English school party picture

Yay!  Another trimester of English classes completed!
Now I have 3 weeks before the next trimester begins, but I am not exactly doing nothing.  In addition to my regular Bambara lessons, I've started visiting a nearby village once a week for practice.  Next week I'll spend the whole week in a village with a small team from my group.  Then we have registration nights at English school.  For now I am working to finish up a translation project.  Our curriculum at English school is made of 5 books/levels.  I teach level 1, and we say it is the beginner level, but real beginners have a hard time as it is all in English and assumes the learners have a bit of English already.  The publisher has made a level 0 book.  I am helping to put the French words for things to prepare it for printing.
It is nice to have a little break from classes, but I am looking forward to the new classes starting.  It will be fun but kind of sad for me because it will be my last trimester of teaching here.  In only 3 1/2 months we are planning to move.

tastes like chicken?

Have you ever come home to find some of these in your fridge?  They were given to JP as a gift, and I let him have them all to himself.

what did I say now?

I have a funny story to share: 

 Last week I traveled by bus to attend our group’s yearly business meetings.  The first bus went 5 ½ hours and that was the end of that route.  I had to hike a few blocks over to the big bus station and find a bus to take me to on, another 3 ½ hours away (by bus.  In a private car it only takes 2 hours!)  The bus I got on there was traveling to my destination, but it was not its last stop.  So when we arrived most people were staying on the bus.  I had to get up and climb over the big plastic jugs in the aisle and make my way to the door which was blocked with young girls trying to sell drinks and trays of snacks to all the people staying on the bus.  I was happy to use my Bambara language, so I announced in Bambara “I want to go out” hoping that the girls would move and let me go out.  A man next to the door looked at me and asked “huh?”  so I repeated  “I want to go out” as I pointed at the door.  He seemed to understand then and he had the girls move so I could climb down the steps.
The next day I was sitting and chatting with some of the ladies at our mission base who were preparing food for that evening’s meal.  One of them noticed something peculiar on the ground under a nearby chair.  In Bambara, she asked another woman “is that poop?”  It looked like poop, and because there are plenty of animals roaming around as well as small children that may or may not wear some kind of diaper, it wouldn’t be that surprising if it was in fact poop.  One of the women investigated and it was only the inside seed part of a cucumber that someone had scooped out and it was now covered in brown dirt.  Hearing the word “poop” in Bambara several times suddenly brought the incident in the bus to mind.  I had a sinking feeling that I might not have said what I wanted to say. 
In Bambara I am sometimes confused or frustrated because a single word can have A LOT meanings.  Sometimes words are actually a little different  but I have a hard time keeping it straight if it’s a high tone word or a low tone word, and there are 2 kinds of O’s, there is regular O and there is an open O which is written like a backwards C.  They sound a little different, but I admit I don’t pay much attention to that and I just hope people will figure out what I mean by the context. 
So here is the tricky part and why I was suddenly worried that I had made an embarrassing mistake:  The way to say “go out” (as in “I want to go out”) is “bo”, and the way to say “poop” is also “bo” but with a closed O.  Did I announce in the bus that “I want to poop” as I gestured toward the door?  Obviously I would want to get out of the bus if I wanted to go poop, so I don’t think context would help me too much there. 
I went and found a friend who does a lot of translation work, and asked him what I really said.  He said that a better word choice might have been “jigin” which is “to come down/descend” and is understood as meaning getting off a bus.  But I was relieved when he explained that what I said was understandable and that to say  “I want to poop” I would have needed to add a “ke” at the end, which is like “to do poop.”  So it wasn’t so bad after all, but I was pretty worried there for a minute!

a shot from inside the bus

village weekend

Crazy or Brave?  Someone asked me, "So, you are going to a village you've never been to and you'll stay with people you've never met... all by yourself?"  Yep. I spent last weekend in a village to work on my Bambara language skills.  My new language helper, who is one of those people who seems to know everyone, found a family for me to stay with when I asked him if he could help me arrange a language immersion weekend.  From my house it takes about 1 hour to get there by taxi, and the family serves as its church's leaders.  Plus, they were willing to welcome a language-learning foreign lady for the weekend.  Perfect!

This is the mom, Tabita, with Marte who is almost 2.  Marte was afraid of me when I arrived.  I tried to buy her friendship at first by offering a piece of candy.  I heard her ask her big sister if she could go get the piece of candy for her.  The sister said no.  Then Marte asked the sister to ask the white lady to throw the candy to her!  How cute is that.  The sister again refused.  Marte finally came to get the candy herself and seeing that I didn't bite or anything, we became friends.  The next day she was sitting on my lap and giving me hugs.

 It was unseasonably chilly for the beginning of March!  Overnight lows were down to 60 degrees (which I'm sure sounds balmy if you're in MN right now, but for us here that's freezing!) and there was a lot of dusty wind blowing.  In the morning and nighttime everyone was wearing jackets or sweatshirts and still feeling cold.  Its nice to not be sweating hot once in a while in Mali, but taking an outdoor (in an enclosure) "bucket bath" in 60 degrees left me shivering.  Other than that everything was wonderful.  The food was good (corn porridge for breakfast, rice and sauce for lunch and dinner), I had my own little private room to sleep in (no sharing a bed with a stranger), and most importantly I had the opportunity to have conversations with many people.  There was a lot I didn't understand, but a lot I did understand, and overall I was encouraged by my ability and progress in Bambara.  I want to go for another weekend (or longer!) again soon.

