Bueno. Today was my last day at CETLALIC and in Cuernavaca, and I feel like it was a good day for closure for my short (3 week) life here - the life at the school, the social life, and the life with the family I´ve been living with. It´s sad to go, and I´m grateful for my time here, but I´m ready to go home and start approaching Spanish from different angles.

Yesterday our maestro, Roberto, instructed us to go home and ask our host families for some Mexican jokes, then bring them back to class and make him laugh. So last night at the dinner table I pulled out my notebook and asked everyone to tell me jokes. I´ve been living with a part-time nurse close to retirement whose 3 grandchildren live across the street with their mom and who come over often, so the kids start pulling out jokes which I guess circulate in their milieu. So the 8 year old boy starts telling this joke about African children not getting presents from Santa Claus. I said ´¡no me gusta ese chiste!´ and looked to the 15 year old boy for another one. He goes on to tell a joke which I´m pretty sure was about gay men not having balls, though to tell you the truth I wasn´t following enough of it to say for sure. I didn´t like that one either, and asked for another, so they gave me one pretty lame one about baloons, the another one which used a play on words about a little chicken named Resistol which I didn´t at all get but recited to Roberto this morning and he did in fact laugh then explained it to us. We then had a pretty interesting discussion about culture and humour, cultural stereotypes used in humour, and the grammatical function of the subjunctive used in spanish humour. Then he gave us a couple good jokes in Spanish, suitably dirty and political to be fun!

Classes have been great. I´ve actually mostly been with the same teacher, Roberto, which isn´t the norm (classes rotate and get reshuffled every week), but there are very few students right now so it is a little more difficult to make sure students are suitably arranged to their skill levels, plus I was sick for 2 days when I had a different teacher in the middle week. Roberto takes a very structured approach to language learning - he sets out a road map of the grammar from the beginning then gets us to learn to use the different branches in the mood\tense tree, plus learn different exceptions and helpful rules to decode idiomatic uses within the gramatical system. He likes to joke around and have fun in class through the examples or in discussions

Normally every Friday there is a special celebration for those students who are leaving CETLALIC, where the staff brings in a cake onto the patio then professors say a few words about each departing student before giving them their diploma, then the students say a bit in spanish with varying degrees of proficiency, then all the departing students surround the cake, bend over with their hands behind their back, and take a bite out of it at the same time. (It´s then cut up so you get the piece you bit into). Today there were 5 of us moving on, which made for crowded cake biting. But this week has been exceptional in that there were people leaving on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, so there was cake 4 days this week! It felt good to get the diploma and say my gracias a todos. I grabbed some promotional material I´m going to try to put up at Kings and Huron Universities - I´d definitely like to promote CETLALIC to anyone who is interested in learning Spanish effectively, and who simultaneously would like to learn about the many solidarity and rights movements which flow through and beyond Mexico.

Today was also the 15th birthday of Angel, the oldest grandson in my host-household. In Mexican culture the 15th birthday for a girl is a very important event meriting a big party, but for a boy, I guess it´s no big deal. So we all headed out to the mall (Cuernavaca Plaza) and dined at Pizza Hut, which was oookay, but nothing compared to Marco Polo, an Iplace downtown with a wood stove and the best pizza I´ve had in a long time. Anyway, it was nice to dine with the family (we also had a 6 month old baby with us, my host-mom´s new grandson - his mom is a professional ballerina and has a show, so we are babysitting). Afterwards we went around the Plaza and I hung out with the kids. Geraldo, the youngest (Dennis the Menace-like), was having a ball imitating Michael Jackson dance moves, so he was running around the mall spinning around, grabbing his crotch and thrusting his pelvis out. I was a little worried the security guards with automatic rifles might have been thinking about taking him out, but we all made it out OK.

When I got home I called one of the other students from the school who had said she might be heading out tonight. Her and another woman were at a bar downtown so I hopped on a bus to join them. I had a nice night chilling with them on a patio over beers and marguaritas with a mariachi singer behind us laughing about school and cultures and life. We were joined by a young Cuernavacan woman who is doing research with one of the CETLALIC students and doing her PhD at Colombia in NY, but who also visits Toronto often and said she would visit me next time she´s up. It´s interesting, every time I travel I end up meeting a very metropolitan crowd of people, and it is in fact a global metropolitan class of people who are more members of a global culture than just their own national ones. CETLALIC attracts students who have interesting perspectives and experiences on issues which go far beyond the borders of their communities and their countries, and its been very interesting to share and hear those experiences both in a social setting and in the midst of our language studies.

