I think I speak French now

Or I at least comprehend a noticeably higher percentage of it.

It’s been nearly a year since we arrived here. Today I was in my office doing a bit of online research for some local shops and businesses. Last year I would have been completely frustrated by all the French-only websites with paragraphs of information while being lucky to find two sentences in English.

Today, however, I turned my research into my homework for French class. I copied the text of one of the pages into a Word document, then translated the whole thing into English. Wow, I can do that now!

I’m not claiming to be fluent or anything and I still stumble at cocktail parties; I still prefer my French movies with English subtitles. But I can communicate with our cook. I can read and understand short articles in Jeune Afrique magazine. I can initiate a conversation, even if it’s only to find out if the other person knows more English than I do French. I’m trying to come up with a good lawyer/avocado pun because they are the same word in French: avocat. I can finally read reviews of Bujumbura shops and restaurants online!

We noticed when we were in France and Switzerland that we could check in to our hotels and order in restaurants and the locals did not automatically say to us, “Speak in English,” as they are wont to do with annoying Americans. But they didn’t even recognize us as Americans at first! All they knew was that we weren’t native French speakers but we were more than tourist French speakers. In Europe, our African French apparently sounds different from the French that’s learned in the United States. We learn a different accent here. Although to me, the French here sounds a lot like the French I learned in school; it’s much easier to understand Burundian French over France French.

When babies are exposed to more than one language, they tend to start talking later, but they have higher comprehension and they tend to speak in more complex structures than single words. 

I think I'm in that absorbing, comprehending stage of language learning. A few weeks ago we spent a weekend with some people who spoke almost no English, and I understood at least 80% of the conversation. I didn't say too much, though. I think it's shyness that's holding me back from blabbing in French, not necessarily ability. (Let's face it, I'm fairly quiet in any language.)

The Big Cheese Deal

A couple months ago, Mike took a trip upcountry and on the drive home he called me to say he had a present for me. My first thought was that it was a rabbit, because I really want one and upcountry they have little kiosks that sell rabbits by the side of the road (I'm pretty sure they're not meant to be pets, though, those roadside rabbits). But he was traveling with his boss who I was certain would not tolerate a rabbit in the car for the several-hours' drive back to Bujumbura. So I waited anxiously to see what my present was.

Cheese! Mike had visited a frommagerie, fresh cheese shop/maker, with his boss, sampled the cheese, and knew immediately that I would love it. At Frommagerie St. Ferdinand, they make two kinds of cheese: frommage de vache and frommage de chevre, cow cheese and goat cheese. And boy are they good! It's the heaviest, freshest, creamiest cheese I've ever had. It's all made right here in Burundi with fresh cow's and goat's milk. He bought enough that after a couple months we've just recently run out. (It freezes well.)

We shared our cheese with some friends and everyone else was just as hooked as we were.

Mike said that the cheese maker's brother lives in Bujumbura and would be willing to supply us any time we wanted to order. As it turns out, I'd met this brother independently of Mike. When we were driving around one day Mike said, "The cheese guy's brother lives there," I said, "Hey, I know who lives there!" So I called him up and we made a deal. Thanks to all my friends and coworkers loving the cheese, we had quite a hefty order.

Yesterday I collected the cash from everyone and the cheese was delivered. I think our cuisiniere (cook/housekeeper) was a little confused and overwhelmed handling all the cheese and money, because he was home when the cheese was delivered and I wasn't. It does feel kind of like a drug deal. I have a dining room table covered in cash -- coins are rare in Burundi and even the smallest denomination equalling about 8 U.S. cents has a bill -- and plastic-wrapped cheese packs that look like bricks of cocaine. 

Tonight I'm hanging out at home, waiting for people to stop by and pick up their cheese stashes. I'm a cheese dealer with a major hook-up.

The Cute and the Fuzzy

I've realized that a lot of my posts recently have focused on not the most adorable subjects. Ants, spiders, more ants, tailless geckos, dead kittens, etc. So now here's a treat:

Chicks!


Bunny!


For more barnyard fun, click here.

