Home Sweet Hohoe

I am back in the old familiar haunts of Hohoe again. Our travel back was pretty mundane and while one funeral party in some small town thought our driver was going too fast, we had zero incidents or breakdowns on the way home from Kukurantumi. The back seat was not as comfortable as I thought it would be at the start of the journey but it wasn't anything terrible or painful by any stretch of the imagination.

As we drove into town I had not a clue that we had arrived. After a few hours in the vehicle all the towns and villages look the same and you find yourself lulled into a sense of seeing the same town again and again. We were only about a block from the station before I realized that it was my town. It felt good to be back.

A few volunteers stayed to do their shopping so I walked around with them in the blazing sun of mid-day and took in the sights and smells. It was good to have some ice cream and it was very nice to be back at the house again and see that all was well on campus.

Today I was walking through campus and everyone made sure to greet meet and say "welcome" in Ewe for me. The response to that is just a plain, "Yoo" and a smile. I think I lost a bit of my language skills in just one week. My thoughts are to find a tutor soon so that I can start  to work on my week points of which there are many. I find that I can't hear a single word someone says when they talk at their normal speed. Even so, sometimes I can grab a word or two but it will not solve the question of what they said to me. Slowly I can get better I think.

There is some light shopping to do and I need to get back into the swing of things with my classes. I missed one week and I wish to make that time up with more computer exercises and the like. Maybe I will give a test as well to see where students are in the uptake of the lessons. Then again, marking 220 or so papers doesn't sound like such a great idea... maybe that was why all my other volunteer friends were lamenting their class sizes after they gave homework and exams.

On a positive note there is someone here to work on the eight computers that have failed us so far in the lab. They appear to be power supply issues and my only fear now is that the man who came will tell me that those power supplies are not in stock so we have to wait some more time before they can come in. I keep my hopes quite low for most things so I don't get disappointed.

So things are creeping back to normal. I have to see if I received permission to travel to Accra to visit for Thanksgiving soon. I called in late and well, you don't ask for extensions from the federal government in my experience. We shall see.