Mwen antrene Creole! (I’m a-learnin’ Creole!)

I think it’s rude to travel to a country and not learn a bit of the language. Sure, lots of people in lots of places speak English, but shouldn’t we try to learn something of our host’s language? Granted, if you try to speak French in Paris, they look offended at what you’ve done to their language and answer you in English… and they don’t yet realise that’s exactly what we were trying to get them to do in the first place… shhhh…

When I went to India in 2006, I learned something — almost everyone there speaks English, but they speak English that they learned from non-native speakers, who learned it from non-native speakers themselves. And so on. They call it Hinglish. Even when we were all speaking English, there was not a lot of communicating going on. And while you’re asking for something, they start the Indian head-bob, which appears to indicate assent, but I believe was actually a signal that they had stopped listening to you entirely and had already decided to do whatever they wanted to about the situation.

The night after the India build, I flew to Varanasi to stay with the friend of a friend on his beautiful estate. The flight was delayed, and the drive from the airport was long, and I arrived in my very awesome and palatial 5-bedroom bungalow at 2 a.m. local time (something like 4.17 p.m. EST… never figured out the time difference). I had some sort of fever which made for a bit of delirium, and when two house servants approached me before I went to bed, I wasn’t prepared for their questions. They wanted to know what I wanted for breakfast, looking at each other first in some sort of rock-paper-scissors mime, the loser of which had to pose the next question. “Poached eggs toast, Mum?” I’d gotten safely through India with poached eggs and toast so far, so that was a yes. “Mum would like papaya?” We had driven in through a grove of fruit trees, so papaya would also be safe. “Would Mum like bacon?” Boy, would mum ever like some bacon. But what do they consider “bacon” in India? In a predominantly vegetarian society, I hadn’t had any luck with meat products so far. Chicken never looked like chicken, beef was of course nonexistent, and, well, let’s just say I never got brave enough to try the hot dogs they sold at the Mumbai airport. (Strangely enough, the very first time I tried caviar was on a Kingfisher Air flight from Delhi…) Just because the word “bacon” was the same as ours, didn’t mean the product “bacon” was the same as ours. When I awoke that morning, I was not hopeful. My host, it turns out, was quite British, and had special products shipped in from Delhi every week that appealed to his non-Indian tastes. Including bacon. Real bacon. Real Delhi bacon…

OK, so maybe that wasn't a perfect example of the language barrier, but it's been a long time since I talked about bacon, and I had to work it in.

Before I went to Guatemala with the Lovely Lane Methodist Church of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I actually tried to learn Central American Spanish. I started learning French when I was 3 years old and majored in French Lit in college, so I was pretty entrenched in the Language of Love/The Olympic Games. Many words were similar, but they say the worst Spanish accents come from French speakers, and I’d have to agree. And the homonyms weren’t helpful — when you say ‘notebook’ in French, you’re saying ‘street’ in Spanish. I’d ask for directions and I kept thinking they wanted to write them down.

I used Rosetta Stone, which was fabulous, and teaches using a method that mimics how you learn language as a child. They show you a picture of a horse running, and the sentence, “The horse can run.” They show you a picture of a fish, and the sentence, “The fish can swim.” This is how I ultimately came to learn the sentence, “The fish can’t run.” The fish. Can’t run. El pez no peude correr. I learned enough Spanish to be able to communicate in Guatemala — more importantly, to be able to know what was going on — and we tried to work “El pez no puede correr” into every conversation we could. We left them thinking that, quite possibly, in America, the fish CAN run…

For Haiti, I wanted to learn Creole. Building with us on each site will be Haitian construction workers and the Haitian homeowners, who may or may not speak some English, or even French as I learned it. There are translators on the build sites, but you have to wait for them, which wastes valuable time, and you can’t monopolise them to have a conversation with the homeowners. It wasn’t until the third or fourth day of the build in Thailand that we found out our homeowner wasn’t with us – it was the wife’s brother working with us, because the homeowners were with their child in the hospital the whole time. I’d like to be able to make conversation with our homeowners, and communicate somewhat with our trades — I think it’s respectful, and I want to know cool swear words in Creole for everyday use.

I found a computer application that teaches Creole (Rosetta Stone doesn’t have a Creole version, so to get my point across about the fish not running, I believe we’re back to mime). This program does not exactly have construction terms, but I have learned to say build (bati) and paint (pentire, pronounced almost exactly like panty-raid). I can also say hike, climb, ice skate, and accordian, which I expect to come in handy. I can set the table, make the bed, and try something on. I can call somebody, talk to somebody, love somebody, and hate somebody. I can drive, swim, sail, and ride a horse. I can count to a hundred (which I apparently could do in French when I was five, so I’m feeling a lack of progress here), but there had better not be any fractions involved in the build. And I can also say, “Nou jwe kèk oke sou glas!”* I’m still waiting for the chapter where I mix mortar, tie rebar, and set blocks.

Here’s the beauty of Creole: for the most part, it’s lazy, phonetic French. No articles, no conjugation. Voyager? Vwayaje. Fixer? Fikse. Every letter is pronounced, just like in Spanish. Dix? Dis. Treize? Trèz. And I’m amazed at how much French I remember, considering I haven’t had a conversation in French in years. I can pull the odd sentence out when Montreal fans come to town and need directions, but it’s not really come up a lot otherwise. La ville? Lavil. À demain? A demen. It’s a language of 99% French cognates! I am loving this! I pretty much just have to forget a little French to make this work… and then figure out fractions, and metric, and “plumb” and “flush,” and I’m good to go!

I actually have a friend moving to Haiti soon, so I’m hoping to practice some Creole with her on Facebook. And the receptionist at my spa is from Haiti, and is incredibly helpful in reassuring me that I already know all this. Anyone else? Nenpòt moun ki?

I’m hoping to avoid the scene in Bangkok in 2009 where we were all learning Thai on the fly, and practiced phrases together… until the day we realized we had just walked through the lobby of the Marriott as a group loudly repeating, “Thank you, thank you, thank you…” over and over. It’s too late for the Thais, but we’d like the good people of Haiti not to think we’re insane. Who wants insane people building their house?

* Let’s... play... some... HOCKEY!