6.3 Owonrin-Were

The biggest news I have this week is that the lady the Araba and I have been treating for mental illness is essentially back to normal. It was really amazing, one day when we came she started speaking like a normal person and was asking questions about what she had been doing and started to cry because she realized what had been happening to her from the past almost 10 years I think. She started taking the medicine voluntarily because she knew it was helping her get better, and the Araba said that soon we will have to make another one for her to cure her completely. It has been really fascinating to me that all of this came about because when the Araba threw his opele for her family this sign came up. I find it equally amazing that somehow, somewhere along the line a babalawo must have figured out how that if you mix the ashes of a specific set of 3 kinds of leaves, the heads of a rooster and a hen, and some other ingredients I have written down, that after a few weeks it will clear some form of dementia from a person’s head. I’m curious to see what the next medicine will be.

Something funny happened yesterday as we were finishing up with this lady. A pastor from Lagos called the Araba and said he needed help with a woman in his church. I think it was because she was sick, but it could have been another problem. At any rate, I have always thought it was pretty funny that so many of these pastors usually come from far away towns to see Babalawos because they don’t want anyone to know that they are doing it. The politicians at least are fairly honest about their patronage of babalawos. There’s one in particular who is trying to get a post that the new governor has opened up by kicking out one of the PDP cronies who was stealing money. He saw us on the street one day, pulled his car over, gave the Araba some money, and then set up a meeting with him and a bunch of other people. The guy actually seems like a decent person, most people seem to like him, and he does have a pretty powerful babalawo working for him, so his odds are looking good.

I’m now almost three-quarters of the way through all of the Odu Ifa, which is a bit scary to me because there aren’t a lot left to study and it doesn’t seem like it has been that long. I think part of it might be that I have started learning them a bit more quickly since I am now able to understand all of the Yoruba in some of the verses and most of it in the others. I have also started to notice that each one of the signs has its own general meaning and when two are paired together the meaning is pretty clear. I can’t usually predict what the meaning will be given the two signs, but when I see the meanings, they usually tend to make sense. I realized that this is why they often describe them as children, just like how kids will get one set of genes from each parent and there are dominant and recessive genes which correspond to the right and left hand signs respectively. It’s really interesting to think that since these signs are supposed to contain all of life and that everything in life (especially it’s problems) are understood to be governed by some combination of the forces (I guess that’s the best word to use) represented in each one of the signs.

I also learned this week that the Araba was right about Oloye. He hadn’t really turned a corner and started getting serious about Ifa. He hasn’t come back to study since then, but only comes back on the days when the Araba worships his Ifa because he knows that I usually buy schapps and akara for him to give to Ifa then, and he wants to eat and drink some. On Friday the Araba purposefully left the house early to through Oloye for a loop because he knew he was going to try to mooch off of Ifa.

I had noticed before that the actual words that I wrote down for each Ifa verse would sometimes differ slightly from those that he would recite when I was recording him. I finally remembered to ask the Araba if I had been writing them down incorrectly or if that was just the way that it was, and he had a very interesting answer. He told me that there are some words of course that can never change, but most times when you recite a verse it will change slightly. He said the meaning will always be exactly the same, it will just have a slightly different appearance. Anyone who knows the verse will be able to recognize it even if a few words are changed here or there. I thought it was interesting because the way the Araba described it, it was very clear that the Ifa verse was not the words itself, but the meaning/story/ or account of a previous Ifa consultation that happened before. As such the way it is told may change slightly and I found it very interesting that it was supposed to change slightly as well. I’m not sure if all Babalawos treat Ifa this way as I was always under the impression that the verses were fixed and memorized word by word. I do like the idea, however, that words and imperfect human symbols, can never completely contain or express a more divine reality or message so by expressing it in various ways you get closer to the real meaning, like looking at an object from many different angles since just one vantage point is insufficient.

On the woman front, I had decided to tell them that I have a wife in the US to see if that would get them to leave me alone, but unfortunately for me, that doesn’t seem to be enough. One woman yesterday said that she was fine with being the second wife and that i should bring her and her kids back with me. I think now I might have to invoke another Odu Ifa (4.3 Idin-Wiri I think) that says the person for whom it is cast must never have more than one wife. It’s actually one of my favorites because it uses a very clever example to prove it’s point. It says whether you try to or don’t, you can never have more than one wife in your house because when light enters a room, darkness flees. I hope Idin Wiri can be my light to make these other women flee...

