IDDS 2011 - Language

My friend Mustafa from Pakistan made it his mission to learn ten new things everyday. I thought that was a pretty cool goal. In that vein, I decided that I would try to speak ten languages everyday. I made sure to greet the Ghanaians everyday in Twi (the national language) and Mo (a local language in the communities where we were working) and I greeted the Zambians everyday in Nyanja. I took every opportunity that I could to brush up my Spanish with the Guatemalans and Mexican. I used the scattered Hindi phrases that I knew with the Indians and Pakistanis. I worked on my German and tried to pick up some Danish with the participant from Denmark. I attempted to speak Portuguese with the Brazilians. I butchered French when speaking to the Cambodians (and one of the Ghanaians who had picked up a bit of French). English was the main language of the event and I tried to use bits of it's Sierra Leonian Krio cousin. And I was speaking quite a bit of Kiswahili as well.

Rose (the Tanzanian on my team) doesn't speak much English, so I was doing quite a bit of translation. There were four other Kiswahili speakers at the event, so we shared the task as much as possible. Denis (the Ugandan on my team) and I each did it about 40 percent of the time at team meetings, and unfortunately, there were some that we just had to recap later since after a while, my brain needed a break from translating. I definitely couldn't convey all of the meaning as we went along since there are a lot of subtleties in English that get lost in translation and also, my vocabulary has some gaps in it. During a lot of sessions, I would frantically signal to speakers to talk more slowly (and one at a time) so that I could translate (and periodically I would have to lean over to Rose and say "I don't understand him/her at all"). It was pretty difficult to both translate and share ideas during team meetings, but Dennis, Rose and I all seemed to manage, and our teammates were very patient with us most of the time. At the end of the summit, people voted for Rose to speak at our closing ceremony, which made me really happy. She delivered part of her speech in English, which was wonderful, but for the bulk of it, she spoke much to fast in Kiswahili and Joseph from Tanzania was struggling to keep up.

I also signed up to compile the language sheets for people to learn some useful phrases in Twi and Mo. It was a good way to pick up some additional phrases. The languages have a few letters and sounds that we don't really have in English, but I was pretty proud when I managed to pronounce the word "kpegri" to the satisfaction of some of our Mo speakers. You pronounce it just like it's spelled.

I have to admit that I'm a bit disappointed with myself that I didn't have the opportunity to learn more languages while I was there. I know it would have meant a lot to the Zambians if I had picked up some Bemba and similarly I would have loved to learn some Khmer from the Cambodians. Still, the language center of my brain definitely got a healthy workout and I am glad that everyone was so patient as I struggled with their languages and made tols of nistakes.

Introduction
My Project (Part 1)
My Project (Part 2)
Other Work
Delivering Content
My Team
Language
Where We Stayed
Suame Magazine
New Longoro
Maker Faire
Food
Potluck
Ramadan
Transportation
Accra