Obruni
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010Sunday, June 6
This is Daniella, the first person to call me “Obruni,” with me and her brother, Jofta.
Obruni means white person, and I was told I’d be called it all the time – just walking down the street, people would call out, “Hey, Obruni!” It’s a friendly form of greeting, not threatening or derogatory, and people shouldn’t take offense.
Yet my whole time in Ghana so far, I hadn’t gotten a single “obruni,” until today at lunch.
We were sitting down for rice balls in the outdoor streetfront section of Jalynda’s, a local restaurant, when a little girl came up to me. She tapped my elbow and said, “Are you obruni?”
“Yes,” I laughed, excited to finally be called it.
The girl paused, looked at me, and took my sunglasses off my head. She tried them on, then slid them back over my ears and said, “I want you to do something.”
“Okay, what?”
“Just do something.”
She told me her name was Daniella, and she brought over her brother Jofta. “Look, Dad, it’s obruni!” she called out to the next table.
Jofta proceeded to try on Kelvin’s sunglasses, and Daniella had mine back at that point, so the two ran around the tables in our sunglasses. They had a field day with my camera too (don’t worry, Mom, I didn’t let her hold it by herself), but then they had to go.
As they drove away, they waved from the backseat of their dad’s van. I waved back.