So I´m back at the house now, about to hop in bed, then tomorrow I´m off to Mexico City for 4 days on my own, which I hope will both be fun and frugal, because I´m damn near broke!

¡Hasta Luego, Cuídate!

(Cuernavaca, Mexico)

So we got downtown and I most definitely took us on a terrible route to get to the museum, so we stopped at a tienda and I bought us both ice cream bars. We got to the museum a little late but caught up with the group, who had an English speaking tour guide who was obviously very enthusiastic about the museum. The museum is actually a house, the house of an American artist named Robert Brady. The building was originally a part of a Franciscan convent (the cathedral is still attached next door) built in the 16th century which he purchased when he moved to Cuernavaca (I think in the 60s). Equipped with access to his fathers fortune, he proceeded to decorate the casa exquisitely with art from around the world. Every room is positively stuffed with art, carvings, statues, beadworks, from every continent and many epochs. Everything is placed acording to his artists aesthetics. For instance there is a Hindu Buddha placed in an enclave that was added to a shower because it was directly visible through the doorway in the next room. The interior is painted with particular colors which they called ´Brady Colours´ and he left them instructions for how to mix them before he died. Brady died in 1986 and his house was turned into a museum afterwards. The website of the museum is here. Pictures from a Google search.

(Water, Food and Work)

Warning: this will probably only be interesting to language nerds

Having recently had a couple one-hour Kiswahili sessions with a private teacher, I have to say, at the end of a language lesson I’m left mentally exhausted, with a small headache from the sheer exertion of active listening and from the inability to form complete thoughts or sentences. A language teacher truly sees people at their most incapable: blustering with simple phrases and awkward social interactions in the target language. Communication is the fundamental way we exist in the world, and learning a new language is the purposive act of obliterating one’s ability to communicate in the world, moving back to the infant stage of communication (without the benefit of their incredible linguistic acquisition abilities) and learn not through natural repetition and observation but by memorizing lists of words on paper and codified grammatical rules.

There are many stages of language learning, depending on how you go about it. For me, the first period isn’t so painful. You can spend weeks, months, or years reading through a textbook, making word lists and flash cards, doing grammar exercises, listening to audio dialogues, doing simple back and forth conversations like ‘hello, how are you, what did you do today, I’d like some coffee please’. But eventually, you’ve learned a sufficient number of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and those crazy prepositions, conjunctions, and grammatical rules that hold them all together that you’re really on the verge of being able to communicate a practically infinite number of things by combining your knowledge of the language in different ways. This is what’s necessary to have real conversation, not just formulaic exchange. And yet, you’ve never ever had to do that! And when you try, you realize you’re missing all sorts of vocab, and grammar, and other things that you need, and you simply can’t think fast enough or remember enough of your flash cards to get out a whole sentence.

I think there’s a threshold which is a somewhat difficult one to cross, where you need to, through practice and effort, force your mind to combine all these things into something which is an integrated language and gives you the basis of fluent communication. I think of it as a basic matrix from which you can add more complexity. You can learn all sorts of words and phrases without having this dynamic matrix capable of rapidly generating communication in appropriate ways. Right now I’m somewhere in the midst of this threshold (and thus the headaches from the language sessions). I’m able to communicate in novel ways only with much effort, but as I make that effort I make progress and am able to integrate more of what I’ve learned.

I think it’s interesting that when I was learning French, by the time that I was beginning to form this sort of basic matrix of fluency I probably had a vocabulary of about 1000 words and had been working on the language for nearly 2 years. With Swahili, I’m reaching that point with only maybe only 2-300 words. This is not because Swahili is more simple or has a small vocabulary, just that I now have the capacity (and possibly confidence) to try to communicate at an earlier stage of vocab acquisition. Also, once you know some verb grammar, a single word verb can be conjugated to say a lot of different things.

So for the grammatically curious, I’ll write out a little Swahili grammar lesson, using one verb, a noun and an adjective or two, two tenses, one case, and two subjects.

