Inshallah, I will be in Conakry tomorrow night for New Year’s eve. The excitement amongst the stagiares is palpable. Some overly industrious soul even took it upon themselves to schedule times for the computers. C’est vrai.
I’m starting to work past and future tenses into my French, but my frustrations with our classes, both language and tech at this point, are mounting. We have essentially taken over our tech sessions, so that we are teaching ourselves the material we should know. This doesn’t really solve the problem, but it removes some of the blame from the formateurs if the sessions are useless. The real problem with tech is that none of it is directly applicable. We all know how to do the different types of analysis, but we have no idea whatsoever how to explain them to people who may have very little education, or who may speak French poorly, not to mention our own mangled efforts at parleying. In truth we need people who have been in the trenches to be working with us on this stuff, but instead we’re getting broad overviews on things that we generally already know.
As for language, sometimes its fine, but lately my formateur hasn’t been prepared and I spend a maddeningly large amount of time waiting for him to figure out what to teach us. But the thing is we don’t need more formal teaching. We need practice. Beaucoup de practique. We need practice comprehending what people are saying and practice working in different tenses and with different pronouns. Instead we spend the days learning how to say we are sick, which we can put together ourselves if we really needed to.
Anyway, sometimes I am not that frustrated, and other times, like today, I get pretty down. I have a long way to go language-wise, and I want to maximize every possible moment, but things are not working out that way. I suspect that, starting after we return from Conakry, we will form a small group of people who are interested in meeting a few times a week solely to practice speaking French with each other. If we’re really on the ball we’ll organize some gin and tonics to loosen our tongues.
Speaking of which, Guineans are fans of palm wine, which they make by basically extracting palm juice and capping the bottle for a few days. It tastes vaguely like fermented urine, but a bottle costs less than a third of what a can of coke costs. I’ve finely figured out that the building outside my family’s compound is a bar, specializing in palm wine and gin. Explains the loud music into the late hours, but doesn’t make me any less grumpy about the noise.
Dear lord, time is going fast.
