outside in

We had some good friends to stay here in Pèdè last weekend. They are a family we knew in our church in France – in fact Alexandra and I knew each other before we knew our husbands, and she was the first person to talk to me about SIM's work in Benin. She did a work placement in the hospital here in 2000, and Guillaume, like me, first visited Benin in 2002. This summer they've come back to Benin so that she can do a few weeks' work in the hospital and he can help with a music camp. Their first child was born just 6 weeks before Simon, and so it was exciting for us, if not for the kids themselves, to see them together again! All four kids got on well together, which gave us parents more time to chat over the weekend.

It was a refreshing break for us to spend time with old friends, to relax, reminisce and share news. Another unexpected benefit of them being here was that we were no longer the most “outside” people here. Suddenly we were the ones who knew people, who could explain how the church service goes, who were able to give a rudimentary translation of the sermon, and so on. For the first time I had the impression of being on the inside – as relative as that may be!

This is not to say that I am no longer experiencing culture shock, but at least it has been balanced out a bit by our weekend.

A photo of our church taken back in April:

the old man isn't snoring

Last night, at about 9.30pm, we heard what sounded like children chanting, clapping their hands and banging tins far off in the village. The sound continued for quite some time, and gradually moved towards us. It got quite loud as they reached our house, then went quiet before starting up again and moving back into the village. (I didn't see anything ominous in this – we are the last house on our end of the village, and people don't generally go wandering off into nowhere in the dark!)

This morning, when Hélène arrived for work, I described what we'd heard and asked what it was. At first she looked puzzled, then she laughed and said it was the “cho-lo-lo”. That didn't mean anything to me, so she explained that it is a kind of rain dance. When rain is sorely needed, as it is at the moment, people shout and sing and bang things, praying for rain to come. She said that they are chanting, “Come here, come here, rain fall, rain fall!”

I don't know to what extent it is taken seriously, and my Monkolé wasn't really up to asking. She, as a Christian, didn't seem to put much stock by it, and I should imagine that here as much as anywhere some people may just join in to be part of the crowd. Do we really think much about the Gunpowder Plot as we watch our fireworks in the UK on November 5th? And do all those celebrating St Patrick's (especially in France) care about Irish patriotism or the great man who evangelised Ireland?

Anyway, 24 hours later the rain dance doesn't seem to have worked … a shame really since the fields desperately need water.

encouragement

It is a relief to get back into language again after Pastor Samuel's month of annual leave. Encouraging too. Yesterday afternoon I called in to see a friend in the village, my seamstress, Emma. She's single, a bit younger than me (I suppose) and sings in the church choir. She greeted me warmly and brought two chairs out so that we could sit in front of her workshop. I know she speaks French because Grace told me so, but she has never spoken French with me. I'm very grateful, as it makes it that much more easy to stick to Monkolé. We caught up on each other's news, and I found I understood most of what she said, and was able to say more or less everything I wanted to say. It went more slowly than a normal conversation, of course, but it was reassuring to realise that I am making progress and can build on a fledgling friendship!

She told me she'd been away working in her family's fields. The fields are 18km away, so they go and stay there while they're working. Her brother, who is a lorry-driver, drove them out there, and they called him (on their mobile phone) when they wanted him to come back and get them back! She told me they'd planted cotton, corn, millet and soy, and that elephants had been getting into their fields! (My comprehension was helped by having learnt “elephant” in one language session, and by the fact that a friend who works for the Forestry Commission had told us that elephants have been getting into fields north of here and destroying people's crops.)

We also talked about my journeying, the French team who are going to be calling in to see us on Sunday, the state of the road between here and Parakou, and a friend who passed his Baccalauréat (equivalent of A Levels) in Niger and then got it validated in Benin. So all very satisfying for someone like me who likes to natter! I came home praising God for encouraging me and re-motivating me for language sessions!

speaking in tongues

It is quite a privilege to be part of a bilingual family. During my undergraduate studies I was interested in language acquisition, particularly second language acquisition, and, by extension (though it is not the same thing) bilingualism. As I became more fluent in French, and found myself becoming comfortable speaking two languages and switching between them constantly, I wondered what it would be like to grow up with that. I couldn't help envying anyone who didn't have to put hours of effort into learning a second language!

When Marc and I decided to have children, I don't remember even considering the idea of bringing up our children monolingually. It would have seemed odd to me not to speak my mother tongue to my own children – despite not minding speaking French to my husband most of the time! – and since both of us understood both languages, there didn't seem to be any reason not to. What's more, since we knew by then that we were heading for Benin, where the official language is French but many missionaries are English-speaking, it seemed logical to give our kids a headstart.

We chose the OPOL (one person one language) model of bilingualism, whereby one parent speaks one language to the child(ren) and the other speaks the other. In our case that seemed the most natural way to do things.

To my shame as a linguist, I haven't done any formal study on Simon's language acquisition, though to be fair we've been pretty busy doing other study and moving countries since his birth. But from very early on I was impressed by the the way he obviously understood both languages. As he began to speak, we were living in England, and he was going to nursery in an English-speaking setting. So although we'd decided to deliberately speak French between us parents, his English developed faster than his French (in production, at any rate).

When we moved to Benin, for the first eight months he was hearing and speaking more French than English, as he was spending most of his time outside the family with French-speaking Africans. It was fairly obvious that his French production overtook his English at that point. After we moved to the village we were spending quite a lot of time with Grace, an English-speaking Canadian, and the Africans we now spend time with speak more Monkolé than French. His English has seemed to catch up again, and he has started speaking a few words of Monkolé! (So I guess soon I'll be able to say that we are a trilingual family!)

