on language
I used to have my Moore classes in the field of a high school that has let out for the summer. We would drag out tables and chairs from the abandoned classrooms and set up underneath the shade of a shea tree. I sat beside two girls with twin stars tucked behind their ears. A cool breeze would blow across the vast open fields, making our notebooks fly open and flutter like dove wings. From time to time, a ripe shea fruit would fall from the tree and I would chase after it before the baby goats got to it. A quick rinse of water, and voila, a midclass snack. A thin layer of sweet green flesh wrapped around a mahogany colored pit. Aliman, my statuesque soft spoken Moore teacher, patiently deals with our small class of gossipy girls.
A lot of people dread our endless hours of language classes, but I love going most of the time. My favorite part of learning a new language is always the first couple of months, when progress is easily felt and the process is akin to learning a secret code. Moore came really easily to me in the beginning. A grammatical structure to untangle, words to memorize. An entire world opening up in front of me.
Two weeks into PST, I came home from a long day of language training and felt tired. For the first time since starting Moore, I could feel myself losing control of the language and drowning in the strange grammar and pronunciation. Too many hours of straight language instruction without opportunities to solidify existing knowledge. I felt a lot of frustration brewing, knowing how futile it was to keep trying in this class. My site in the southwest is ethnically Lobi, not Mossi, but no one on staff spoke Lobiri so the program was still trying to find me a teacher.
They eventually hired Pascal to be my teacher for the remainder of PST. Pascal is a familiar face for many of trainees, who affectionately (and mistakenly) call him Elim because he’s the chef at Elim Café, that miraculous oasis where hamburgers, peanut butter cookies, and banana cakes somehow exist. For those in the Leo community, he’s well known as the local pastor. He’s a small bespectacled Lobi man with kind smile that crinkles his dark eyes. He’s extremely complimentary towards my language learning skills, something that I need desperately to not fall into my crippling stuttering jags. Perhaps it’s because of this that he’s one of the rare people in my life that I don’t struggle to speak French with. Sometimes, I think myself into such a nervous state that I can’t even string together a sentence without stuttering every other word.
Lobiri classes take place in a large empty pavilion just across from our main training center building. Sometimes, he arrives and slides a present across the table. “Fere dagee,” he says with a mischievous smile. For you. A fresh baked treat meant for the lunch rush at the restaurant. I smile graciously and then class begins.
The puzzle pieces had just started to fall into place with Moore when I switched into Lobiri classes a couple weeks before site visit. I was able to string together simple sentences in Moore and I loved how I was able to start to pick up on bits and pieces of it. I’m only equipped with enough Lobiri for now to catch drops of it as it storms down on me. Child, meat, thank you, family, bus station.
I struggle to write in English as my mind jumps from French, to Moore, to Lobiri, and back to English at multiple points of the day. I was writing an email in French recently and while it was still peppered with mistakes, I marveled at how it almost seemed easier to write in French than in English. Sometimes.
