First Peace Corps Volunteer

Yale Women Authors

“My claim to fame is that I was a member of the very first Peace Corps group,” said Meryl, one of the early arrivals at our home Sunday for the gathering of YaleWomen Connecticut.

The first group had gone to Ghana. Meryl had been a French teacher; she’d just completed her Master’s in Teaching at Yale when she joined the Peace Corps. She’s on right in back row.

YaleWomen Connecticut Author Conversation attendees. -Peace Corps

YaleWomen Connecticut Author Conversation attendees. .

Like me, she also met her husband during her Peace Corps time – but he was neither a host country national nor another PCV. Instead she met and married an Indian man who was teaching at the same school with her. I hope I’ll see her again. Maybe we can get together with our husbands!

Sunday’s event was an Alumnae Author Conversation. I shared the speaking honors with Elise Broach, a prolific author of children’s books. Eighteen women came.

“Where do you get your ideas?” one of the women asked. Elise said she’s always had her head just full of ideas for stories; it’s never been a problem for her.

Memoir is different – I knew the basic story I wanted to tell, but had to search my memory for the scenes and dialogue to include to make it a page-turner for readers.

I had a great time, and I think everyone else did too. The women who came were all seriously interested in writing. They wanted to know how we did it, and at least half want to do it themselves.

Year of Literacy

On February 1, the American University of Nigeria with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) officially launched the “Year of Literacy – Technology Enhanced Learning for All,” or TELA.

The former Vice President of Nigeria, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, was the founder of AUN. I wrote about him a few months ago.

He was present for the project launch with the state governor and several other government officials.

The project will use radio broadcasts since radio is “a common medium of mass communication in the north.” Tablet computers will be used as part of the instructional teaching content. Students from the university have written apps that will be loaded on the tablets.

AUN President Ensign said, “the US government gave $801,000 to fund this project and AUN has been tasked to prove that this pilot scheme is scalable.  If it succeeds, it will be replicated across Nigeria.”

Steve, a faithful reader, sent the link to the article from The Chronicle of Higher Education. I hope he’ll keep us posted on progress.

AUN launches Novel Radio Literacy Program, targets 22,000 vulnerables

This House is Not For Sale

Can you imagine having to put a sign on your house to avoid having it sold out from under you? Or ending up in a huge court battle to prove it was never sold?

I have seen these signs myself. Another former Peace Corps volunteer, Louise, sent the link to this article from the Christian Science Monitor that describes this scam.

Street hawkers in Lagos traffic - plenty of customers!

Street hawkers in Lagos traffic – plenty of customers!

The writer says  600,000 people arrive in Lagos every year, hoping for a better life than in their village. Yet there are too few salaried positions. “That collision demands an extraordinary level of imagination from new arrivals,” the author says. “If you want a job in Lagos, chances are you’ll have to invent it yourself.”

This accounts for the incredible number of hawkers selling goods along the roads. The traffic jams provide plenty of bored people, all potential customers.

Perhaps the struggle for any source of income helps to make the city so vibrant. But it is very difficult to survive the hustle, so a few people will try to sell something they don’t own, like your house!

How Do We Learn to Speak?

I’ve been puzzling over what to write next for my memoir and essay writing class.

I’ve had language on my mind. Learning Clem’s language was critical to feeling at home in his village, with his people. And I believe understanding another language helps us to understand the people who speak it.

Maybe I was getting a message yesterday morning. I listened to Krista Tippett’s On Being while I was getting ready for church. Her guest was a psycholinguist, a job description I didn’t even know existed. Did you?

“Jean Berko Gleason is a living legend in the field of psycholinguistics — how language emerges, and what it tells us about how we think and who we are,” the OnBeing website says. “She has helped to illustrate the remarkable ordinary human capacity to begin to speak.”

Gleason described how children learn language sequentially, for example learning about the verb ending ‘ed’ to make past tense. I was intrigued as she told the story of her child’s coming home from pre-school to say, “The teacher holded the rabbit and we petted it.”

She – the mother – said, “Oh! The teacher held the rabbit?”

“Yes, she holded the rabbit,” the child replied. Once more Gleason asked a question using the past tense ‘held.’ Again the child replied with ‘holded.’ The linguist said at that point in time, the child had learned the rule and was ‘over-applying’ it, and wasn’t yet ready to learn exceptions.

I realized later that although this was fascinating, it wasn’t helping me know what to write. Then I began to think about African names, so rich in meaning.

I was pleasantly surprised when I opened my email this morning to find an article in the blog Africa in Words about Yoruba names.

I’ll write about names, and share some fascinating Igbo and Yoruba names with you next time. Meanwhile if you have a language story or a name to share, tell me in the Comments section below.

Author: Catherine Onyemelukwe

Author, blogger, speaker. Born in New York, grew up in mid west United States, lived in Nigeria for 24 years, back in U.S. since 1986. Advocate for racial justice.

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