In Which Tide Wi Lan Krio Small Small
on Zoe Page (Sierra Leone), 22/Sep/2010 20:35, 34 days ago
The spraying / window closing / air conditioning of my room seem to have worked. I only have two new bites this morning, randomly both on fingers of my right hand. I have a shower, open the soap they have given me and, far from being reassured that it‘does not contain pork fat’, am somewhat concerned to learn that is an option. I may just have to keep buying this brand, I guess. It’s a Turkish soap made in Egypt, and I can just imagine how a non-native English speaker might pronounce the brand, ‘Fax’. It smells unmistakably of washingpowder.Prepositions.Question words.Pronouns (subject, object, possessive).Present, past, future tenses.Perfect tenses.Negatives.The alphabet.In under 2 hours of class we cover all of the above and more besides, in other words pretty much the whole content of Inside Out or Cutting Edge pre-intermediate if they did them for Krio. In total we cover 17‘lessons’ from our text books. It’s a whirlwind tour, with lots of repetition and reading but no other skills, but the book’s ok so it’s really just the pronunciation we need from our teacher, not the ‘grammer and vocabularies’ he listed on the board as our agenda for the day. It’s alot to take in (and not helped too much but the depressing fact that even if we become half-way fluent, it’s only one of a number of languages in use in the country. What does help, though, is that so much of the vocab is similar to the UK, just with shorter vowels.Up next, Carole and Jo’s session on Surviving Freetown is clearly the best and one of the most useful so far this week, even for those of us going up country. It somehow becomes clear how it’s possible to spend double your official allowance each day when you discover olive oil costs £5 a bottle... Lunch is the sameold, but with the inclusive of couscous. Whoop. Then we have a session on diversity which involves the case of a gay Hispanic priest with a severe hearing impairment and a Masters in climate change. It sounds like the start of another of those bad jokes. We get a couple of plates of biscuits. It was hard to fathom when a Tesco bag appeared on day one, but just like back in the NHS, it seems a lot of tea, coffee and biscuits are the only way to make it through 8 hours in a meeting room. Today we get what look disturbingly like Boasters and vanilla wafers. We’ve already had custard creams, shortbread, cookies and digestives earlier in the week. We end with a session on culture which is interesting but doesn’t really equip us for an inoffensive life in the country, and then we have one on HIV/AIDS which is full of stats that suddenly make it all real.As we finish, we get to collect our latest lot of goodies: some psychedelic tie-dyed sheets, a VSO t-shirt and polo-shirt, pen, baseball cap and keyring, and 2 mosquito nets. It’s like an NGO’s attempt at Freshers’ fair. Cheryl and I walk up the road for food, getting bread and peanut butter Oreos. Hell yeah. I pick up the pack priced less than the others and pull a ‘don’t go ripping off the nice white people’ face, so get away with it. All along the street, people call out ‘hey you’ and ‘white girl’. It’s really friendly, not aggressive, and so far no one has come up to stroke us although I doubt this will stay the case once we move out of the city. Some little kids get really excited to shake our hands, so we practice our Krio on them, which,rather kindly, they don’t laugh at... Getting back we also try out a few phrases on Mr Manager Man and Surly Waitress who, as it turns out, totally does know how to smile. I like to think it’s our killer personalities, and not our inability to string even a basic sentence together. I’m gonna have to try a “Bring wan continental fu mi, ya’ at breakfast and see how far I get...