year…oops).  So sometimes they include that part of their names…sometimes they don’t.   And then there are so many different tribes and languages here, so the teacher might think the child’s name is spelled one way when it’s spelled differently because they’re from a different region.

Well…I had to keep from going crazy…so I started to have fun noticing the names.  Some of the names that I’ve loved most at the school: Twistable, Gifty, Favor.  And of course there’re the royal names: Prince, Chief, Duke, Princess, Queensly…and my personal favorite - King David (who goes by “King David“ = ).  Lots of Papas and Nanas - those are really common names!  As are religious names like Emmanuel, Emmanuella (the girl version) and Mohammed - I even saw a Jesuslyn.  And then there are hundreds of local names that are so unusual and so beautiful, such as Adutwoumwaa, Ife Oluwa, Ewurakwa, Etornam, Kwame…and the list goes on.

Other than that, today I was made to feel very grateful for our printers and copy machines at schools at home.  This printer jams when you put in more than one piece of paper.  So I had to load it one paper at a time (and the drawer sticks every time you open it).  Plus I heard a teacher begging to be able to use more paper for something (not sure what - they were going back and forth between English and a native language) and being totally denied.  But whatever it was for, I can’t imagine that it was too unreasonable considering the kindergarten teachers have to replicate the assignments they want their students to do in every single child’s notebook (like this week is domestic animals…so she had to free hand a dog, puppy, cat, and kitten in 23 books for the children to identify and color!).

One more funny thing from today.  There’s one teacher’s bathroom.  When you go in there’s a sink and two stalls - one that says male and one that says female (the stall doors don’t lock).  Today I walk in and there’s a male teacher just peeing with the door open in the female stall.  Luckily his back was to me so I just turned right back around and walked out…but that was one of those moments that I just wished I had somebody there to laugh about it with!