from grain to table!

Here is the last stage for our corn! First a photo of Marc and Benjy de-graining the dried corn cobs. Then I'm afraid no photo of it being milled in the village, as I had to leave it there in the morning and go back and collect it in the afternoon. Next, a photo of it made into "pâte", a fairly solid paste which you eat with whatever sauce takes your fancy! In this case a fairly non-traditional mince and tomato sauce with tinned peas!

Benjy may be looking as if he has been forced into child labour, but I promise he volunteered his services!



Of course, it would usually be eaten with fingers, but we were hungry and it was hot!

context

A: Is it true?
B: Yes, it happened just like we thought it would.
A: Oh no. And is it bad?
B: Uh-huh – at least 5 have been affected.
A: Oh dear. How long do they think it will last?
B: It could be up to three weeks.

I hope that as you read this conversation you found that you understood every word and yet still didn't have a clue what these people were talking about. This is how I sometimes feel at our current stage of language learning (though I also have times where I don't understand many of the words!).

Language is more than just learning vocabulary and getting to grips with grammar. It also involves relationships, and knowing what the person you're talking with knows about which you therefore don't need to mention explicitly.

This means that when you come into a village where everyone has known everyone from birth, and spends most of their time together, you are bound to lack a lot of the shared knowledge. I sat through an hour-long church meeting recently where everyone else knew what the problem was which was being talked about, but I didn't! So although I understood quite a lot of what was said, I was missing the crucial bit of information necessary to work out the relevance of what everyone was saying!

Of course, when people are talking directly to us they do adapt what they say accordingly. They know we don't know the same people, and haven't experienced the same events. But even then, there may be cultural assumptions we don't share.

For example, I was telling my seamstress how much Simon liked the new trousers she had made for him.

Me: This morning he told me, “Mummy, I want to wear my new trousers!”
Seamstress (in a jokey manner): Ah, was he going on a journey?
Me: (puzzled silence until I remembered that here people dress in their best clothes if they are travelling somewhere – quite the opposite from what I would tend to do!)

We could allow ourselves to be discouraged when we realise that we have a far greater task ahead of us than simply learning the rules of a language. Yet it also makes it more exciting, as we have a whole new world to explore, and a new community to become part of. Yes, we'll always be outsiders to some extent, but that doesn't mean we won't have real friends and a positive role to play.

PS Even I don't know what A and B are talking about above ;o)

circle of the year

Spring is green and yellow
and the summer, pink and gold.
Autumn's red soon turns to brown –
the year is getting old.
Wintertime is blue and white –
the ice is crystal clear:
All the colours dance around
the circle of the year.

(Lois Rock, in “My Very First Prayers”)

This poem is in a book of Simon's. It is interesting to read it with him, because he doesn't really remember about European seasons. He is quite fascinated by the idea of snow and ice!

Here in the North of Benin, the harmattan wind is blowing again. This brings us right around our circle of the year, since when we arrived here in February it was the end of harmattan. The harmattan wind is a cold(ish) north wind which blows down to us from the Sahara. At the moment our nights are chilly (down to 15°C) but after some mist early in the morning our afternoon temperatures can go up to 33°C or even higher. The air is very dry, and I have to dig my moisturising cream out again.

The year is basically divided into two parts – about 6 months of rainy season and about 6 months of dry season. The dry season includes harmattan and hot season. Hot season is well-named! We didn't have our thermometer during the last hot season, but we know it was 43°C in our nearest town at the beginning of hot season! The hardest part is that the temperature doesn't even go down much at night, which makes sleep difficult, especially if like us you don't have electricity at night-time, so no chance of ceiling fans. By the afternoon we have hot and hot running water, and one of the loveliest things my husband ever did for me was to manage to cool some water overnight so that I could actually have a coldish shower in the morning!

By the time the rains finally come, it is a real relief to feel the freshness they bring, though at first the drop in temperature doesn't last much longer than the storm! We had big storms at the beginning and the end of rainy season this year – with several trees and branches knocked down in May. The boys found it quite scary, as they couldn't remember the last rainy season, and the rain sounds very loud on our metal roof!

The other wonderful thing about the beginning of rainy season is the speed at which the vegetation grows back. One day everything is dry and bare, and then in the space of a few days there is grass everywhere!

The rains were heavy in the middle of August, and there was one week where we didn't see the sun at all, putting a strain on our solar-powered electricity system and making it nearly impossible to dry laundry. We were grateful to have a generator (and I even resorted to using my hairdryer to finish drying some nappies!).

Then by October the rains are usually dying away again, though this year they went on longer than usual (see my post here). And then we end up back in the harmattan end of dry season. I love harmattan, it is definitely my favourite season here. The only thing I find strange is to know that Christmas is on the way, but not to “feel” Christmassy. There is too much warmth and sunshine, and whereas down in Parakou there were quite a lot of Christmas decorations and things in the shops, here up North I haven't seen anything yet. Simon and Benjy do have an Advent Calendar, and I think I'll put the Christmas tree up this weekend, so we will try to get into the spirit of things. We have been told that Christmas is a big celebration in the church here, so that should help!

We have yet to find out how much of a shock to the system it will be to fly into the UK at the end of February, dropping about 30°C overnight!!

A few photographic memories:

Dry season



After a storm


Near the end of rainy season: