Shoe woe

(Doesn't that look like it should rhyme? Crazy English.)

I attended a "combined youth service" last Sunday in Massaka, the
next village over. Several days later, my memory is mostly of my
feet.

If I had known we were going to trek two hours through the
rainforest, instead of going by the road, and then hike back on
the road after torrential rain had made it a sea of glue, I would
have worn different shoes.

On the way there, we waded through waist-deep ferns... took the
wrong fork of the trail and backtracked... fished my shoe out of
the mud puddle where it came off... and crossed no less than six
streams, fording three and a half. (How do you ford half a
stream? Well, the stream in question had a log bridge starting
several feet into the stream and ending before the other bank...)

I learned that the statement "very soon we will be in Massaka"
means that in about half an hour more trekking, we will cross the
boundary line between Big Bekondo cocoa farms and Massaka cocoa
farms. It has no relation to when we will actually reach the
village of Massaka.

Also, have you ever noticed (I think slowlane, at least, will
agree with me here!) that it is a great comfort in uncomfortable
circumstances to be able to think "how will I write this up on my
blog?"

On the way back, after the blisters on my feet had already been
popped and rubbed raw, I learned that my shoes had other faults
besides rubbing in the wrong places. They were positive mud
magnets. Have you ever tried to favour blisters while lifting
shoes that are three times their original weight?

I think, by the time I was limping pitifully and most of the
group had gone on ahead, Santana figured that weak white-men
shouldn't try to trek eight miles in a day. She advised me
kindly about halfway back that "there is a youth conference in
Bikoki next weekend. But I don't think you will be able to walk
there. Maybe sanga Rachel [that's Dan-- "father of Rachel"] can
drive you part of the way."

However, once she realised that the problem was mostly my shoes,
she not only lent me the pair she was carrying-- she also
insisted on taking both pairs and washing them for me once we got
back to the house.

And, believe it or not, I really am headed up to Bikoki-- which
happens to be six or eight miles, the last four of which are all
uphill-- tomorrow.

I'm wearing different shoes.

"What is this dream that you have had?"

I've heard missionaries say several times that the Old Testament
makes more and more sense the longer they live in Africa. Some
of the OT stories that strike Americans as grotesquely bizarre
just sound like part of normal life to an African-- whether it
has to do with dreams, visions and signs, or with status wars
between siblings, or with marriage, or revenge, or jealousy...
It seems like the Hebrews had a worldview very similar to an
African worldview.

What I never expected to find, however, is how uncannily similar
the languages themselves are. As I compare the Hebrew, Oroko,
and English translations of the Joseph story, doing my best to
"check" the Oroko, English is always the odd one out. Time and
time again, the Oroko sides with the Hebrew-- in grammatical
construction, vocabulary, even discourse (how the story flows on
a "paragraph" level).

An example. I was reading the Oroko backtranslation of Gen.
37:10, where the English says that Jacob "rebuked" Joseph for
saying that his family would bow down to him. Our backtranslator
had written "His father shouted at him." I cocked my head in
thought. "I never pictured Jacob shouting at him. I guess he
could have. That just wasn't the picture I had in my head of
'rebuke'... but certainly that's what they do here to rebuke
someone!" So I looked up the Hebrew word. Lo and behold! the
list of meanings was as follows: "to address harshly, to cry at,
scold, rebuke, threaten." Well, that refines my mental image a
bit. Suddenly Jacob takes on a new life in my understanding: as
an African "big man" and patriarch, as well as an American-style
father.

I love reading the Bible through other peoples' lenses.

Water!

We have water again, after an outage of nearly a week (Dan's take
on the situation was: "It only takes these guys about two hours
to go up and fix all the leaks. However, the ones who are
responsible for fixing the leaks are not the same ones who are
having to carry water from the stream. They can get kids to do
it for them. So, it doesn't cost them anything to wait a week
before they do the repairs.").

Whatever the reason, however, it's WONDERFUL to be able to turn
on the tap again and have water come out. It's WONDERFUL to be
able to take a real shower and get rid of that grimy feeling
(splash-baths just don't quite make it go away). It's WONDERFUL
to wash your hands with water that hasn't already rinsed soap off
sixteen pairs of hands. God bless whoever invented running
water.

(God bless my hostess this summer, too, who remembered enough of
her own culture shock to joke, my first night back in the
'States: "You do know you can drink the tap water here, right?"
:-) --It really is a significant adjustment when you return to
having taps that actually work 99.9% of the time, and that
consistently spout not only clear water, but drinkable water.
Wow.)

Language learning

"If you keep on speaking nicely like that, you won't go back to
the 'bakala.' We will just steal you and take you off to our
houses," joked one of the translators at lunch this week.

Language learning isn't a steady process. It goes in fits and
spurts and plateaus. But lately, it feels like I've "leaped"
again. I find myself staying in language longer, instead of
panicking and switching back to English as soon as I can't figure
out how to put the right endings on my verbs. It's becoming a
more common thing for me to have entire conversations in Mbonge--
simple ones, of course, but significantly more than the scripted
"Good morning"-"Good morning"-"How are you?"-"I'm fine, how are
you?" sort of thing... ones that are actually communicative of
information. And there are just lots more things that I can talk
about as my vocabulary grows (although, with this language at
least, it seems that vocabulary is the easy part-- it's learning
how to add all the right things to the word roots and make them
all agree with each other that can be daunting!!).

I love language learning. I think it has to be my favourite part
of being here. I've always loved figuring out how to say
something "in code" or with a different set of rules-- when I was
eleven, I spent hours practicing my Pig Latin until I was fluent
:-) -- but the whole fun of it is having someone to understand
your code. In language learning, you not only have "someone"
that understands-- you usually have a whole village or town or
city or country of them, and they're experts!

Still out of water

Out of water. Out of flour. Out of rice. Out of milk (powder).
Out of brown sugar. Apparently we didn't plan for our long stay
in the village well enough. :-)

This is not to say that we are short on food-- or water, for that
matter. We just have to be a bit... creative. And take
advantage of every time it rains...

Meanwhile, if you have any ideas for meals that use cheese
without any flour or milk (besides omelettes), let me know.

For those who like to laugh at things linguistic

Quotations from today's (rather messy) data entry:

"Parts of speech are things that linguists try to use to pin down
living language."

"It's running away and laughing at me!!!"

"We have verbs that are adjectives, why not adverbs that are
conjunctions?"

Subtle subliminal messages

81"Certainly... if I myself were to be writing... I would choose
to write so that my words would sound out with whatever diverse
truth in these matters each reader was able to grasp, rather than
to give a quite explicit statement of a single true view..."81

~St. Augustine of Hippo, slightly out of context

Water, water everywhere...

but not a drop out of the tap.

It's common, when we have torrential downpours like this, for the
village water system to be damaged. This is not surprising... it
is a 3-4-mile-long, above-ground pipe that carries water through
the jungle from our water source, repaired every so often with
plastic bags, strips of tire, forked sticks, whatever is handy.
The water outage is inconvenient, but it usually doesn't last
more than a couple days (and it's fairly easy to collect
rainwater!).

So, right now, we have several gallons a second pouring down onto
our tin roof... several drips a minute plip-plopping into buckets
and pots... and nothing but air coming out of our taps.

More notes on the rain

Biscuits and hot soup are a perfect lunch for today.

Rachel says it's "freezing." She's going to have a rather
startling adjustment when her family returns to South Dakota on
home assignment next year...

Because it is raining, our cook has not yet returned from market.
Therefore, he has not yet washed the dishes. Therefore, there
are no clean large pots to catch the drips from the roof.
Therefore, the bowl with remnants of biscuit-dough is sitting in
the middle of the kitchen floor, slowly filling up with
rainwater. (The cat tried drinking it and gave me the most
disgusted look I've ever seen.)

Lisa found an Earthworm outside today. This was a capital-E
Earthworm. It was almost two feet long and so large she thought
it might be a snake. So she chopped it in a few places, just in
case. If it was a snake, it is dead. If it was an Earthworm,
now there are three.

Rachel is getting out of her math lesson for the moment, to
clamber up in the space between the rafters and the tin roof and
position containers to catch leaks BEFORE they get to the
ceiling. "We don't have snow days here," Dan says. "We have
rain days."

Wet

I presume that Dan is rather moist at the moment.

He went to a cocoa-breaking this morning. The farm, we were
told, was about an hour and a half away. That's a bit too far
for Rachel to walk, and I need to be with Rachel to do
schoolwork, and Lisa's back was a bit painful-- so Dan was the
only one who went off with the group at about 8am.

It's about 11:30am as I write this, and it's raining. Moreover,
this is not rainy-season rain, this is transition-season rain...
the kind that thunders on the tin roof and turns our front yard
into a lake and the path into a river.

Ashia, Dan...

What colour is money?

"Forty thousand dollars." Lisa stopped reading Rachel's history
book for a minute to make sure Rachel understood. "That was a
lot of money back when Harriet Tubman lived. That might be as
much as a million dollars now."

Rachel squinted at her. "How much is that in Cameroonian money,
Mom?"

Dessert with a kick

We had crepes Saturday morning. Crepes are exceptionally good
with vanilla pudding, and Rachel thoroughly enjoyed her chance to
make pudding for breakfast.

There was a small bit of leftover pudding, which we decided to
divide up after supper the same day. I took a bite, and my
tongue tingled.

