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+

7.12 Obara-Oturupon

This past week the whole issue with the lie someone told about the Araba finally got settled. The King called everyone back to the palace to finish it, but the guy who accused the Araba of making charms against the person who owned the property never showed up because I think he realized that everyone already knew the truth. So we waited around for about an hour at the palace, but when he never showed up, we just left. It was incredibly anti-climactic...

I learned about one Odu Ifa that made me laugh a little bit on Monday because I think the Araba has assumed that it is mine. This one is Obara Oturupon, and if it is cast for someone, it means that (s)he should keep to certain very strict taboos, two of which are abstaining from eating dog meat, and the other is from drinking palm wine. I think the Araba associates it with me because I never drink alcohol and I don’t eat meat. Apparently, if this were my figure, and I broke one of these taboos my body would turn against me and possibly swell up. The funniest part about that was that I think I may have accidentally eaten some meat in something the day before I learned that figure and my body definitely turned against me...

We also went back to see the lady who has some kind of mental illness. The medicine seems to have been working well because every time she has taken it, she has passed out, and now she looks a lot better. Before she looked pretty scary, I can’t lie, but now she looks almost normal. Something in her face has definitely changed since she started taking the medicine. She also has become more together, as she realized that we were probably sneaking the medicine into her food, a fact that had completely gone over her head before. I’m not sure how we’ll convince her to take the medicine now that she’s more lucid, but hopefully she’ll be lucid enough to know that it’s good for her!

There is also this lady who lives right across from the Araba who is deathly thin and never has any food. I usually give her money every week or so just to make sure she can eat something healthy, but the terrible part is that she lives in a house with relatives who are fairly well-to-do. I never understood why they would let this woman starve while they were all fine, but the Araba finally explained it to me. Apparently this woman’s father owned a large plot of land, and since she his closest living relative she is the legal owner. Her relatives are letting her starve because they want to inherit the land once she dies! I didn’t want to believe it when he told me, but it’s the only thing that makes any sense, and the Araba has dealt with them before and says they are bad news (even though he’s always really polite to them).

On a much happier note, I got to see my Dad this week. He finished his course in Abuja last week and came back to Lagos to see a few people before leaving for the US. On Thursday, he and my uncles Segun and Seun came to Ibadan to see my grandparents’ graves and I came from Ife to see them at my grandparents house. I didn’t get to see them for too long, but it is really nice to see all of them together again. It doesn’t happen too often anymore.

Finally, there is this Al-Haja who has a store on one of the roads I take to get to the Araba’s house who is one of his good friends. Sometimes I stop by there to buy Akara (I guess the best way to describe it is beans that have been smashed and then deep fried in oil). I don’t always like Akara because it can taste very different depending on who it is that fries it, but I think I am hooked on hers. I think it also helps that she always gives me the biggest ones and slips a few extra in when I buy them. I am going to have to learn how she makes hers so I can copy it after I have left because it’s really just that good. If I perfect it, feel free to ask me to make some for you when I go back to the US because I’d love to have an excuse to eat it again (provided it tastes like hers...)

3.8 Owonrin-Okanran

3.8 Iwori-Okanran

So I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I got to meet the Ogunsua (King) of Modakeke, but the bad news was the way that I met him. I sent the Araba some money for a new year’s Ifa festival that he had to put on as the highest ranking Babalawo in the town and he told me he used it to buy several crates of drinks for all of the other Babalawo. The problem was that another person in the neighborhood who also sells drinks got angry that he didn’t spend all the money at his shop. As a result he told this one guy is the landlord of some property where the Araba and his friend had a shop that he had made some magic charms to stop the landlord from building anything there. So after a whole lot of trouble, it became clear that the Araba had done no such thing, so we all had to go to the palace of the Ogunsua and tell him what had happened. The whole thing got resolved pretty easily, but the Araba’s friend, a tailor and a really nice guy, had to find a new place to set up shop.

When I heard all about the trouble I told the Araba that Iwori-Okanran was the most appropriate Odu for the situation, and he laughed pretty hard and said, “Very good!” Iwori Okanran warns that the person will be involved in some kind of trial and should beware of people (especially people (s)he thinks are friends) because they will come into some sort of conflict. The Araba handled it pretty well though, he said it made no sense to have done something like that, and insisted that his good name could get him through the lie, and he was right! At any rate, we’ll probably go back so I can introduce myself to the king under better circumstances.

In other news, I’m about halfway through all of the 256 Odu Ifa. I think I’m somewhere around 125, but I forget the exact number. It’s gone by really quickly, and I think I’ve really started to get the hang of what a Babalawo does. I always know exactly when to get the Araba’s divining chain before he asks me, I’ve gotten used to all the different tools he uses in making medicines, where to get them in town, and I even recognize the Odu when he cast his chain about as fast as he does. A few days ago was the first time I think I completely understood everything that happened when a client came and it was pretty cool.

This guy came from another town, and was talking about how his sister was having trouble having children. Apparently she had tried making some sacrifices to her ori (best translated as destiny or personal god), but she still had not had any success. The Araba cast Ifa for him, and I recognized the Odu that came up. It was Idin-Osa which I like to call the Odu for the conundrum of the modern woman. It says that there is a woman who cannot have children and is doing very well in business. It also says that God will not give her children until she takes it easy with her workload. She works too late, and is possibly a bit too concerned with business, all of which will have to change for her to have a successful family. To make a long story short, the guy started telling us all about how his sister was pretty rich, but was stingy, I think because she wanted to use every last cent to make more money. We’ll have to see if she comes to make a sacrifice or not.

Another interesting thing that happened was that last Sunday I think, the Araba cast the figure Owonrin-Iwori also called Owonrin-Were (were means crazy person). This was really cool because I got to learn all about it this past week, or the week before, I forget. At any rate, I helped the Araba make the medicine for the person who indeed had a mental illness of some kind, and we took it over to her. I have to admit that she was a bit scary looking, and she wouldn’t take the medicine the first day, so we came back on another day and snuck it into some food that we had bought for her. The Araba told me that the way it worked was that the medicine would make her fall into a deep sleep, and while she was sleeping it would clear the illness out of her head. She didn’t want us to stick around long enough to see her pass out, but after she had taken a bit of the food, she started nodding her head. I’m going to ask if we can go back on Monday and see how she’s doing.

I’ve been trying pretty hard to catch up in memorizing the meanings of all of the different Odu, and I’m almost a quarter of the way there now, and whenever I get bored here (especially when the power goes out) it’s kind of fun to cast my Opele and think about the different stories associated with each Odu. I hope I’ll be able to fit all of them in my head, because sometimes after I finish studying them, it literally does feel like it’s full and nothing else will go in. One last interesting thing that has happened to me is that the second person in a few months has literally chased me down assuming that I am a pastor and harassed me about doing something for him. The most recent guy said he didn’t know what he wanted me to do for him, but there was something that I had to do. I think I’ll pray for him, but maybe next time that happens I’ll just tell the guy I’m a Babalawo and see if that solves the problem!

Who's Your Daddy?

Happy New Year everyone! For starters, let me say that yes, I know who my father is, and this time around he came with me to Nigeria. We only spent a few days together because he had to head off to Abuja to teach for three weeks, so after he left I came back to Ife. Once I got here, I put all of my things away, and went back to the Araba the very next day. He was really happy to see me, especially since I brought a brand new blackberry for him (Nigerians all seem to have an obsession with hi-tech phones). We’ve been making a lot of medicines for people recently and it’s really funny to me to watch him grinding up leaf ashes and bird feathers with two rocks right after playing around with the features on his blackberry. I guess it’s a good example of leapfrogging (thanks Ellie!).

The day before I came, some people came to see the Araba and he cast the figure Owonrin-Were (Were means crazy person in Yoruba) for them, which in this case meant that they had someone who had some kind of mental illness in the family, and not only did I get to learn about that figure this week, but I got to help him make the medicine. It was pretty wild to be honest, and very tiring. I get why the medicines are usually so expensive. I mostly just pounded the ingredients together, which was a bit awkward for me at first since the two most important ingredients were chicken and rooster heads! At any rate, I got a good workout in, and Baba Araba said that I could go with him to give it to the person. This should be really fascinating because the medicine is supposed to knock the person out within 10 minutes and then when the patient comes to, whatever the illness is should start to leave the brain. We should do it this coming week.

