OK, so this is a Typhoid Tuesday, rather than Malaria Monday, update, but so it goes sometimes. To briefly address THE question that has, no doubt, been spinning endlessly through everyone's mind....I will make a massive picture update either today or tomorrow, and by today or tomorrow, I really actually mean today or tomorrow. I just need to borrow a friend's laptop long enough to throw the pictures over onto my flash drive, and I'll be set to update. Really.

So, since I have no exciting travel stories or grand adventures to relate, this week's entry will be another "what Kevin does on his days off from being a fearless explorer" entry. Last time, I talked about afternoons spent on the balcony of room 82, hanging out with friends and making music. This week, my classes. I sometimes forget that I am, in fact, here under the guise of taking classes. To say that the course expectations at the University of Ghana are perhaps a bit lower than back at TLU would be to make a massive understatement. To be completely, totally honest, of my 4 classes this semester, a whopping ONE of them feels remotely demanding in terms of academics, and even that one is not particularly strenuous. This class would be Religion in the African Diaspora, which is by far my favorite course this term...which is saying a lot when you factor in that the class begins at 7:30. I do NOT like morning classes at all, but I can make myself get up and go to this one. It's incredibly fascinating, and the professor does a great job of presenting the lecture material. I genuinely feel like I learn in this class, and for a hopeless nerd like me, that makes me happy. We just finished covering African traditional religion in the Diaspora (i.e. Voodoo, Shango, Macumba, Santeria, etc.), and it was a fantastically enlightening lecture.

Now, my other classes are...not so wonderful. My Twi class is the least offender out of the remaining three; it's informative, useful, and fun. However, any 100-level language class is going to be pretty easy, and our professor has effectively made it a sluff-off course...my feelings aren't exactly hurt by this (gives me more time to travel), but still...a sluff-off course is still a sluff-off course, and it's hard to really motivate myself to care about it. Drumming, too, is fun, but eesh...if you ever want to feel better about your rhythm skills, take a "Drumming for white people" class in Ghana. I've done enough drumming/hand percussion back home to where I'm probably a smidge above the level expected of us by the instructor, and ALL of us are bored with the class right now. We've been working on the same basic rhythm for the entire course now; it's gotten a wee bit old.

And then there's The End of the Roman Republic. I had more demanding courses in junior high, but the professor is (despite himself) highly amusing. For starters, his name is (I am not making this up) Dr. Shadow. Perhaps I merely have an overactive imagination, but Dr. Shadow sounds more like it should be the name of a video game hero's archnemesis than of the head of the University of Ghana Classics department to me. Adding to the comic factor is that he looks much like Bill Cosby from a certain angle; this was an unfortunate discovery for me, since I now have to fight laughter during lecture. The kicker, however, is his manner of speaking - he interrupts many of his sentences with a "what?," and then finishes his sentence. Example: "This course will be dealing with the Roman - what? - Republic." Typically, he sticks the "what?" before an exceptionally obvious word, such as "Senate" or "Gracchan Brothers," but occasionally he'll whip out a nice, surprisingly random one, such as: "The Roman provincial governors had a reputation for being very - what? - rapacious." However, his lecture mostly consists of the same 3 or 4 basic ideas being repeated over and over again in various permutations - I could get more information on any given topic from 10 minutes of Googling the relevant terms than from 2 hours of lecture.

After a few weeks of this, I became understandably frustrated, as did we all - EVERYONE is having the same, or worse, experiences with their classes here. And then...it hit me WHY the lectures here are typically so dreadfully dull to the American, Canadian, and British students. I think the realization came when I was actually talking to myself in Spanish (no, I am not insane; this is merely the only way I can get in Spanish practice in Africa) - English is NOT the first, or in most cases second or third, language of ANY of the students or faculty here. They don't go home and speak English to their families; they speak Twi, Ga, Fante, Ewe, Hausa, etc. English is as hard for them as Spanish is for me; I would be well over my head in an upper-division Theology lecture at Salamanca, so why is it that I expect them to be as conversant in academic English as a native speaker? The lectures are basic because they have to be just so that the students will be able to understand and absorb them; just as I couldn't handle a full-bore lecture in Spanish, Ghanaians (through no fault of their own) generally speaking aren't prepared for a full-bore lecture in English.

English is the language of instruction here for three reasons - the first is colonialism. Ghana was, up until 49 years ago as of yesterday, a British colony which frankly had English shoved down its throat. The University here was founded by the British and originally taught in English, and all of the books they furnished for the university were in English, so the university taught, and still teaches, in English. Secondly, I am not aware of any academic works (apart from linguistic studies, perhaps) which have been written and published in any of the major indigenous languages; suffice it to say this would make teaching courses in Twi or Ga an even greater challenge since the lecturer would be teaching in Twi, but still having to assign readings in English! Thirdly, and this strongly connects to the first point, English really is the closest thing to a universal language in Ghana. Ghana is a colonial construction, a mashing together of several historically separate tribes and people groups, each with their own languages and cultures. To select one of those languages as a national language would practically be inviting ethnic strife - the Hausa-speakers of the North and the Ewe of the Volta region would NOT take kindly to Ashanti Twi being established as a national language which everyone must learn. As sad as it is, English is just...safer as a language of government and education in Ghana; it's foreign to everyone, so at least no one Ghanaian people group is being elevated over another.

So, that's academic life here. Obviously, I've been...languishing a bit, but I've found means to keep my mind from going into atrophy. I've been reading a great deal, and am now resolved to work my way through several literary classics which I've not been able to motivate myself to read up until now - I'm currently working on Tom Jones by Henry Fielding right now, and I am mortified that I never made the time for this one before; it's superbly funny.

Well, I've prattled on and on enough for one entry; Timbuktu is now just a few days away!