Ok, let’s take a verb, let’s say, ‘to want’. Verbs don’t stand on their own like they do in English, they get conjugated with a whole slew of pieces of information (in fairly straightforward ways, unlike French). So every verb in itself is a verb root. For ‘to want’, this is: -taka

In the most basic conjugation of a verb, you have a subject, then the tense, then the verb root.

Let’s take two subjects, I and you. I is ni-(pronounced 'knee') and you is (conveniently) u-

Now lets take two tenses: present –na- and future –ta-
So already we can put these together to say a few things:

Ni – na – taka: ninataka I want
Ni – ta – taka: nitataka I will want
U – na – taka: unataka You want
U – ta – taka: utataka You will want

Now if we add a noun, let’s say… shoes. Ok, so in Swahili, nouns work in a class system. All human and most living nouns exist in one class. Everything else is split into several other classes. Shoes is in a class called the ‘ki/vi’ class, for a reason now to become apparent. Shoe is kiatu and shoes is viatu.

So put them together… Ninataka viatu – I want shoes.

Adjectives go after the noun, as they do in French (shoes red, not red shoes). Some adjectives just stand on their own, but just for fun lets choose one that doesn’t. Let’s talk about our new red shoes! New is -pya and red is –ekundu

To talk about new shoes, you have to make the adjective agree with the ki/vi class noun. A new shoe is kiatu kipya and new shoes are viatu vipya. Red, because it starts with a vowel, changes the prefix a little bit. Red shoe: Kiatu chekundu, red shoes are viatu vyekundu.

You gonna want some new red shoes???
Utataka viatu vyekundu vipya?!

I want a red shoe:
Ninataka kiatu chekundu

I should stop there, but as a bonus, how to say, I want ‘it’/I want ‘them’ (referring to the shoes). Real simple. You take the prefix (it’s actually the subject prefix not the noun prefix, but in the case of ki/vi, they’re the same), and you insert it between the tense and the verb root.

So to say I want it (the shoe), you say: Nina – ki – taka: Ninakitaka
and you will want them: Uta – vi – taka: Utavitaka

Hooked, want some homework? (Pete you’re the only one I expect to do this). The verb root for ‘to like’ is –penda, the infinitive form of ‘to eat’ is kula, and the adjective for ‘blue’ is –a buluu (it changes the ki/vi prefixes in the same way –ekundu does). The past verb tense is –li-. Now, how you do you say in Swahili: ‘I liked to eat blue shoes’ (NB. Infinitive verbs follow conjugated verbs in the same way they do in French).

It’s a neat language! And as you can see, it’s really extremely logical and straightforward once you learn the necessary elements.

Wako, Wacko

Neil

My mom had to have a talk with me about writing the blog. I tell you, I’ve been imbued with a feeling of guilt about touristy reflections, exotic travels of the young man in Africa. Why is this? Because Huron BRAINWASHES its students! Actually it teaches cross-cultural sensitivity, appreciation of ones own privilege, and an understanding of the way power works in constructing identity and representing difference, and the consequences this privilege and power has played historically and into the present day. [CGS students will obviously appreciate this, to everyone else, I’m sorry].

Anyway, that being said, as my mom reminded me, most of the people who might be reading this may have never been anywhere in Africa, and would like to hear my reflections. I’m reminded of something James Ferguson wrote in his book Global Shadows, that people who work in Africa are especially sensitive about people’s perceptions of Africa and their tendency to think of Africa as one place, one country, one condition. He wrote that the common response when he is asked about ‘Africa’ is to say: ‘well, I can’t tell you anything about Africa, it’s a diverse continent with 54 countries and thousands of ethnic groups, lots of different situations. I can, however, tell you about the people/place I work in’.

This response though can be counterproductive because it may not be appreciated by the general audience, and it fails to actively engage how people think about Africa as a unity. Africa, as much as it is a continent of great diversity, is still an idea, a unity which people both African and non-African alike subscribe too. The ‘African’ identity is being used in new ways in many locales and ethnic homelands to reinvent and reinvigorate people’s ideas of themselves, their culture and their political future.

So yes, I am writing one mzungu’s own perceptions of a specific country, time and place in Africa, and I cannot speak to any other place in Africa. However I might be able to engage ideas about Africa and challenge the persistent notion that Africa is somehow a place ‘in the past’ or a place that is fundamentally deficient – ideas that keep on popping up in the way that people think about Africa.

