ALL GROWN UP (‘SIESTA’ & ‘CO.’)

I was 9yrs old, in 5^th grade (class 5) and enrolled in one of the best schools of the time. Swedru International School (SWIS) was a lonely place to be for a shy kid like me. My temperament and ability to fit in are not the focus of this piece, however. This piece is to celebrate the words above and recount to whoever cares to read the reason I so love them…….. (Ok, not love them exactly but I doubt I will ever forget them either). Simply put,

‘SIESTA’……….. is a short afternoon nap.

‘CO’………… is short for ‘company’ meaning a group.

By the end of my second day of getting into the school, I had figured out what siesta meant all by myself. The spelling of the word proved difficult for me for a while (the whole of that term actually). Sister Leticia’s own private joke about the exercise didn’t help me much in figuring out its spelling. Sister Leticia was our dormitory prefect and she used to go from room to room saying for anyone awake enough to hear; ‘oooh, see Esther. See how Esther is crying’ referring to siesta. Now who wouldn’t think siesta was spelt ‘seesther’ with a statement like that. At the end of the term when I went back home, I asked my mum and was so relieved when my mum finally gave me the spelling of the word.

‘Co.’ gave me an experience worth mentioning now, even though it’s a slightly embarrassing tale.

The first time I heard ‘co.’ being used, it was used in a sentence similar to this: ‘Anita and co., speak English’. I had been there for about a week and I had never heard anyone with the name ‘co.’

Consecutive times I heard the expression ‘so and so and co.’ all the while wondering who co. was. On two very distinct occasions I ran to the location where some girls and ‘co.’ were supposed to be breaking some other kind of rule. When I got there, the group had already started dispersing so I took quick notes of the members and disappointingly noticed I knew all of them by name and none of them had the name ‘co.’

When I got home for vacation I had a lot to tell my mum about and she had a lot to hysterically laugh about.

In retrospect, I don’t know, for the life of me, why I had to wait for a whole term to end before I answered these burning questions in my mind but I guess that is what growing up is about.