Thinking the fault must be with my mouth, and not the pudding, I
tried again. It tasted like normal vanilla pudding... but there
was still that strange tingling sensation. My suspicions were
confirmed when Dan commented on the same thing.

The mystery was solved when we discovered a small crack in the
lid of the plastic container... and a bag of hot peppers that had
been set on top of the container in the fridge.

Pepe pudding, anyone?

Miss Wormwood, my brain is full

Consider the single syllable [lo].

In Mbonge, this means "because."

In Hebrew, it's "to him."

In French, it means "the water."

And in English, it means "close to the ground."

Then add the fact that none of these are spelled "L-O." And add
the further fact that I may deal with any or all of these forms
on any given day.

Is it any wonder that sometimes I can't remember where I put my
whatchamacallit?

Sniffle snuff sneeze drip ugh

That about sums it up. I wish I could figure out what I am
allergic to.

But it could be worse, as Rachel pointed out the other day: I
could be allergic to Kleenex.

Our wonderful, wacky language... with a twist

English is full of homophones.

You know, homophones... those words that they make you practice
spelling over and over in elementary school... the ones that
sound the same but are spelled differently.

Those confusing words like...

"leave" and "live"
"sheep" and "ship"

and most especially...

"hat" and "heart"

Man in Store with Cup, Elf No. 57, or Footman no. 6?

"You can be the fairy godmother, Mommy." Rachel was handing out
parts (for no apparent reason) as she helped fold clothes. "And
Daddy, you're the prince. And Sharon-- who's Sharon? Oh, she
has to be Cinderella."

"Wait a minute," I interrupted from where I was grading a math
lesson. "If your daddy is the prince, then your mommy has to be
Cinderella."

"Oh." Rachel wasn't much fazed. "Ok. Then Sharon can be the
fairy godmother."

"Who are you going to be, Rachel?" Lisa finished folding the
clothes and stacked them neatly on the couch. Rachel thought for
a minute, then decided that the romantic parts could go to all
these silly adults. She wanted a part with some fun in it.

"I'll be the guy who gets to ride on the back of the carriage!!"

Blitz!

Anyone who has ever had the good fortune to play Dutch Blitz with
me knows how easy it was to win and leave me in the dust. :-)
Dutch Blitz, while quite enjoyable, is just not my card game...
it requires keeping track of too many things at once.

Dan Friesen, on the other hand, is the fastest Dutch Blitz player
I have ever seen, with the possible exception of my mother.
Since we play "vone such game that ain't gonna be no bore" almost
every Friday night without fail, this necessitates some coping
strategies on my part.

So I have taken to announcing my score in unorthodox (usually
mathematical or linguistic) ways after every round.

Unfortunately, about half the time my score ends up including "i
squared"... and rarely rises above "vingt."

Playing mommy cat

"Good kitty. Mmmmmm, good. Cockroach good. Yummy. See it? I
killed it just for you. Yes, eat it. Good kitty. Now catch one
for yourself."

I certainly don't see cockroaches as any gourmet delicacies, but
if the kitten's tastes are different-- this is the sort of thing
that should definitely be encouraged.

Who says you can't train a cat?

Culture shock

I'm feeling bicultural.

This is quite aside from the fact that I'm in Africa, actually.
I have successfully adapted from living at the Scotts' house to
living at the Friesens'.

There are different methods of stacking dirty dishes here. There
are different methods of feeding the animals. There are
different rules for children and different bedtimes (for all
concerned). Laundry is handled differently, and time has a
different level of importance. There are different ways of
dealing with our constant window-spectators, different
philosophies of work, and a different level of tolerance for the
constant interruptions that are part of life in Africa. And
here, Dutch Blitz is the card game of choice.

Has anyone ever written an ethnography of missionary households?
Maybe this is my chance for a masters' thesis...

Eph. 1:21-22

The noise next door started in the middle of the night. I
sleepily wondered why there was so much noise coming in my
window, and rolled over.

The next morning, when I was rational enough to realise that
noise in the middle of the night was unusual, I found out the
reason. Our neighbour's relative, who lived in a different
village, had died, and his corpse had been brought to the village
last night for his "die" or "death celebration."

The drums and chanting and jostling and drinking and crowds
continued all day. A death celebration normally lasts four or
five days, including one or two all-nighters. I couldn't shake a
tension and heaviness that gripped me. I didn't know the
deceased, and I didn't even know his relatives very well. It
wasn't just the constant drums coming in through all our windows,
either. I have never felt the spiritual darkness here so
keenly...

Whether I felt it because I knew it was there, or because of some
intuitive awareness of it near our house, I don't know. It
doesn't really matter. I know that people here are in bondage to
the spirits. I know that fear holds them all-- including the
Christians-- in an endless cycle of appeasement, feuds, and
accusations. Christianity provides hope mainly for the
afterlife; God is distant and can't be expected to provide for
daily needs in this life; therefore we have to be dependent upon
keeping the capricious spirits happy. So the reasoning goes.

