Uganglish

This past Saturday I actually had a pretty good day. Almost every Saturday my counterpart and I hold meetings or classes for teachers who are pursuing their teaching certificate while they are working, we call them peer group meetings (PGMs). We go over content that will be on their exam and help them to improve their overall teaching. This past Saturday my counterpart was conducting a session on how to teach reading and writing to primary students. A lot of what she discussed was with English grammar and rules. Yes yes, I know it is MY native language, but if you ask me to diagram a sentence I will look at you dumbfounded. Well not really, but for the most part, it's amazing how well Ugandans know the technicalities of the English language yet have a hard time speaking it or understanding a native speaker. Anyways, so at the PGM the students were asking about pronunciation and my counterpart asked me to assist her and felt it was more appropriate for me to teach this part of the lesson (ok, all of you who know me can get off of the floor and stop laughing). I had a great time. First, I have to explain how I sound when I talk to Ugandans. If I speak like I do in the United States no one can understand me. Therefore, I try to not only slow down and pronunciate, but I have adopted the accent that we Peace Corps volunteers call Uganglish. It's hard to describe but it's a version of the British accent with every letter in every word emphasized (the first time I heard another volunteer speaking Uganglish I thought they were acting like a moron, and now of course I am doing it too…). When I started to help them with pronunciation I gave a small disclaimer that depending where you are that words in English will sound different: England is different than America, the northern and western part of American is different from the southern part of America, etc. This created an uproar. So I said that I will help them be able to speak like an upstate New Yorker (stop rolling your eyes, haha). I began with speaking with my normal accent and speed of speech. I was glad that they could tell a difference but after about 3 minutes they said that I was 'driving them crazy' because they couldn't understand what I was saying. Anyways, after explaining that most letters and letter combinations, especially vowels, are pronounced differently depending on the word, like owl and own, either and weight, etc, they started to ask me about specific words. Most words when I hear them spoken incorrectly I let it go because it is not usually a big deal, however there was one word that I just cringed when they said it: leopard. They say it like lee-oh-par-D. I made them practice saying it like 5 times. Although it was fun to have them repeat after me and recognize that their version of English actually may not be right, it got a little taxing. Sometimes they would argue with me and tell me I’m lying when I told them how to pronounce a word. I’m like: It’s MY language, don’t question me about HOW to say to it. Then, I had one student ask me how to pronounce the word realia. I told him it’s not a word. He said, and my counterpart also tried to convince me of this, that it is in reference to real objects. I told them over and over again that they made it up because it’s not a word, even showed them it’s not in a dictionary, but to no avail. They still don’t believe me to this day.

I know this is a long blog posting, but I also wanted to mention that I tried to teach some of the teachers and boarding kids how to play kickball on Saturday. You may think that kickball is one of the easiest games on earth, but the only game they really know is soccer. We take for granted that everyone is familiar with baseball and understands the concept of hitting/kicking a ball then running to a thing called a base with the object of the game to run in a diamond to reach a place called home. Trying to explain the basics of the game and the concept of ‘outs’ and other general rules took almost an hour. Other details like leading, stealing, strategy, positioning, etc. will have to come another day. Again we take for granted that everyone knows how to catch because football and baseball are so ingrained in our society. To see 13 year old boys and adult men wave their arms frantically as a ball hits them in the chest is hilarious. I think about 2 balls were caught. Also, they understood that after the player kicks the ball that the outfield needs to retrieve it but they think that they can run with it faster than it would take to throw it in, which we all know isn’t true. So getting people out didn’t happen very quickly. But by the second and last inning they were laughing and cheering as their teammates ran over home base. They are interested in playing again and I like going back to the good old days of playing kickball. Hopefully next time it’ll take less than 2 hours to complete 2 innings.