The microwave doesn't kill ants

Someone at HowStuffWorks.com was reading my mind when they posted this question and answer. To paraphrase: How come the microwave didn't kill the ant on my plate?

Ants in the kitchen are a big problem here and it's impossible to avoid them. They are harmless, except for the fact that they're walking all over your food if it's left on the counter unattended for two minutes. I'm always able to clean any ants off before consumption. But it's true that if you're hoping to kill ants on your food by zapping them, it won't work. Here's why:

Small black ants are only about 2 millimeters long, and they also have a certain amount of intelligence along with built-in temperature sensors. Their intelligence and their small size gives them the ability to survive in a microwave oven.

You may have noticed that your microwave oven does not heat evenly. This is especially true if there is no spinning carousel in the oven (or if you turn the carousel off). The microwave energy in the oven has hot spots and cold spots.

So the ant is walking around, and its intelligence allows it to sense the hot spots and avoid them. Its small size means that if it makes a small mistake, heat dissipates very quickly. That gives her a little extra time to explore for a cooler spot. And the sandwich also created some “shadows” – areas where it absorbed a lot of the microwave energy – giving the ant even more protection.

If you were to constrain the ant so it could not move around, the probability of death is much higher.

Who knew they were so clever and sensitive?

Eventually you learn to live with the ants. You have no other option. You get to the point where as long as they're not biting you and they're sticking to the kitchen where the food is, as opposed to crawling on you while you sleep, you may as well live with them in harmony. There's not enough RAID on Earth to kill all the kitchen ants in Burundi. (Rest assured, a huge amount of our food lives in the refrigerator, which the ants cannot penetrate.)

New posts at What I Eat and Confessions of a Book Addict this week.

I'm glad they didn't get stuck in my hair

We took a little trip into the country over the weekend, to Mutoyi. There are lots of wonderful things to say about Mutoyi, but I'm going to start with something spooky -- giant spiders. We were touring the grounds of a hospital. The children and the nurses and all that stuff was great but we became captivated by giant yellow and black spiders spinning webs in the bushes just over the terrace wall.

I think they are golden orb weavers. There were at least twenty of them, and this one was the king. His body had to be about as long as my thumb. If they are golden orb weavers, then we are lucky they didn't decide to get stuck in our hair as we were leaning over the railing trying to snap photos. Their venom is similar to that of a black widow, but less potent. They are usually not fatal to humans but can cause some nasty swelling and pain around the bite site.

We were in a group, and some people couldn't understand my and Mike's fascination with the spiders. Je les deteste, "I hate them," we heard from more than one person. I tried explaining in my broken French that I like all animals, but I do prefer spiders when they're outside and I'm inside. I think my reaction to the chicks, bunnies, and cow later in the trip proved that I'm an animal equalist. But I've seen chicks, bunnies, and cows before. I'd never seen a spider like this.

Written with information from wikipedia.org.

Femur or Stick?

In preparation for a construction project at my office compound, the lovely palm trees were chopped down and the courtyard has been dug up. Resting on the pile of dirt this afternoon after the workers left is something that looks like a long bone. Cow leg? Human femur? Or maybe just a suspiciously shaped stick? There are some ropes up and I can’t get close enough to take a better look in my skirt and nice office shoes. I’m awfully tempted though. This is the kind of place were it could conceivably be a femur. There are some chips and shards laying around it that look like the same substance, whatever it is. If it is a human femur, would the workers just have left it? Possibly.

What if they disturbed an ancient Indian burial ground causing my office to be haunted with evil spirits? So far nothing evil has happened, but shortly after I noticed the femur I did have some chatty folks pop in for a tad longer than I would have liked them to stay. It didn’t even register as mildly annoying, but maybe the spirits are just warming up.

Despite the sadness of chopping down such nice palm trees, it was a pretty cool scene to watch. It took about a week for the trees to come down. A guy would spend a day at the top of one, whacking off palm fronds with a machete. Then some guys started chopping at the trunk, with machetes as well. When the first tree came down it landed just inches from my office door, smashing a concrete drainage trench that’s going to be replaced anyway. For the second tree, I guess they decided against possible building damage (the second tree was much larger) and they used Burundian Rope Technology to control the fall. They tied a rope to the top of the tree and sent one guy about halfway up it to start chopping (avec un machete, bien sur). The other ten guys stood by the end of the rope on the ground and when the tree started to fall they yanked it in the most convenient direction. They then spent a day digging the stump out of the ground.

