Breaking Stereotypes: Scrabble

Avid readers of this blog (hi mom!) will recall the dentist who accompanied me on my Best Day in Uganda. His name is Willbroad, in case that triggers any memories. I assumed the shortened version was Will, but I am wrong. His friends call him Broad.

After our island adventure, Broad invited me to play Scrabble with him and his friends. He said they meet at a bar. I pictured a lot of drinking with a small dose of wordplay.

I was very wrong. When I arrived at Ebenezer Bar there was a game already in full swing. They sat around a card table on the concrete patio in front of the bar: four skinny Ugandans staring in silence at the board. There were two dictionaries in evidence, the official Scrabble dictionary for standard challenges, and a heftier one for challenges of THAT dictionary. One man sat aside and kept score, so that none of the players were disadvantaged by distracting externalities like adding numbers.

And I was the only one who ordered a beer. Like a rank amateur, they no doubt thought.

When the first game ended, all the standard courtesies resumed. Hands were shaken, introductions performed. Laughing, smiling, slapping arms and backs. The players once again became that most warm and affectionate of all social units --- a circle of African men after a day’s work.

I joined in game two. My guard was up after watching the intensity of the first game, but I figured I would be able to hold my own.

Nope. I was schooled. In my defense, I did try to lay down words that were clever and interesting, which was a big mistake. Broad and his buddies know how to maximize the power of the two-letter word.

“Eh?” I said at one point. “You think ‘Eh’ is a word? I think I might have to challenge that.”

He crossed his arms confidently in front of him. “It is a word.”

He was right. So then I mistakenly deduced that this meant other exclamations were in the dictionary. I tried to play “Oy,” and Broad shook his head disdainfully. “It’s not a word,” he said. “Of course it is,” I shot back. “If ‘Eh’ is a word, then ‘Oy’ is too.”

We looked it up, and again he was right: no Oy in either the little or the big dictionary. I sulked into my beer for a few minutes. Oy is a Yiddish word, I realized, while Eh --- whatever you think of it --- is full-blooded English.

(Wait, I should have challenged that it’s not English, it’s actually a Canadian word! Opportunity missed...)

Here’s a sampling of the many, many two-letter words that were played that night.

Ho
Ug
Ma
Fa
Eh
Fe
Et

Those are just the ones I remember. I did a lot of challenging, and not once did I catch them playing a word that wasn't in the dictionary.

Now, I don’t want to read too much into a tiny ancedote, but this two-letter obsession fits exactly with what I observed during my previous year in Kenya. It absolutely typifies the African work ethic.

Contrary to the beliefs of everyone outside the continent, Africans are the hardest-working people in the world. If they set themselves a task they will complete it. But they prefer working harder to working smarter. It is, unbelievably to me, somehow gratifying to memorize every two-letter word in the Scrabble dictionary.

Even the thought of attempting such a thing makes me reach for the remote. Or it would if I had a TV here.