All About Niya (pictures to come)

So, I know it would make more sense to start by setting the scene by telling y'all all about the scenery and the town, but I really love this little girl. I wanted to write about her as soon as I could because 1) I knew it would be fun and 2) because I didn't want to forget anything about her. This is all about the smallest child who lived in our (mine and Serena's) family home.

Niya is two and a bit years old. She's turning three in July. She has no sense of privacy and loves getting into everything. The first time we met her, on Thursday, may 22^nd, we didn't think anything remarkable of her. She was just like every other toddler – absolutely adorable, loud, and playful. She was also introduced to us with her Christian name, Ruth, but we soon learned that everyone calls her by her Chrambo name. That was very confusing at first and I thought maybe there were two little girls in our house, but we cleared it up pretty quickly.

After a few days spent with her and playing with her we learned how very... loving she really is. She loves everything everyone else has. We learned the value of knowing “nga!” as compared to “no”. Because she is only three, she doesn't know any English, so even just saying “no” in Chrambo helped us with her. One day we came home and we realized we had forgotten to lock the door. Niya had come in and played with my toothpaste (luckily there was still some left) and lost the cap to my After Bite.

But I don't want to just tell the negatives. When we left she was the hardest one to leave and she started to follow us to the truck, but unfortunately we couldn't take her with us.

Niya is adorable. The first time we did laundry, we asked the “babysitter”, Adela, to help us. She taught us how to scrub clothes by hand and how to rinse them. And then Niya came up. Naturally, she already knew how to wash clothes, so she just reached into the bucket, grabbed a sock and went to work. And so it went, every time we did laundry she would end up washing socks. It was probably the cutest thing in the world. Until she put clean clothes back in the dirty clothes bucket. Then we had to pull out our “nga”, again.

In our last week there Niya greeted us at our door every morning, often with loud bangs and cries to be let in. Who needs an alarm clock when you have a toddler? She followed us around everywhere, including to the bathroom. There were some holes in the tin door, and I saw little eyes peeking in once or twice. One time she wanted to open the door on Serena, but I helped her out by picking up Niya and carrying her to the front of the house.

She knew our names pretty well, but she didn't know us separately. All she knew was that the two white girls in her home were named Karima and Serena and she that's what she said anytime she wanted us. “Karima and Serena. Karima and Serena. Karima and Serena.” It was fun to quiz her and see if she could get our names right, but she usually didn't.

Apparently by the end of our time she didn't want us to leave. She didn't want to come with us, either, but she wanted us to stay with her. We told her she could come in our suitcase, but she said no. She also said all this in Chrambo, and her mom and brothers translated for us.

What was especially cool for me to see, and this is the Linguist in me really coming out, was how much English she started mimicking while we were there. She doesn't speak English, even though she was going to pre-nursery (I'll talk about the school system in another post), and she never knew what we were saying, but at the beginning she would only say a few phrases in English. Before we left, she was saying so many things in English, and with our accents. Don't get me wrong, I love the Cameroonian accent, but it was so cool that she was copying our accents. I was touched.

That's Niya in a nutshell. I hope you get a good feeling of her and you can understand why I teared up having to leave her behind. When she wasn't getting into our things she was the funniest, most energetic little girl, and she wormed her way very deeply into my heart.