"Lord, protect us by the blood of your Son Jesus Christ. We are
his." The reality of the spiritual power next to our house came
home to me.

"Lord, show yourself stronger than the spirits!..."

Comments!

Thanks to a tip from another missionary on the Cameroon field,
blogspot is now automatically forwarding comments to me! So in
direct contradiction of my earlier post, please feel free to
comment away. ;-)

Hymnological thoughts

Two thoughts occurred to me at youth meeting today, while singing
the hymn I just posted.

One was that I am getting a chance to see how church music
develops in an oral culture... and very probably I am looking at
a similar phenomenon to mediaeval chants. Is that cool or
what?!? As we were practising today, I was daydreaming about
someday helping Hans and others publish an Oroko church songbook,
with choruses and hymns and hopefully Oroko-composed music. I
realised, however, that the hymn we were singing, if printed,
would require some kind of hints as to where the musical accents
fell... the Oroko have an amazing faculty for fitting just about
any number of syllables into a given number of notes, but you
have to have someone teach you the song (orally!) in order to
know which syllables to glide over and which to drag out. :-)
No rhyming, metred hymns here... you just say the meaning, and
somehow make it fit the tune. --Then something began niggling at
the back of my brain about old liturgical hymnals... singing
Compline chants with Micah and Jenn... and little marks over the
words to tell you where to put the musical accents. Hmmm...

The other was simply that the mere act of translating hymns can't
change hearts. Putting the words they are singing into their own
language can help them understand in their heads... but still,
only God can bring heart-understanding. As we sang "Yesu adingi
mba wa atombi ema te" ("Jesus loves me, beyond anything") I
realised how much I am still only beginning to understand that...
I pray that they will not only sing the words, not only
understand their meaning intellectually, but begin to really
understand that this God in heaven, whom their whole culture sees
as distant and uninterested, really, actually loves them. Beyond
any love they, or I, have ever, ever, ever known.

Yesu 'ijo bo besusu (Jesus knows it all)

I am posting this, not because I think you will be in any way enlightened as to the meaning of the words, but because I love looking at it and I thought you might enjoy getting a glimpse of "real Oroko." :-) This is the latest hymn translated by Hans, and we are singing it Sunday morning. If you are looking for the original English to compare with it, the hymn begins, "He knows my thoughts, my ways, my deeds/ My Jesus knows it all."

'Ijo bem��i na bebo���i iba,
Yesu 'ijo b� besusu.
Ema t� ya ak�m� o nyo�o eya,
Yesu 'ijo b� besusu.
'Ijo b� besusu,
Na mo�ema i�a,
Eke ema esas�mi na Yesu,
'Ijo, 'ijo b� besusu.

Eke o bu�u na o w�s�,
Yesu 'ijo b� besusu.
Eke ose t�t� o�a,
'Ijo, 'ijo b� besusu.
Ema t� ya mbo�ak�,
Na etafo t� ya nj�s�k�,
'Ijo ma amati o mo�ema i�e,
Ya nj�s�k�, ya mbo�ak�.

Atambo�� bebo���i iba,
M� ande�ke�.
Ete ya bi�a, ete ya �eny�,
'Ijo, 'ijo b� besusu.
Atambo���� mba,
Na mak�nj� ime,
Yesu ande�ke� ema t�,
Yesu 'ijo b� besusu.

Yesu m� 'ijo �ong� i�a �ose,
M� any�ng� mba nginya.
Nga mba mati ndabo eya ya muny���,
Yesu akomb� f�k� o�a.
Yesu a�ingi mba,
Wa atombi ema t�,
Mba mb��i �ana wa Yesu,
Anding�n�, mba n'ijo.

Elle est sans beyala

Being an MK has some distinct advantages. Rachel, as a fourth
grader, is taking not one, but two foreign languages in school:
Oroko, and French. (Meanwhile, I, as her tutor, have the chance
to become a student for half an hour every day as Lisa teaches.)

This does present some interesting situations, though. On
Tuesday we reviewed the Oroko numbers by playing Go Fish in
Oroko. Today, we played Go Fish in French. If you have ever
tried to play the same game in two different "second" languages,
at two times not very far removed from each other, you will
understand the difficulty.

We were utterly unable to stay in French. All three of us mixed
the two languages indeterminately, consciously attempting to
speak French, but inserting Oroko words without thinking. Rachel
grew increasingly frustrated with her inability to remember the
French, until, at the end of the game, she suddenly exclaimed,
"I'm SPEECHLESS!"

But Lisa simply sat back and smiled. "Finally! It took eight
years-- and French!"