If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. Nelson Mandela
"You said that the rain needs the fields."
"oh... I did?"
I have just finished 3 weeks of trial/review Bambara lessons with Fatim. I wanted to see how lessons would go with this teacher before making a longer commitment, and to get caught back up to where I left off studying - I hadn't picked up my study materials in many months. But I do use a tiny bit of Bambara on an almost daily basis with taxi drivers, shopkeepers and market sellers, and in greeting neighbors. The 3 weeks of lessons showed me a few things: Fatim is an excellent teacher and I can learn well with her, there is a lot of Bambara in my head - I hadn't forgotten it all, and I do know a fair bit, and that if I am going to pay and take lessons I need to free up my schedule so that I will have plenty of time to put in long hours of practice and studying.
Fatim is a Malian woman about my age who previously was employed by the Peace Corps to teach their new recruits the Bambara language. She worked for Peace Corps for about 6 years before they pulled out of the country after the coup d'état last year. Now she is unemployed except for when she can find students to tutor (and that isn't often since there aren't many new white people coming to Mali since the coup.) She has plenty of time and the rate she charges is good motivation for her to come and teach me even though it takes her about an hour and a half on public transport to get to and from my house for lessons (she lives outside of Bamako.) I did two 2-hour lessons per week at $12 an hour. That is really good pay for someone here. I talked to a ditch digger last week and asked him how much he makes, and he said $10 a day. Someone with an unskilled and less strenuous job like a night guard could earn $3-4 a day. So $12 an hour seems pretty steep, but it is the going rate for a top notch Bambara teacher in the city, and I do think its worth it. Fatim is used to working with Americans, she understands how we learn and what is difficult for us. She comes to my house and I don't have to go her and hope that she hasn't forgotten about our lesson. (I had that happen with other teachers in the past.) She speaks French and English. (one of my past teachers only spoke Bambara and so couldn't explain things I wasn't understanding) She is trained and experienced to teach language and her professionalism and competence is reassuring.
I told Fatim that I want to start lessons with her again as soon as I get back from my trip to Chad.
Although I learned a lot of new things too, most of what we covered in the last 3 weeks was (much needed) review for me. I have plenty of words in my head and I have a good foundation of the language's grammar. I can form questions, but that doesn't do too much good when I can't really understand someone's response. I also have a tendency to mix up the order of words in sentences and say things like the rain and fields example at top or to leave out one of the many postpositions which ties everything together. I need to invest a lot of time and practice to be able to really speak and understand one day.
So I need to make room in my schedule for Bambara learning. Many folks who come to Mali (who work for organizations other than mine) spend a year in France to learn French before they come. Then they spend their first year in Mali doing nothing but Bambara and culture learning. A couple I talked to said that they spent 30 hours a week every week their first year doing lessons or study or practice to be able to speak the language. And they can speak it, really well.
I kind of feel bad sometimes to think that I've been here this long already and I can't speak Bambara. But my first year, though I jumped into work immediately, I was learning a ton of French every day. And then I got married and set up house and changed work (from helping at school to helping at the baby malnutrition center) and I was still improving my French, and I finally started some Bambara lessons. Then my mom came to visit so I took a break and then the teacher got busy, then we went to the states for 3 months. I started to learn with a different teacher and I even spent 3 weeks in a village to see how much I could learn there. Then the coup d'état happened and I left the country for 3 months. When I came back I did a few lessons with another teacher, but we were getting ready to move to Bamako. Besides, I felt pretty frustrated with it all, I felt like I wasn't making much progress. So for months I have had this nagging idea that I should be learning Bambara, but I hadn't made any steps forward to do so until just a few weeks ago. And now I'm fired up and ready to do this! When we get back from Chad I will have a schedule that is much more open so that I can devote about half my time to my English teaching work and half my time to learning Bambara.
Here is a picture which has nothing to do with this blog post except, well, its me and I wrote the post I guess. Blog posts without pictures can be kind of boring, so there you go. I'm sending you a smile. :)
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