7.4 Obara-Bodi

My biggest piece of news this week was the fastest and most interesting marriage proposal yet. Lots of women have told me that they want to marry me, but there was one proposal this week that I don't think I will ever be able to forget. I never even got the girl's name, but she set a record by asking if I would marry her within 30 seconds of meeting me! What was memorable about this proposal however was not her speed and directness, it was the fact that she had some interesting facial hair. I don't know if even Ifa could have seen this one coming! To her credit, she was much nicer than the other women when I explained to her that I couldn't take her to the US and that I was not looking for a wife. I think the next time I come back to Nigeria I am just going to pretend to be married. It's usually the girls who have to do that, but I guess this is the 21st century... Interestingly enough there is an Odu Obara-Bodi that reminds me of love potions from Harry Potter. It is for people who have their sights set on a certain someone but are having no success (IE these women/me). I just hope they don't come to the Araba and have him make the prescribed sacrifice that is supposed to open the road to the relationship!

The other big piece of news for me was that I finally worked myself into the ground. I figured it was just a matter of time, but it caught up with me. This Monday I didn't feel too well, but being myself i decided to man up and work through it. By Monday night I was worried that I might have contracted malaria, so I took my first day off on Tuesday. Sure enough that did the trick and I'm all better now, but I'm going to watch myself a bit more carefully and try not to work quite so hard. I've told myself that before though, so we'll see if it actually happens.

I'm not sure if it was this week or last week, but there was a person who came to have Ifa cast for her while the Araba's other student was with us. This guy, we call him Oloye which means title-holder or chief, hasn't been a really serious student and has only recently finished the first 16 major Odu (I think I'm somewhere around 170 now). So the Araba likes to mess with him and the people who come for divination by asking Oloye if he can interpret the Opele. The answer is invariably no, and then the Araba asks me. I can't always get it, but this particular time was Ogbe-Alaara. I told the Araba that it meant she is either living outside of her father's town and struggling to get by, or she's having trouble with enemies or both and then explained what she would have to do. Then everyone laughed. At any rate, I'm not sure if the Araba's teasing light a fire under Oloye or if he got tired of riding his Okada around, or chasing women, but he has recently decided to start getting more serious. The Araba is skeptical that it will last more than a few days, but I try to encourage him.

Finally, as some of you may know, there is an big presidential election coming up here in Nigeria. As I am a Nigerian citizen, and of age for the first time, I have decided to do my civic duty and vote! There has been this big push by the INEC to register as many people as possible for these elections, so I went (partially out of patriotism and partly out of curiosity) to one of the stations to get signed up. It was really neat to see how simply they were able to do it. All it took was a printer, a laptop with a webcam, and a fingerprint scanner, and in about 15 minutes you could be registered to vote! The less neat part was also how easy it was. I brought my passport because I figured they would need some kind of documentation, but all I had to do was give them a name and an address! I now understand all of the protest from the opposition parties like ANC and ANPP about how while admirable, this registration push could possibly be doing more harm than good. I can easily see how an organization could register people without them knowing and cast votes for them or possibly even make people up. We'll have to see how it turns out. As for me, I haven't made up my mind about for whom I will vote, so if any of you have your own opinions (mainly pointed at the other Nigerians, but anyone really) I'm all ears!

Wahala Ti Po Ju

The funniest thing happened yesterday, apart from ManU losing to Wolves... I came to Ibadan to visit Kyle and we went to the zoo on campus. The zoo was ok, but at one point we went into the primate house and were staring at a chimpanzee, and it really didn’t like Kyle at all. After making noises at him, the chimp grabbed something off of the floor and flung it at Kyle! Fortunately, Kyle ducked, and I almost couldn’t believe that the chimp had actually flung his dung! I had always heard stories about monkeys throwing poo at people, but it was very different seeing it in person. It’s highly entertaining, as long as it is not getting thrown at you...

Everything else that has happened this week pales a bit in comparison, but it was still pretty interesting. The mad lady has been getting better everyday. Now to make her take her medicine, we have to go to the places where she buys food and ask the people who make it to put it inside, because she is too together for us to try to sneak it in ourselves. Just recently she started going out of the house to go buy things that she wants, which never used to happen before. The Araba told me that it may take some months for the illness to completely clear from her head. We’ll see how long it takes.