This is the dad, Alain Madu.  He is standing on the land that belongs to the church and you can see the partially constructed church building is behind him.  For now the small church, about 30 people, meets in the family's courtyard under a shade roof.  The village is pretty big, I don't know the population, but it is next to an "Industrial Zone" that already has a few factories and will soon have more, and there are tons of new houses being built in the village.  Their church is the only one in the village.  They are praying for the finances to put a roof on the new building so they can move the church meetings over there.  Having a "real" church will give them more credibility in the eyes of other villagers.

On Saturday I went a lot of places with Tabita.  She took me to the market, to visit friends, and to her weekly women's meeting.  In many villages, women make groups and when they meet each week they bring and collect money, it's kind of like their own little credit union system.  There were some kids hanging out at the meeting and they liked having their picture taken.  I thought it was pretty cute how a couple of them climbed into this old shipping crate. 

Here I am with the whole family.  The 3 little girls in the middle are the daughters of Alain Madu (blue shirt, center) and Tabita (back left).  The man in the pink shirt is Tabita's brother.  He has a tiny bachelor's house on the land next door to the family.  The boy in yellow is Sidiki, he is not related but came to live with the family to go to school and help take care of the 5 cows and do other work.  The girl in front of me is also not related.  She came from another village to work for the family.  She said she is 14 and has never been to school.  She does cooking and cleaning and takes care of little Marte if the mom goes out.

 

say what?! Bambara language update

Take a quick look at this picture.  It looks like pages of a chemistry book, right?  Nope, this is a Bambara language learning book.  When they have to explain something with half-page diagrams its gotten too complicated!  I'm an English teacher and I have to explain some tricky grammar rules sometimes, but this is meant for people with degrees in linguistics or something. 
That said, my Bambara learning is going quite well.  I've now done more than 50 lessons with my teacher Fatim. (each lesson is 2 hours, so that's more than 100 hours of private tutoring - wow!)  And I've started doing an extra Bambara morning each week with Daniel who is pictured below.  When I started my lessons I made noticeable rapid progress; that's how it is when someone is at a beginner level of language learning.  Now that I am "intermediate", my progress seems to have plateaued a bit.  I know I am still making progress, but its not as dramatic from week to week.  I am now able to say all sorts of things in Bambara, my problems are with trying to understand the rapid mumbly way a lot of people seem to speak.  I often have solid 10-15 minute conversations all in Bambara with taxi drivers, so that is encouraging and its definitely coming along.  I hope that the next few months of lessons will help me get from intermediate to advanced.
I am so grateful for the financial gifts that a few people gave that have allowed me to do my language lessons!  Thank you so much!

I am doing extra lessons with Daniel now and I think its helpful to learn from more than one person.  My regular teacher is a Muslim and Daniel is a Christian, so he is helping me with certain Christian vocabulary and giving me a different perspective on cultural issues.   The picture is from last week when I visited a prayer meeting.  He is an assistant pastor at a local church but on Fridays he is part of leading this prayer meeting where people come to pray especially for Mali.  I knew that Daniel was the guy to ask to find me a good family and village to spend some time with to practice my Bambara.  I'll write about that in the next post.  

book bags and school update

Here are a couple recent pictures from English school.  There was a women's group in America that sewed and then sent book bags for us to give to the students.  The students were so happy for this present.  Isn't it funny how they put them on around their necks?  This is just how its done here.  

We are just over halfway through with the current trimester and classes are going great!  I spent 3 weeks with an extra class, Level 5.  We have so many students wanting to take classes and not enough teachers to go around, so we decided to split the level 5 class between 4 of us so each teacher took 3 weeks of teaching.  My favorite class is always Level 1, the lowest/beginner level, so it was very different teaching Level 5, the highest level.  I enjoyed trying something new and the students were terrific, but I'm kind of glad that the extra load is done because my schedule is already pretty full.
I brought cake to give to my classes last week.  Someone asked if it was my birthday.  I said "no, the cake is just because I like you guys!"  I love my students and teaching English.  Its so cool when I see one of them out in town somewhere.  Of course I have to think quick and see if I can come up with their name, but even if I can't it's still fun.  In class I have them wear nametags, but I usually have learned all (or at least most!) of their names after the first month.

JP's "book"

I am super proud of JP because he recently got his "book" finished.  Ok, its not actually a book, but it looks like one to me.  Its his research proposal/plan/information paper, but its something like 40-50 pages and its bound together like a book.  He has been working on this for a long time and honestly, I don't even understand everything in there.  Now it needs to get approved and then he will be spending another month at the hospital where he did an internship last September - October.  After that he has to write another big paper/book with this findings and whatnot, and then that needs to be formally presented before he can be really finished with his schooling.  I am really hoping all of this will be completed by August, because we are hoping to start our trip to the states in September.  It is very difficult to plan things when there are issues like 3-week school strikes that come up.  JP did start classes again this week thankfully.  Just in case you're wondering what his schooling is for:  He already had a 3-year gov't licensed nursing degree, and now he is in a 2-year Public Health program.  This would be like a master's program in the states.  When he is finished, his diploma or certificate will say "physician's assistant" so that sounds impressive, right?  :)