Nigeria in the Morning

Today I am thinking about what Nigeria sounds like to me in the morning. I hear birds chirping, guards talking and laughing. I hear roosters crowing. I heard that wonderful sound of the generator.
When we first moved here Margee was worried that we might not like our apartment because it was located so close to the generator. Granted it does make it hard to hear our children at night, but everyone in our family, even our one year old, is relieved to hear the generator when it peals, because of the hope that it will bring the electricity on again.
Then there is the awful sound of prayer by microphone (shouting) at 4 am. I am not awakened by it anymore, but our first few months it was really nerve racking. I don’t like it when I am awake either, but at least it isn’t as bad as waking up to it.
Another morning experience for me today was the hot sticky feeling of being just as wet after I toweled off as I did before.
I was also thinking about emotional independency and how I get to learn even more about it. Nigeria has been a diamond in the rough for me in learning how to be truly independent when before I cam here I only liked to think that I was. With this blessing has come an added closeness with my family that I cherish.
 - Joy

A Neoimperialist reading of The Cat in the Hat

I was reading The Cat in the Hat to Superstar tonight. As usual, I like to pick random dialects, accents, and characterizations to make the books more interesting. Tonight I happened to give the cat a very deep, posh British dialect and the fish an Indian accent.

Suddenly the entire book was transformed into a colonial pseudo-commentary: wise India continually cried for the British to stop with their Great Game to play, but its voice went unheeded. When the British finally left, everything was a mess. But, in good neoimperialist/White Savior/white guilt tradition, the Cat shows up again as an NGO (or an economics professor?) to clean up the entire mess and restore everything to its idyllic state. Shall we go so far as to name Thing 1 and Thing 2 the Breton Woods Institutions of the World Bank and IMF?

Even though the narrator is "Sally and I" (notice the ever  dominant male perspective and the completely silent female), the real star of the show is the imperialist who gets his own line of dolls, t-shirts, books, sequels, television specials, and movies, all upheld by copyrights promulgated by Thing 3 (the WTO) and the corporatist government (the mother) who pretends to see nothing amiss. The neoliberal market allows the developed world to exploit the developing once again by controlling how its story is portrayed.

Catch up: A few little moments

Superstar lost his first tooth. He lost it and we don't know where to find it, so I'm afraid the Tooth Fairy shall not be making a Nigerian appearance. This is probably for the best since the Nigerian Tooth Fairy would ask for a tip after taking your tooth.

Superstar and I started reading Harry Potter, which he chose over Narnia or Fablehaven. He also rather enjoyed the Muppet Christmas Carol. Among their innovations is that the two hecklers, Statler and Waldorf, play the part of Jacob and Robert Marley. Superstar hoped that there was another version with three brothers Marley.

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Last night we packed Joy's and Derrill's clothes for our trip to the US. Superstar's are mostly packed. When Joy mentioned this at lunch, Princess got off her chair and ran to her room to start packing her clothes.

Just before that, though, she asked me to move her chair closer. Then she said, "I love you," and gave me a big hug. She is a very sweet and adorable little girl.

The other day she went to the window to comment on the trees. Then she noticed the new onions in the basket. She picked one up and said, "New onions. They so sweet."

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After Church, they wanted to speak at our makeshift podium.

Books Princess loves and asks me to read her regularly at night: The Marvelous Toy; Saint George and the Dragon (she's scared of the dragon but regularly asks for the book anyway); One Fish, Two Fish; The Tawny Scrawny Lion; Little Bunny; Fox in Socks; and anything with a lot of animals or anything else by Dr. Seuss.


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