I don’t think I mentioned it before, but the Araba has one son who is a lot of trouble. The Araba tells me about how despite his best efforts the kid just seems to be no good. Well sometime in November or early December, we found out that he got a girl pregnant, and since he is still (supposed to be) in high school he doesn’t have a job or any way to earn money, so the Araba reluctantly gave him his Okada to try to earn some kind of a living. That means that whenever we need to collect leaves, roots, or anything else for medicine, we almost always have to walk everywhere, which gets really tiring now that the sun is so intense.

I have also been playing a lot of Ayo (A Yoruba board game like Mancala) recently. When I came back to Ife, Dr. Ajibade’s son Samuel was getting pretty restless because there aren’t a lot of people his age around, he’s the only boy, and when there’s no electricity there isn’t a whole lot to do in the house. So I taught him to play Ayo, and ever since he wants to play Ayo 24/7 (except when he’s watching some DVDs I bought for him since he did well on his end of term exams). I’ve really enjoyed teaching him to play, the only problem is he wants to play literally all the time, including when I’m sleeping or working! We’ll find some kind of balance though I’m sure. Interestingly enough I learned a story

So something very funny happened this week. I had noticed a long time ago that when casting Ifa or making medicine or prayers for a person, the Araba always calls the person by his or her first name and then the son or daughter of his/her mother. So I would be Ayodeji omo (child of) Anna. I had meant to ask him why it was always the mother’s name and not the father’s name but had just forgotten. In my mind I was trying to come up with some deep theological or cosmological reason for this, and I had some far-fetched theories, but the Araba’s answer was much simpler, logical, and hilarious in my opinion. He said that in theory you could use either name, but quite often if you use the name of the father, the prayers or power of the medicine doesn’t reach the intended person. Not picking up on what he meant, I asked him why, and he spelled it out very plainly for me. He said, because there’s never any doubt who is the mother of the child she carried it, but far too often the person you think is the father actually isn’t! After he said that, all of us started laughing, both at the idea and the fact that I didn’t get it right away!

Ifa Says Respect Women!

This past week was my last working with the Araba in 2010, and it was honestly one of the most interesting. It started out on a sad note as the Akoda of Ode-Omu (a good friend of the Araba, and a very knowledgeable Babalawo) lost his younger brother. So on Monday we went to visit him and give him some money to help with the funeral preparations, and didn’t really do much else. I felt pretty bad for him, not just because he lost his brother, but also because he had told the Araba the week before that he didn’t have any money and I think he is expected to finance most of the funeral. He’s a really nice guy, and he kind of reminds me of what a Yoruba Santa Claus might look like because all his hair is white, he’s a little portly, and he likes to laugh a lot.

Whenever I hear about problems that people are having or have had here, I like to try to think of an Ese Ifa that would address that problem to imagine which sign would have come up for him/her if (s)he were to have come to a Babalawo, like the previous governor of Osun State and Irosun-Agbe. The next day the Araba taught me another Ese Ifa, Idin Yeku, that foretells immanent sudden death, which I thought might have been a possibility since the disease that killed the Akoda’s brother was very sudden.

Sometimes for some of the more incredible Ifa messages, I ask the Araba if he has even cast them for someone and what happened, and I did that for this one. He told me that about a year or two ago, he cast it for two brothers in the neighborhood, who didn’t believe him and said that he just wanted to eat the goat that was prescribed in the sacrifice (along with white clothing that is currently in the person’s house and two wooden statues, and some money). To make a long story short, both of the brothers died a few days later in an accident with some kind of machine on the street and the Araba showed me the spot where it happened. It was pretty scary stuff!