Ultimately, as a Canadian writing cross-cultural reflections in Africa, I’m going to be representing poverty, conditions to which I am not accustomed. I’ve been here for 10 days, and have only had running water for 3 or 4 of them; I get accosted by beggars, scammers, and drunks; walk across the street so I don’t breath in fumes from garbage piles on fire; can’t walk too far without smelling human shit; worry about fatal accidents while on the road; etc…. These are experiences westerners will inevitably write about when they do report on their experiences in Africa. It’s a way of saying: ‘hey look what I survived!’ and wearing that badge of the hardy traveler.

It’s hard not to represent these things without reinforcing myths about Africa. So I’m not really sure how to deal with that! But I don’t really intend to focus on those things. I know there are all sorts of reasons that public infrastructure is wanting which are political, historical, and economical, which say as much about the rest of the world as it does about Africa. The processes which keep people in poverty are more important than the personal discomfort I feel when a person on the street understandably sees opportunity when they spot an (albeit poorly dressed) white person on the street.

So it is important to dig deeper, but it’s also reasonable to share what’s on the surface. Thus I will attempt to be a bit more unabashed in writing about what I’ve been doing and my reflections on Dar, while also trying to do analysis when I’m able.

Until then, my thoughts,

Neil

This post is kind of late, I had internet issues but we're good now so I'm just going to post what I wrote earlier. Welcome to my blog! My intention is for it to be part travelogue, part reflection on the academic and research questions I’m pursuing here. As I just landed today in Dar es Salaam, this post will definitely be on the travelogue side.

                My flight was three hours late (there was a problem with the plane we were supposed to have), and I stupidly lost my notebook in Heathrow, but we touched down 10am this morning no problem. Moving from the new Heathrow Terminal 5  to Dar es Salaam is a stark transition from privilege to poverty. Kai picked me up from the airport and drove me in to her family’s compound, where they have built guest houses. There was a lot of construction on the road, and most of it was nicely tarmaced. My room has a bed, couch, table, desk and chairs, as well as a microwave, mini-oven and electric stove. No running water though, only a bucket which I can fill with water from a water tank nearby. I realize that this is how most people utilize water in rural Africa, but I have no idea how! I went to the store and bought a package of cups so I could pour water over my hands with them and wash things separately. There’s a small trickle of running water now though and apparently it should be fixed shortly. But I’ll learn how to get by with the bucket in the mean time!

                My current place is next to a new shopping centre which is extremely convenient, just a 10 min walk. It’s got a grocery store and two other stores which might be equivalent to Hart and Giant Tiger, with a lot of clothes and other essentials. There’s also some cafes, specialty shops, a book store, and an internet café though I haven’t found it yet (though obviously I will have by the time this is posted). I picked up a cheap cellphone, I’ll give my number to anyone who wants it, just message me. I’m being tempted to buy a cellular modem for my laptop, which has quite good speed internet mobile access (note to mom: that means I could connect with my laptop from anywhere I could use a cellphone). They’re way ahead of Canada here with that stuff!

                I was pleasantly surprised that nobody yelled ‘mzungu’ at me while I walked through the neighborhood today, or even conspicuously ogled me! This was very common in Kakamega, Kenya, last year, though it wasn’t something that bothered me so much. Maybe I’m going to miss the attention!

                I’m munching on a bowl of beef/plantain stew right now, it’s pretty good. Bananas are cooked before they’re yellowed, and they have a consistency and taste much like potatoes. Kai brought me over a bowl of it. Once the stove (and water) is working I’ll be able to cook more for myself. I don’t think I’ll have any trouble doing this. I already picked up some garlic and onions, beef stock, oil and vinegar, and soup mix. Once I have a fridge I’ll get more veggies and meat and be able to do all kinds of culinary magic.

                It’s a little intimidating being here. I’m a little nobody in a big city. I’ll admit to a couple ‘oh jeez, what have I gotten myself into?’ moments, but I’m pretty confident overall. It will be very interesting once Arja is here and she introduces me to some different sectors of the society. Until then I’ve got some reading and exploring to do, and some Swahili to practice.

                I may as well keep my blog posts short or else no one will read them! More later. Goodnight world.

Neil