Teaching Russian in Wolof (Nov 30, 2013)

The past two and a half days we Peace Corps trainees hosted the 'Counterpart Workshop' at the Training Center.  Each Peace Corps Volunteer has at least one local national they work closely with, known as their local counterpart.  So we essentially hosted over a hundred Senegalese men and women who would be working with us.  The two and a half days held sessions about the Peace Corps' mission, how the different projects would be working together, and cross-cultural work.  It was a weekend of constantly trying to keep track of over two hundred people as well as many, many awkward moments.   

Many of us trainees experienced these awkward moments with our future counterparts.  We've been learning the languages for the past seven weeks, but that by no means indicates that we are able to communicate well with strangers.  Although I'd met my counterpart several weeks ago when I visited my future site, I renewed our relationship with quite the awkward moment.  First, I missed when my counterpart arrived.  In my defense, counterparts were arriving in a ten-hour window so it was a long time to sit in the sun and wait for someone to arrive.  I was sitting inside with some friends when my counterpart walked in looking for some water.  Once I realized who he was, I had to come forward somewhat awkwardly and say hello.  And how is your family?  And how was the travel?  And are you in peace?  And then he responded with a very thick bush accent that I couldn't understand.  To give some perspective, imagine you are learning English for the first time and you've been studying in the American Midwest, then someone with a British, or New England, or Texan accent tries to speak to you.  The difference an accent can make is astounding!  So, it felt like the past seven weeks I actually hadn't learned much of the language.

This awkwardness continued when we were supposed to take our counterparts on tour of the Training Center the next day and show them some of the techniques we were using.  First of all, the agricultural counterparts are experienced farmers who know a lot more about Senegalese ag techniques than I do (I'll be learning more in February during my second bout of training).  Secondly, I don't have the language skills to really explain drip line irrigation quite yet.  So I walked him around the center saying, 'this is lettuce' or 'this is a mango tree' or 'look at all this compost!'  I was pretty proud of myself when I was able to comment on the fact that the vegetable nurseries had been dug by us stagiers, amended with compost, ash, and charcoal, and the nurseries in the shade were doing much better than those in the sun.  (Quite the long sentiment to express in Wolof!)  My biggest failure though was when I tried to explain aloe vera- I said the sun was bad for my skin, and then the aloe was good for it... there were a lot of hand gestures involved.    

The classes we attended were fascinating from an organizational point of view.  At times, classes had to be divided based on the sector of service (agriculture, agro-forestry, or Economic development) while at times they were divided by language (Wolof, Mandinka, Pulafounta, or Pular).  Those that were divided by language only had to be translated once, like from Wolof to English for us trainees, but those classes divided by sector had to be translated into upwards of four languages.  If anyone ever wants to claim that colonialists were right and Western Africans aren't smart, they should sit through a class where over half the individuals are speaking three or more languages!  From a political point of view, it is easy to see the challenges that arise from a multilingual country.  A two day conference was headache enough, organizing policy would be extremely challenging and I can see why French is used as the national language, though it separates policy making from the majority of citizens.  (A debate I'm sure I'll continue to have with myself over the next two years.)

One of the classes we had was about the difficulties of language learning and working in a different language.  One of our language instructors facilitated the class, asking our counterparts how long they thought it would take us to learn our languages.  Some wonderful comments were brought up, such as how different accents would be difficult to learn and that our host communities should help us learn.  Then they started debating whether it would take several months or  just a couple of weeks to learn Wolof.  The final consensus of the new counterparts was that we should be pretty fluent in Wolof after two weeks at our permanent sites.  TWO WEEKS?!?!?! 

Thankfully, we had a little activity to show them the difficulties of language learning.  All the language classes had one trainee teaching a foreign language for ten minutes.  Friends of mine taught Korean to the Pulars, Vietnamese to the Mankinkas and Pulafuntas, and I taught Russian to four Senegalese Wolof speakers.  In our ten minute lesson, I taught them to say the responses to the following:

Hello

Hello

How are you?

I'm fine.

What is your name?

My name is ______.

Where are you from?

I live in Senegal.

As instructed by my language teachers, I began the class speaking only in Russian.  After spewing about 30 seconds of my credentials and why I was teaching them this language (in Russian), they all were staring at me in horror and confusion as they didn't understand a single sound that came out of my mouth.  And the entire class laughed at them.  We spend the next ten minutes working on pronunciation, having the entire class (or 4 students) and the individuals repeat the words over and over.  One woman had obviously learned languages before and was picking it up very quickly.  Whenever she would say something correctly, the larger class would clap.  Whenever anyone got anything wrong, the larger class would laugh.  At one point, I saw sweat absolutely running down the face of one of my male students, but my language teachers told me to continue to teach and not try and comfort him.  By the time we ended the class, my brain was hurting pretty bad from thinking in English, teaching Russian, and speaking Wolof. 

The ten minutes were pretty funny, and I ended it by mixing some Wolof in with the Russian so that everyone laughed.  When my 'students' were allowed to return to their seats, we had comments about how language learning actually was difficult.  Some of my favorite comments were as follows;

"How do you ask what a word means when you don't understand the other words in the language?"

"When everyone laughs, it makes it harder for me to learn. "  (Which brought on a whole discussion about how Senegalese culture involves lots of laughing and we've been laughed at a lot, and how to limit laughing at us.)

"I was only sitting there for ten minutes and sweat through my shirt, I don't know how you have done this for seven weeks!"

So all in all, it was a great tool to show that, in fact, a language cannot be learned in two weeks.  Learning languages is hard and takes a long time.  Speaking of which, I have my final language exam on Monday so I'd better sign off and start stu