It’s been fun having something to watch outside my office window, even though a nice courtyard is being replaced by a concrete building. In these quiet moments at the end of the day I can contemplate femurs.

New posts at Confessions of a Book Addict and What I Eat. Check 'em out!

You know what really grinds my gears? G-8 Edition

You know what really grinds my gears? Conferences held by world leaders to discuss the bad economy and saving the environment that are expensive and have ridiculous carbon footprints just in the amount of jet fuel used to get everyone there.

A few months ago, what was it, 20 leaders who gathered together in London? And this week the G-8 was held in Italy.

They should be leading by example. If they're going to talk about the greatness of renewable energy and reducing carbon footprints, why not have a contest to see which biotech company can develop the greatest solar-powered video conferencing system, and put it to the ultimate test by actually using it. What better way to stimulate innovation in a field they all say they promote and save everyone a lot of money at the same time?

 

Really, what is coming out of these conferences? What is being accomplished? Everyone talks about the good things they want to do, but where are the actions? If they're going to sit around talking about pledges, the least they could do is sit around at home so that they don't look quite so showy.

Every world leader should be forced to take one of those "stay-cations" I've heard so much about. They could promote tourism and service industries in their own capital cities. I think it's lovely that the Obama daughters got to make real gelatto in Italy, but there are plenty of ice cream crafters in the D.C. area who I'm sure would give them the same opportunity. And it would help a small, local business. If only the Secret Service would let them use the Metro, for the real D.C. experience.

Les Fourmis Militaires

Mike left early this morning to meet a friend for a tennis game and from the front yard I could hear him and the guards having an animated discussion but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I went about my coffee-drinking and blog-reading and forgot about it until later, after Mike got home and we were ready to leave for work. “The guards moved the chicken coop,” Mike said. “It’s been overrun by ants.”

Upon opening the front door, we were greeted in the driveway by a small, narrow trench, filled with not just any ants, but army ants. You may have heard about them; they’re also called driver ants, safari ants, or saifu. They are the ants known for destroying anything in their path, particularly infirmed animals and even people who cannot avoid them. The chickens are fine; it looks like their feed dish, not the coop, was in the path of the ants, but the guards moved it away from the trail as a precaution in case the ants change their minds.

Despite all the stories of destruction, these guys (or gals I should probably say) are pretty fascinating to watch. They’ve created a windy trail across the driveway and through the yard and it seems to have sprung up overnight. They certainly weren’t there last night when we came home from work. Standing there and admiring them for too long, the soldier ants left the trail to check us out; they defend the trail and you’d better not get in their way. You can see the larger soldier ants herding the smaller worker ants through the protective trench. Luckily, even the largest ant is much smaller than we are, so a big step backward was sufficient defense.

We are having them fumigated. Our gardener found the nest, and it’s very close to the house, much too close for my comfort. I just hope they don’t change their minds and head in to the house before we can get them taken care of.

Written with information from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siafu. The photo is mine.

Kittens Can't Fly (It Doesn't End Well)

I could have sworn I’d posted about the kittens last December, but a little jog down memory lane / blog archive shows that I did not. I think I probably tried to write about it several times, but it was too painful.

Just before Christmas, Mike burst into my office at the end of the day to pick me up and said, “Grab the camera! It’s raining kittens!”

“Wha?”

I did grab my camera and I ran outside after him. Apparently a Momma cat had stuffed her kittens in the roof of my office building for safe keeping, only one of them fell out and the other two were teetering close to the edge, so they weren’t so safe. The one who fell was fine. Mike found a ladder and pulled the other two out. We decided the best thing to do was put them in a box on the ground below their roof nest. If Momma was coming back for them, she’d be able to find them easily and pull them out of the box.

