Foghorn Legon

This was supposed to be published yesterday, but Blogspot was being a bit uncooperative.

This is my last post from Takoradi, and I can honestly say I'm going to miss this city a lot. Compared with Accra, it's much more compact, the people are friendlier (i.e. I could walk around in the evenings and not get stabbed) and the overall environment is just more welcoming to foreigners. This morning, as I was leaving church, I heard someone call out "obruni"; after several weeks of this, I've gotten accustomed to just walking on if I don't feel like making conversation (yeah, sometimes I'm just tired...), but this guy actually called tugged my sleeve, so I was like "yo ... dude..." But it turns out that his absolutely adorable baby daughter, who was maybe 14-16 months and just toddling about, was really fascinated by me, this light-skinned guy, and wanted to shake my hand. I think she was about as tall as my knee. I crouched down and gave her a little high five--she gave a little squeal and then ran behind her father. Definitely the highlight of my morning.

The past couple of days have been low-key for me. Just doing battle with R code (picture me ardently pleading with my laptop, lights flickering, shoo-ing away mosquitoes), but it seems like victory is close at hand. I successfully imputed 10 data sets in a row, so now I have just have to build constraining priors matrices to make sure my imputed salary responses don't appear to be denominated in Zimbabwean dollars. In other words, I successfully made up data for non-responses that appears like it could have been a logical response. Speaking of victory, The Patriot was on last night on the South African movie channel. Such an excellent movie. Best quote comes from the Reverend-turned-colonial-militia: "A shepherd has to tend to his flock. And at times defend it from wolves."

Anyways, I should be back in Legon (that's the University of Ghana campus) on Monday afternoon. I'll also be picking up a few more kente shirts that morning! Will try and post some pictures when I get back to the University; allegedly I can connect my laptop to the wireless network that sometimes exists...