ngung tie

news in brief:

i found myself wandering around the carpentry district in dschang, tasting ginger juice and looking at some porcupine quills. i ended up with one in my hand. one of the chiefs asked me what it was and why i was holding it. i put it away and investigated the matter discreetly and found out that they were used to summon thunder bolts by wizards. note to self: avoid handling chickens in light of the bird flu

i bought a handsome ledger to lend a more prestigious air to my ngwe investigations. i made a small dictionary of about 400 words and made a resume of noun cases and conjugations. the next logical step was to work with my teacher to translate cortazar's short story casa tomada. one stumbling block was the phrase that is approximately "we entered our forties with the unexpressed idea that ours, that simple, silent marriage of brother and sister, was a necessary closure of the genealogy assented by the great grandparents of the house." discussing ancestors brings about some idioms that i cannot comprehend when they are translated literally. we decided on something like "both of us reached 40 years. i see that for us to live together in that particular house, our parents and great fathers did not know that they should never again stay in the house."

i announced a story-writing contest for my younger students and the winner i selected made a story, which i can reprint or paraphrase without permission since the author is unaware of her rights, that is approximately as follows:

"i want to write a story of my future. in my future i want to be a journalist. a journalist is the greatest person in the world. a journalist has much money. of course, my sister-in-law is a journalist. when i am a journalist i will tranlate news stories very fast. the job of a journalist is to translate stories. when i am a journalist i will speak in french always and i will speak in english only a little bit. a journalist is a very beautiful. a journalist should be able to read news on the television. a woman journalist wears a white shirt, a black skirt, and a black coat. a man journalist wears a white shirt, black trousers, and a black coat. one quarter of the world is a journalist. the journalist is the best person in the world. this is the end of my story."

i chose this one narrowly over a story about a girl that was too lazy to do farm work to pay for her school fees, and decided to become a prostitute. the story was about the girl's laziness, having little to do with school or prostitution, which seem to be the two possible destinies of a teenage girl in the village. another was about a girl named atacoco. her sisters were killed by a lion because the lion imitated their mother's voice. because atacoco never listened to her mother, she never listened to the lion either. atacoco's father kills the lion and they have a nice meal of lion meat. happily ever after.