The next morning we arrived at work with bowls for water and some canned food, just in case the kittens were still there. One kitten was in the box. One kitten, the one who’d fallen off the roof, was wandering around the parking lot a few yards from the box. The third kitten was gone. It was the last day of work before the office closed down for the long Christmas weekend. It was obvious that Momma wasn’t coming back, but these kittens were way too young to be left alone. I couldn’t leave them in the parking lot for three days to be picked up by hawks or attacked by cats that weren’t their Momma. For that last day of work I brought them in to my office. They teetered and squawked and drank some milk and water. Everyone came to visit them, but as much as I talked them up, no one offered to adopt them. I decided to bring them home for the weekend to live on our porch and then on Monday I’d bring them back and raise them as office cats.

We created a nice little home for the kittens on our porch. We found a bigger box for them to sleep in, and they enjoyed napping curled up right on top of each other. They were eating and they were following Mike around whenever he was outside. The one who’d fallen was definitely the stronger, more adventurous one. I wanted to name them Blisters and Crumpet, after David Sedaris’s elf names in “The Santaland Diaries.”

I never should have named them. When we got home from dinner on Christmas Day night… let’s just say they were decidedly ex-kittens. We don’t know what happened, but perhaps there was something wrong we couldn’t see but their mother could and that’s why she left them. I was so sad. They were just stupid little furballs that I’d only known for 3 days but I’d so wanted to do the right thing in bringing them home. Nature is harsh, and Africa nature is especially harsh. I tried to console myself with the circle of life and all that stuff. But it took me awhile to stop being sad because so many people asked about them at work the next Monday morning.

Fast forward to this week. Not a kitten in sight at my office until yesterday morning. The one I found yesterday was a little bit older than the previous kittens. He was walking around the parking lot crying, but scampering away from any person that went near him. He seemed reasonably strong and healthy. A coworker had decided to bring him home at the end of the day. But when I returned to my office after lunch yesterday… another ex-kitten. Even though he seemed strong enough, it appeared he’d fallen off the roof, close to where the original kittens had been stashed. How he got back up onto the roof is beyond any of us.


Today there’s another kitten. It’s stuck in the ceiling above a coworker’s desk. We started hearing it hours ago and haven’t yet figured out how to reach it. There’s no ASPCA or Animal Control officer to call here. We are our own Animal Cops Bujumbura.

Why does this Momma cat keep stuffing her kittens in the roof?

Mousebird TV

A few weeks ago I woke up, looked out the window, and noticed that I could no longer see the top of our largest papaya tree. I went outside onto the terrace for a better look. The tree had fallen down overnight. Even closer inspection showed that the tree had probably been diseased, as the trunk had become soft and spongy.

We weren't that concerned about the papayas, even though it was a pretty cool-looking tree. We have other papaya trees. What we liked best about that specific tree was that it was a popular hangout for a band of speckled mousebirds. These short, fat little birds have a tufted head and a long tail. They are a chatty bunch, chirping and squawking all day long on their branches. The mousebirds like to hang upside down from a papaya, digging in to it to eat the seeds. Since we moved here we've spent a lot of time sitting on the terrace watching the mousebirds in that tree.

But now, with the favored tree gone, we expected to not see much of them anymore. Most of the papaya trees are far from our terrace, except one. We thought that one would be too close to the house for the mousebirds. Low and behold last Sunday afternoon, I looked up from the couch to see five mousebirds sitting in that closest papaya tree, chirping and bouncing and eating seeds. Mousebird viewing from the comfort of my own couch! Of course, I was trying to get some work done and the little buggers were pretty distracting. But I couldn't bring myself to shoo them away.

Because of the proximity to the house, the mousebirds only hang out in that tree on quiet afternoons, usually when I'm being quiet because I'm trying to get work done. 

(Image from E.J. Photo)

New Addition

I have a new addition to my little corner of the blogosphere. Confessions of a Book Addict is where I've started indulging in my book obsession. I love to read and I was inspired by a recent post at The Mummy Chronicles to start writing about my reading. 

Check it out, subscribe, bookmark, comment, enjoy!