RubyWriting

UNDERSTANDING
       As I bent down to pick up the bamboo flute my little sister, Anaa, carelessly dropped on the ground, I saw a pair of white Reeboks walking towards me. I glanced up and got a better look at what was coming. It was Ms.Brown, the new English teacher from the missionary school.
        "Jawa, where have you been these few days? Why weren't you at school?" Ms>Brown wore a white t-shirt and a pair of blue jeans. Her English was to fast for me to understand.
        "WHY WEREN'T YOU AT SC HOOL?" she repeated her sentence, this time, very slowly.
        "My mama needs my help, it is very important. I need to take care of my sister," I tried to explain to her, using all the Englsih words I knew.
        "But school is also ver important, if you don't come to school, you will never learn anything! What is so important that you must stay home?" Ms. Brown was different from the other American teachers I had before, she was not a missionary, and she was single, although she was about thirty years old. Her blonde hair made her look very pale. She stared at me waiting for me to answer her question.
        "My grandfather's funeral is next week, I have to help." Poor Ms.Brown, she is such a nice lady, but she will never understand. The funerals are very important tous, the Ghanaian, this is the only time the whole family gets together; funerals are not sad events.Ms.Brown told me that funerals in America are usually very sad. Here in Ghana, we sing and dance during funerals, women get to wear their red dresses, children get to play with their cousins, adults can renew their friendships, funerals are actually a reunion of our family. Why was Ms.Brown making this thing such a big deal? I was only going to stay homw for a few weeks. Plus, there was so much that had to be done before our relatives came, I had to prepare the food, clean the house, set up the and take care of my sister.
        "But you also need to learn how to read and write," Ms.Brown's large blue eyes stared at me. "You need to know what the outside world is like, you can't just drop school like this."
        When Ms.Brown first came here, she told us that she was a volunteer, which meant that she didn't get paid, she wanted to come here to teach us. I wondered why anyone would want to leave America, the paradise, to come here. She would never understand. Ghanaian fathers send their daughters to school because they want a higher dowry for us. They don't care if we can read or write, all they want is for us to graduate and marry someone rich. All we have to know is how to have a lot of children and how to take care of them, how to cook, how to make clothes, and how to survive draughts. The missionary schools never teach us what we really need to know.
          I stood there silent, unable to express myself.
          " I don't really understand," Ms.Brown looked depressed. My sister was running back and forth from our house to the street. Anaa likes to run, she is only five years old. I didn't know what to say, I guess neither did Ms.Brown.
          I started playing my sister's bamboo flute, it was a song about a happy woman who had married a rich husband and had many children. The woman was thankful that God gave her such a wonderful life, so she sang the song to thank God. Ms.Brown looked into my eyes while I played the flute, I thought she was sad (thought I had no idea why), then I saw something in her eyes that told me she finally realized, after all, she was a foreigner, an American. She would never understand, there was more than just a difference of language between us.

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