Monday, May 30, 2011

Obviously. Clearly. Indubitably.

A few weeks ago, my friend asked me if my camera could take video. When I said that it could, he asked if I could film a wedding for him. I agreed (though what a villager with no electricity or computer or television will do with a wedding video, I have no idea).
Since people here are SO wonderful at sharing information with me (not!) I didn't find out that it was actually HIS wedding until the day before. I also didn't find out that it was in a different village until the day before. "Don't worry," they told me. "It's not far at all, only 3 km." Okay, 3 km, I can handle that. Except I think they really meant 6 or 7. In the 2PM heat of the day. In the bush (which means I'm biking through sand and bushes and ditches and such). I arrived exhausted but ready to film. I was led to a huge tree where a group had gathered-all the men on one end and the women on the other. Obviously I sat with the women, who all got a kick out of talking at me in Gouin and watching me cluelessly stare at them in response. People continued to chat as a group of men in the middle of the semi-circle talked amongst themselves. Phones were answered when they rang, children ran around, the bride and groom were nowhere to be seen and I figured that, like everything else here, things were going to start far later than planned. After a while, people got up and prayed (it was a Muslim wedding) and a woman instructed me to follow her.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"To eat," she responded. That's weird...eating before the wedding?
Another friend came up to me who knew I was going to be filming the wedding and said "Did you film it? You got all of it? I want to see what you got!"
"What?!" I cried. "What do you mean?!"
"The ceremony," he responded, with a tone that I expected to be followed up with a drawn out "DUH!"
"Um...well...people were running around and talking and there was no bride or groom or anything and I didn't know it even happened!" I blurted out.
He just stared at me for a minute.
"The guy gave the mother of the bride a pagne and then someone gave 500CFA. Then the dad got 1000CFA and then they..." he continued on about this convoluted ceremony that apparently took place as if to say "Really, Lindsy. How could you be so daft as to NOT realize that the ceremony was taking place right in front of your face?!"

Silly me.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Ça fait deux jours!

That is African French colloquial for “It’s been a while!” (though I don’t know why, since it literally means “That makes 2 days”)
Let’s see…what’s new? I just had an in-service training, which did have some boring moments but was overall surprisingly interesting. I am excited to go back and use what I learned (and the new “supplies” I got…including LOTS of condoms and model reproductive organs on which to use them!)
And, of course, it is always fun to see other volunteers. I am pretty sure a secret requirement to join the Peace Corps is that you have to be a RIDICULOUS dancer. I fit right in…
We are actually just ridiculous in general. We speak in Franglais all the time (with a little local lang thrown in) and often don’t even know/remember how to say things in English or sometimes we don’t even know how to say things in French. (Like Jii Tige. It means the person who guards/runs/takes money at the public water pump. But tige really has no direct translation. It can mean manager or caretaker or person-in-charge-of or…I don’t know. I can’t explain it. You just need to know it in context) I’m sure we confuse locals all the time. We are CLEARLY foreigners (nasaras or tubabus, depending on what region we’re in) but we speak local languages and we act like we have never seen a real building or electricity or televisions or toilets or eaten anything besides rice and sauce in our lives. VERY villagois (villager) but VERY foreign at the same time. Confusing.
Because no one can understand us (most of the time…) we talk as loud as we want about pretty inappropriate things in public. Anything from how annoying the person right next to us is to bodily functions of any kind (when your bodily functions are this weird, you can’t help but share them with others who can relate) are frequent topics of conversations and on the rare occasion someone near us speaks English BigBig (here, thanks to the direct translation from local languages to French and then to the little bit of English they learn, people say they speak English “small-small”) we are rather embarrassed. Also, we all are concerned about what will happen when we are back in the U.S. and basically everyone speaks English and knows what we are saying…I’ll know my true friends when I return because they’ll be the ones who will go out in public with me.