I learned about a few other interesting ones that the Araba cast as well. I think the most interesting one was Irosun-Opinmi which contains a story about a man named Sasore who’s destiny it was to become king even though he had to struggle to realize it (the story is pretty fascinating and reveals a lot about the Yoruba concept of Ori [destiy] and how it can and cannot be changed). Anyway, the Araba said he had cast it twice, once for his friend who is a cripple, but was able to become the king of Ode-Omu even though many people protested because of his disability, and the current Ogunsua, or King, of Modakeke who also had to fight a lot of rivals before taking the throne. There is another one about infidelity that warns the person to stop cheating with someone else’s wife (or husband/significant other) because he will soon die as a result of it most likely because of Magun, a medicine you can make if you think your spouse is cheating on you. The Araba told me he cast this one for a guy who enjoyed “pleasurable company” too much, and when he warned him, the guy got mad and stormed off, and a few weeks later he died while in the process of doing what Ifa warned him not to do...

We didn’t get to finish all of the Ese in this Odu (Irosun) but in all of them, except for the last two that I haven’t learned yet, Ifa has something to say about women’s issues. I think about 10 or so have to do with having babies, others are about taking care of children, most of the stories contain female characters and/or are about the issues listed above. One of my favorites is Irosun Okanran, which explicitly prohibits the client from touching women inappropriately or forcing them to do anything against their will. The explanation the Araba gave for it’s meaning was incredibly unforgiving and contained serious worldly and supernatural repercussions if the person does not heed Ifa’s warning. Another one that I found really interesting prescribed monogamy even though traditional Yoruba society is very much polygamous (The Araba himself has 5 wives, I think...). The way Ifa described it was fascinating; it says that this person will only be able to have one wife, but he can chose the way that happens. He can either marry one woman and treat her well, or he can try to find a second, and one of them will leave. It used the analogy of light and darkness and says, “When light enters the house, darkness must flee.” I think if I keep doing work on Ifa in grad school I might have to write a paper or something on this section of Ifa because it is very clearly focused on women, while it’s hard to identify a specific focus of any of the others.

So far I have studied exactly 100 chapters of the 256, sometimes when I try to think about all of them it makes my head spin a little bit. About a month ago, the Araba told me that it would take about a year for a Babalawo in training to reach the place that I had then. Since I'm not memorizing all of the verses word for word, I get to move much more quickly, but it has made trying to memorize the meaning of the messages very difficult since on some days like Thursday and Friday the Araba and I went through about 8 chapters or more per day with at least 2 verses per chapter. I have typed them all up on a Word document to help me study, but it is now about 20 pages long single spaced, and is only the shorthand notes that don't contain the full sacrifices, stories, songs, etc. I'm going to try to use this next week to catch up on all of the verses I haven't completely memorized yet, but we'll see how far I can get.

In other news, I’m in Ibadan right now, and I’ll be going to Lagos early tomorrow morning. Aunty Bimbo came to pick me up from Ife yesterday, and we’re just hanging around my grandparent’s old house on Agbeka street for the day because the Lagos-Ibadan expressway is really terrible on the weekends and Sunday in particular. When I get to Lagos I’m going to buy a whole bunch of fabric to start making clothes because there’s only about a week left until I come home briefly for Christmas! I think it’s going to be pretty weird when I come off the plane because it’s bee over 80 degrees every day here and the sun is really intense, so it’s tough for me to imagine something like snow...

I(fa) Told You So

The biggest news around Osun State right now is how the current governor, a member of PDP of course, has just been found guilty of voter fraud and stripped of office! PDP is by far the most powerful party here and everyone has always kind of known that they weren’t quite playing by the rules, but for whatever reason just recently people have been calling them out. Osun State is just the latest in a group of 5 states (Edo, Ekiti, Anambra, and one other I just forgot) that have ousted their PDP governors. When the ruling came out over the radio, people were running out on the streets and honking horns, it was great. The funniest part about the whole thing, is that there were tons of PDP candidates who had spent lots of money on the coming election in 2011, but since the ACN Candidate won this court case, he is going to serve his term of 4 years, which means no election and a lot of money wasted by those guys. Every time I see their billboards I chuckle a little bit...

