In our compound there is the chief’s family with all his wives and their children/grandchildren and almost in our same compound is his brother and all of his family. One of the nephews is a little man about four years old who has more character and expression than anyone else I’ve met out here. He’s hilarious and its obvious that his charm works even on his own family, when normally the parents and siblings can be pretty harsh with their own… Still, our new little friend is a ball of energy and hardly stops talking. He reminds me of Arnold from different strokes (of course that may have something to do with the fact that the actor playing Arnold actually WAS much older than the character he played). You can almost see him saying “whacha talkin’ bout Willis?” and I’m sure it wouldn’t take much coercion to get him to say it… In our first day our brother told us that the boy talks like he’s an old man, and so that has become his nickname. While our older brother, it seems, has assigned himself as our primary language tutor (or maybe the chief assigned him, I’m not sure) and spends a good part of the day teaching us words and helping us understand what he’s talking about or learning to say things for ourselves, so far my favorite times have been when he’s called “little old man” over and instructed him to do various things. When he wanted us to understand “pick this up” or “put this over there” our object lesson was him telling old man “hey, go pick up that thing and bring it here” and when he got there, “take this and put it back over there”… back and forth, back and forth. Or older brother would throw it on the ground “pick that up and give it here” only to throw it on the ground again and have little man fetch again… It was hysterical for us, and even little man didn’t seem to mind doing as he was told over and over again.