Whoopsies!

In addition to all the challenges I just wrote about, my days are constantly full of small hilarious things.  When 2 such different cultures/languages come together, there are bound to be some “whoopsies” as I’ve started to call them.  If you can take it with a sense of humor, it really helps to ease your way through the embarrassment.  So here are a few of my favorite “whoopsies!”

1. …You Do WHAT?!?

Remember I said Moussa and I were learning the terms for body parts?  We’d gone through all the normal ones (facial features, phalanges, etc) and I’d pretty much mastered them, so Moussa started teaching me trickier ones.  Once he was teaching me a word that he charaded by running his fingers up and down over his arm.  I thought he was trying to teach me the word for “tickle” so I confirmed it by making a tickling motion in the air with my fingers, and Moussa nodded his head.  Good student that I am, I tried to use it in a sentence.  “N bε Sumaylia kamagan don o don!” – “I tickle Sumaylia (my little brother) everyday!”  Moussa and Salif and the rest of the kids cracked up as Moussa shook his head at me.  After a bit more charading, I caught on – “kamagan” means “skin” not “tickle.”  So apparently I tried to say that I skin my little brother.  Whoopsies!

2. Awkward Silence…

We had just learned the terms for family members and related verbs in class, and since I had been trying to discuss family with Moussa for days, when I went home that night I got our my photo album (for the millionth time) to show off my new knowledge.  Now that I knew the words for “grandparents” and “aunt and uncle” and that sort of thing, my explanations were a lot clearer.  Since everything was going so well, I decided to get a bit fancier and explain that my parents are divorced.  I flipped to photos of my mom and dad and said “N bangebaw fatulen don.”  My aunt and uncle’s faces got really serious and sad looking and there was kind of an awkward silence as they tried to come up with something to say.  All of a sudden I looked down at my notes and realized I’d just told them my parents were dead.  I frantically shook my head and said “U te fatulen don! U furusalen don!!!”  Malians have a hard time understanding divorce (I’ll talk more about that later) so they were still confused, but at least I got the message across that my parents aren’t dead.  Whoopsies!

3. No Singing At The Dinner Table.

No singing at the dinner table was always in rule in my house while I was growing up.  I don’t know why all of those years of training suddenly flew out the window.  Maybe because eating here is kind of quiet since I can’t say much yet, and I want to fill up the silence.  I’ve developed a habit of humming while eating, which I vaguely remember being told during the first week is very inappropriate.  At first I was just humming in my head, but one night we were eating dinner when the prayer call came over the loudspeaker.  (Muslims pray 5 times a day and in small villages like mine the mosque has a loudspeaker for the call to prayer to be blasted throughout the village.  The first one is at 5:30am.  I am not pleased about this.).  The prayer call has a pretty musical sound to it, so I started humming it out loud.  My brother looked up at me and sternly shook his finger at me.  I guess if it’s rude to sing or hum while eating, it’s even ruder to hum the prayer call while eating!  Whoopsies!  Now that I know I can’t do it, I really want to all the time and I have to force myself not to so I don’t get in trouble again.

4. Hey Mom, This Is Really Good!

This one is by far my favorite.  Most of the time we’re all pretty quiet while eating.  In the beginning, Moussa would point out various ingredients in the meal so I could learn the terms, and now he’ll quiz me, but since I know everything by now (our meals aren’t very varied) the quizzing is fast and we’re silent again.  At lunch during one of the first few days, we were eating rice with sauce and Moussa was teaching me all of the vegetable names: eggplant, onion, cabbage, etc.  My mom was standing nearby and I wanted to show my appreciation for her hard work, so I asked Moussa how to say “c’est bon” in Bambara and he told me “zame.”  I looked at my mom and said, “Zame!”  She kind of laughed at me.  And from then on, everytime I genuinely liked something, I would say “zame!”  I really like the special tea that my dad drinks several times a day, so once I told him zame after drinking a glass, and he got kind of a funny look on his face but I passed it off. 

Then maybe like 5 days later we were in class talking about food terms, and I learned that rice has 3 different names.  “Malo” is raw rice.  “Kini” is steamed rice.  And “zame” is fried rice.  What!?!  Apparently Moussa had thought I was asking how to say the word for fried rice, the base of our meal that day.  And for the past 5 days, I’d been randomly saying “fried rice” everytime I liked something: tea, a banana, my morning porridge.  I was so embarrassed!  I went home and our next meal was fried rice, so I tried to explain my mistake.  It came out something along the lines of, “Zame, ayi ‘c’est bon!”  (“Fried rice, no ‘it’s good.’”) so then my mom and grandma got really worried (and probably offended) that I was saying loudly and in the middle of eating that I don’t like fried rice.  And then I had to try and fix that blunder as well.  Whoopsies!!!