I also think about a few Ifa verses like one in Iwori-Aate/Wole that warns the person not to abuse the great power (s)he holds even if it will provide a short-term benefit. In the long run it will come back to hurt you more than you were able to gain from it. Mostly I think of a story from Irosun Agbe about the bird who got too cocky and greedy and started to do things he wasn’t supposed to and ultimately lost his power (I think I wrote something about it a few weeks ago...). Anyway that got me thinking about how people like to look down on politicians who patronize Babalawo, and to be honest a lot of it is making charms to hurt rivals or enemies, and of course I don’t support that, but I can’t help but wish that some of these guys would let Baba Araba cast one of those figures for them and see what happens. It might not be such a bad thing. On the radio today, I heard something about a man who was running for a position in the local government, and the Araba stopped what he was doing and told me that he had come to him not too long ago. He pulled out his record book and showed me his name and the figure he cast for him. I forgot to ask him if Ifa said he would win or not, but I will do that tomorrow.

A few days ago a guy I had never seen before came by the Araba’s house for divination and Baba did his usual thing while I was putting something away, and when I came out he asked me what the figure he had cast was. I recognized it as Oyeku-Ogunda, but then he asked me for the meaning because it is one of the about 80 we have studied, and to be honest I was a bit lost, but after a little while I remembered its alternate name, Oyeku-Ojo (k)o da, and that triggered everything. I told the Araba that in that Odu Ifa tells the story of Orunmila and Ikun or Vulture and how someone or some people have abused this person but (s)he needs to be patient and not retaliate. The person in question needs to take the matter to Olodumare (or God in Yoruba) in prayer because vengeance belongs to Him alone. If this is done, justice will be served, even if it takes up to 16 years (which figuratively means a long time in Yoruba). After I finished the guy was a bit surprised because apparently it was spot on and the Araba started to laugh and recited everything for him. I’m still not sure exactly what had happened to the guy, but I think some people had cheated him and were treating him really poorly and he wanted to find a way to get back at them, but I think he’s doing as Ifa said now.

I have a friend here, a Muslim guy, who sells DVDs and CDs who has been telling me all about how he wants to hopefully get married next year and maybe move into a bigger apartment and/or expand his business, but money is pretty tight. Just this week he asked if we could go see the Araba and see if there was anything he could do for him. So the Araba cast Ifa for him and said that he’s having trouble advancing in his business, and that for the amount of time and effort he has put into it, he should be further along than he is now. He said part of the problem comes from people in his family, perhaps because they ask too much of him. That all sounded about right to me because he’s not old, but he’s been working for a while and doesn’t have too much more to show for it than when he started and since he is the oldest child in his family, he carries the most responsibility even though he isn’t the most financially secure. So the Araba made a sacrifice for him today and we’ll see if business begins to pick up for him.

This past weekend I went to visit Kyle in Ibadan and we had a good time watching Arsenal put on a show at Villa Park, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching my favorite player Robert Pires come out of retirement, even if he was a bit rusty. The coolest thing that happened in Ibadan was that I was able to find a really nice Ayo board! Ayo is a Yoruba board game that uses the same board as Mancala but has some different rules. I had been looking for one for several years now, and I found a great one carved in the shape of hands praying, and the best part was I used the J+ genes from my father (Ogunnaike joke courtesy of Uncle John Orife) to pry it away from the seller for about $10! I have been trying to resurrect my Ayo skills, but it has been a while since I played and I’m not quite where I would like to be, but it’s been a great way for me to take a break from staring my computer screen when I’m trying to type up notes, stories, edit videos and all that good stuff.

One last funny anecdote from here is a story the Araba told me about some medicine he made for someone once in his hometown. We went to his village of Ode-Omu on Monday and as we were coming back he pointed to a little grove by the side of the road and started to tell me about how he had made medicine there, and then he started to laugh and turned around to take me back there. When he pulled over he showed me two charms that were stuck on sticks and covered to keep the rain off of them and he told me they were for protection and told me the story about them. He had a friend who wanted to plant some plantain trees but didn’t have land to do it, so the Araba made these charms for him and they planted them by the road in the bush. The charms apparently prevent people from stealing and keeping anything near them, and so when somebody from the town took some of the plantain when they became ripe, the Araba said within two days he went to the house of his friend and just handed him the plantain and said, “I stole these.” I thought that was pretty hilarious and I wish I could have been there. The Araba told me about some other ones he knows how to make that make thieves go blind or not be able to walk until the owner of the thing they stole gets it back. I would really like to see it in action some time, but we’ll see if that happens...