There was another family who came to Baba’s house because their father had been almost dead for months now, but was not able to die. They said he had taken some kind of traditional medicine to stop others from being able to kill him, but now it is stopping him from dying when it was his time. So the Araba cast Ifa for his children and they made a sacrifice. The Araba collected some leaves and made a kind of paste with them and we went to their house. When we got there, the Araba told them to leave a snail in the corner of a room, and then we went in to see the man. It was honestly the most miserable I have ever seen anyone in my life. The man already looked like a corpse. The people in his family told us that we had to leave quickly because a pastor was coming and they said the pastor would want to kill us, but it was pretty clear that they just didn’t want him to know that they had called a Babalawo in for help. Apparently they had been working with the pastor for a long time, but since neither he nor the hospital had been able to do anything, they decided to try the Araba. So the Araba told them what to do with the paste (they had to make nine small little cuts on the top of his head and rub the paste into them), then we left so they wouldn’t be in an awkward situation. They called the next day and said that the medicine was working because their father’s face had changed completely. They didn’t say anymore than that, and we haven’t heard from them since, but I really do hope it worked. I felt so bad for the poor man...

At home, Samuel has discovered that I know the answers to most of his homework questions so pretty much everyday without fail, he comes into my room and tries to get me to give them to him. Since I worked in a classroom of kids of the same age in Cambridge, the kind of work they are doing really worries me. He’s supposed to be going to one of the best schools around, but that’s a bit worrisome. At first I thought he wasn’t trying too hard to figure things out for himself, but then I realized that usually he either hadn’t been taught what he needed to know, or even worse, sometimes he has been taught incorrectly. I’ve looked at a lot of his homework, and sometimes the teachers will have marked correct answers as incorrect, and left incorrect ones as is. Just this past week I had to teach him French pronouns, how to do long division, find LCMs, and everything in between, mostly I think because it wasn’t really taught to him the first time. I can’t really blame him for just wanting to have the answers to things when the explanations either aren’t there or don’t make any sense (especially if they’re wrong). Sometimes I feel bad that I can’t spend more time with him working on his homework, but I know I don’t have enough time for both of our work! It does really get me worried about the Nigerian educational system though...

Another problem here, for which there are several Ifa verses, usually comes with painted eyebrows and fake nails. Since we’ve been spending a bit more time outside the past few weeks, the Araba and I have been running into more and more ladies who are in or around their houses. The Araba has told me several times that nobody will ever see him with a lady-friend because there’s too much trouble there, and also because his Odu Ifa says he cannot have any more than 3 wives. That confused me at first because my wife-count for him was up to 5, but I must have made a mistake somewhere because he assured me it is only 3. At any rate, we run into a lot of these ladies, and like most other people, they all beg me to take them to the US, but some of them get really angry when I tell them that it’s simply not possible for me to do that. Most of them also either ask the Araba if they can marry me (to which I always say no), or sometimes they ask me. I usually try to laugh it off, but they are really persistent so I have to be frank sometimes and say I’m not interested. They also are pretty shameless in asking me to buy things for them, and often because it’s the only way I can get away from them, sometimes I give in and just give them some money to leave me alone.

The Araba usually thinks it’s kind of funny, but recently I think he has even realized that it’s a bit too much. Also, for all his caution with women, there is one who got him into a lot of trouble. One lady who used to be his friend in Ode-Omu, his hometown, needed to have a funeral in November, but didn’t have the money. Because the Araba is a nice guy, he just gave her all the money I paid him one week, and then called one of his friends who is a bank manager to see if he could give her a loan. Since the lady owns a beer parlor, the manager and she agreed that she could take a loan of 40,000 Naira after she made lots of money over Christmas and New Year’s, she would return 50,000 Naira (a little over $300). The Araba signed on as a guarantor for her, and everything seemed to be ok, until January ended and she hadn’t come back with the money. The Araba called her several times, but she refused to come. She didn’t say that she didn’t have the money, she just didn’t want to give it up. So the police came to the Araba’s house and said they would come back and arrest him if he didn’t get the money to the bank somehow. To make a long story short, the Araba paid the 50,000 himself and has been trying to get her to pay him back ever since, but she hasn’t showed up yet... I always knew that people struggled in Nigeria and that some people would always try to cheat others, but this one really surprised me. It has definitely taught me to be very careful with letting my money out to people here. Thank God I am J+