May 19, 2011 – Languages and Larvae

It’s our first day in the village of Lassa Tchou and I’d better start writing down some words and phrases that I’m learning before I forget them:

Labale – Thank you
Payan swe – What is your name?
Payan se – My name is
Punuh – goat
Pono – bread (easily confused with “punuh,” but guaranteed to draw laughs when Caroline, unaware of the difference between the words, leans down and looks at a goat and yells “pono!”)

Those are just the Kabiye words and phrases I remember learning today, but there were quite a few more. They have their own alphabet so of course all of those phrases are just based on phonetics. As is my French, which we’re also learning a lot of!

Comment vous apell et vous? – What is your name?
Bon soir – Good afternoon
Bon jour – Good morning
Bon nuit – Good night
Adieu – Goodbye (but careful, you only say adieu to someone who is dying. Which I learned after saying it to the local pharmacist. Whoops.)
Du rien – You’re welcome
Poisson – fish
Moto – motorcycle (the chief mode of transportation here in Togo. Seriously, there are more motorcycles here than I’ve ever seen in my life. Haha it makes me want one so bad!)
Panye – the fabric all the women use as skirts. They just wrap them around themselves or use them to tie their babies to their backs. It’s pretty ingenious, honestly.

I’ll try to keep a running list of new words I’m learning so I can remember and practice them more.

Folks, in other news, there is something seriously wrong with my right eye. It feels like there’s a speck of something stuck in it and it’s stinging like crazy. It’s really red and irritated and I keep sobbing and snotting out of the right side of my face. No bueno. Other health issues have come up too. Last night my half a meatball sub threw my vegetarian stomach through the ringer. I spent some time in the bathroom for sure. And Lydia did this morning too after drinking some coffee. And the worst one by far is Dusty’s back. He laid on a bad mattress in Uganda and got his back all pricked and then rafted the Nile the next day and now he has botfly larvae growing in his back. Seriously, they’re disgusting, and Cecily is having to pull them all out. But he has worms living and growing in his back and if he doesn’t get them out they’ll grow to maturity and crawl out of their holes as full-grown flies eventually. Is that not the grossest thing EVER? But other than that, I think everyone has stayed pretty healthy, praise God!

Today in Lassa Tchou was an awesome first day! We got to introduce ourselves to the women and they introduced themselves to us and we gave them their shirts and took their pictures. Then we took a tour of the village. It’s really cool! As we were walking around and seeing things we got to learn so much about their culture. We saw where and how they live and they taught us different words and phrases and even though we didn’t speak the language we could still communicate in a way. That is so amazing for me to see how something that was a main concern for me could just be put to rest so quickly. I mean of course it’s still an obstacle, as we saw in the market when we tried to haggle for panyes, but the women in Lassa Tchou it seems like just understand that we’re there to love them and they love us back for it. That might sound kind of hippie and naïve, but that’s really the sense I get. It doesn’t matter that we can’t speak Kabiye, we can still learn a lot from one another.

Besides, they see that we’re trying to learn. And it has been SO much fun for me to learn both of these languages today! I was seriously thrilled to learn from the women and from Esowe (our translator). I’m so glad that they’re patient and understand how much we want to be able to communicate. And learning these different languages is so much different than learning Spanish…it’s easier for me to understand French when I already know Spanish, but it’s still tough. I think I feel like I’m capable of mastering French while I’m here, as ridiculous and unrealistic as that is, whereas when I’m speaking Spanish I feel like I’ll never reach fluency. I don’t even know why that is, but I wish I were as confident in my Spanish as I am right now in my pretty much nonexistent French. Maybe this trip will teach me confidence in languages. I like the idea of being trilingual :)