A few months ago another missionary we didn't know very well called in, and in our conversation he was asking about whether Simon spoke French or English better. So I decided to ask Simon:

Mummy: Which language do you speak best, Simon, English or French?
Simon: English.
Mummy (out of earshot of Simon): Peut-être si Papa pose la question en français la réponse sera différente!
Papa: Simon, c'est quelle langue que tu parles mieux, le français ou l'anglais?
Simon (with a huge grin): English!

There's nothing wrong with his sense of humour!

Simon always uses French to speak to Marc and English to me, except occasionally when he decides to joke with me and says something like, “Maman? Qu'est-ce que tu fais?” If I reply in French it makes him laugh. He's used to hearing me speak French, but not to him!

One thing I always wondered about was which language our children would use to speak to each other. It is very interesting – and I can't explain it – to see that Simon prefers to speak English with Benjy than French. A typical example occurred the other day when the following conversation took place at a mealtime.

Marc: Dis merci à Benjamin, Simon.
Simon: Merc- thank-you, Benjy!

Benjy already understands both English and French very well, and has himself begun using a few words – a real mixture! He says “Mumma” (a mixture of Mummy and Maman), “amam” (for both “amen” and “all gone”!), “au'voir”, “bravo” (in French), “aawo” (Monkolé for “no”!), “honey”, “brr-brm” (for any vehicle) and a whole host of animal noises!

As for my poor brain, now that I'm using a third language on a daily basis, sometimes when I switch out of Monkolé I find myself speaking English instead of French!

getting to grips with Monkolé

Our method of language learning is not a traditional one, and we are finding it very useful! I don't want to go into all the details (see any of Greg Thomson's work if you want to know more), but just thought I would explain a few of the principles.

First of all, this method prefers not to talk about “language learners” – since in theory at least you could learn a language alone in a room with book – but “growing participants” – people becoming more and more involved in a language community.

The idea is that you can learn more quickly, and more naturally, by first understanding and responding to language input, and then allowing this passive knowledge to “surface” as active knowledge. This means that at first you don't concentrate on speaking, or on understanding grammar, but on responding appropriately to what someone says to you.

When you do start learning the language, it's important to realise that you will speak it badly. Adults often hate the idea of speaking with grammatical “mistakes” or sounding like a child or someone of limited intelligence, but unfortunately this is inevitable if you are going to communicate your own thoughts and not just memorized expressions.

Those of us who feel we are visual learners don't always like the idea of learning without writing anything down. But the only way to improve listening comprehension is to learn to understand spoken language – insisting on seeing the words won't actually help in the long run! (Few people in the real world speak with subtitles!) Since we are learning a language which is written phonetically, if we learn to hear and speak it accurately, we will automatically be able to read and write it pretty well too!

In a way, using a method like this is liberating when learning a language like Monkolé for which there are no formal courses, very little literature (the New Testament in Monkolé and a few literacy primers), few audio recordings (some sermons recorded for the radio) and for which no systematic grammatical analysis exists.

As parents of small children, we have the advantage of already having a good stock of toy animals for learning to talk about animals, plastic bricks for learning colours and positioning (left, right, next to, etc.), story books to look at with our language helper and so on! Compared to formal language lessons, this format is much more “kid-friendly”, as the children can wander in and out of the room where we are, and can take part in the activities if they want to.

The challenge for us is to discover what we need to learn. We realise that there are a lot of things we don't need to know how to talk about, because they are unknown to the Monkolé people, such as seaside holidays, mountain life, central heating, waltzing, MacDonalds – to name a random few! So what do people talk about? What is important to them? What are the everyday concepts that any small child is aware of, and which we need to know about? Our language helper can help us with this, but we can't just put the question to him, as these things are so obvious to him that he may not realise that they aren't obvious to us!

As for us, we may mistakenly want to learn to talk in categories unknown to the Monkolés. To take an easy example, it's no good asking them whether they describe ginger hair as “orange”, “red” or whether they have a specific word like “ginger”. None of the Monkolés have ginger hair, so there is no “normal” way to talk about it! There are sure to be less striking examples where it is more important to us to listen to what is said rather than asking for Monkolé translations of our way of thinking or speaking in English or French. I can't help but think that the old saying about having two ears and only one mouth applies to language learning too!

Here's Marc learning animals with Pastor Samuel:

oats and beans and barley grow ... actually just peanuts in this case!

We got our first taste of fieldwork today. Admittedly it wasn't much more than a taste, but it was an interesting experience. It rained yesterday evening, and again for much of the morning, and when it stopped, the pastor's wife called in on her way to plant peanuts in the field next to our compound. We said we'd like to see how it was done. We aren't just trying to learn the language, we also want to participate in village life, and since we know nothing about farming at all, this seemed a good opportunity to get started!

I had always imagined that all fieldwork was a hard grind, but soon discovered that planting peanuts isn't so difficult … or at least not if you only do it for 15 minutes! In the photo below you can see Daniel – on the right – going down the rows making holes with the end of his stick. Hélène, Marc and Simon are dropping one peanut into each hole and closing them over with a foot. If you have good aim, you don't even have to bend your back to do it!

This was the second time the field had been planted. We were filling in the gaps where the first peanuts sown hadn't sprouted. We'll let you know how things grow!

Here's my foot next to the hole into which I've just dropped a peanut.

back in benin

The long gap between posts is due to my trip to the UK for my sister Ali's wedding. Marc and the boys stayed in Parakou, and though we all missed each other, everything went smoothly for everyone. Here are a few photos from my time away...

I had hoped to put more than this, but I can't upload any more at the moment (dodgy connection, I think). Our family just before the wedding:

The happy couple triumphant after cutting all the way down through their cake: