The site announcements were made this morning and……….Ta-Dah…… We are going to Ramotswa (pronounced like "remote" control with a SWA on the end. It is town of about 20,000 which is 30” drive South of Gabarone, virtually a suburb. Although we have not visited it yet (we will have our site visit this week), one of the volunteers shadowed there and spoke highly of it. Both our host mother and a pharmacist we have met have family and friends there. The PC also thought it would be a good place for us given our mental health backgrounds and my interest in a secondary project to do with mental health, since the only psychiatric hospital in BW is in Lobatse which is close by. We will have more to say after return from the site visit, but we are pleased.
I now have been in BW long enough to make a few unsolicited comments about Setswana, the BW language, and even suggest a few improvements. I know, I know, Setswana has been around for over 1000 years without any help from me, but I am an American and we are always trying to build a better mousetrap. It’s in the genes.
One of our guest speakers at the training described SWINGLISH which is the combination of Setswana and English that is very common here. You can be listening to a conversation which says:
blah blah blah CELL PHONE blah blah blah.
Or the Newscaster will say:
blah blah blah ECONOMIC CRISIS blah blah blah or
blah blah blah DOWN JONES PLUMMETS blah blah blah.
These latter two are especially disturbing because you can’t figure out just how much further your pension 401K has shrunk, but you know it isn’t good.
So number one, I am all for Swinglish and want to add some word combinations of my own. They will be easy to say and convey their meaning when you hear them.
Secondly, Setswana has 15 classes of nouns! (I am not joking here folks). In addition, when you want to say “my, your, his/her, our, yours, theirs, it, me, you, him/her…) you must use the correct marker for the subject, object and adjective depending on which class of noun is used. Each of these markers may be different in the same sentence and requires the appropriate “e o a ee aa oo rone lone bone le la go mo or ma”—to name a few.
Therefore for my other suggestion I want to introduce the new word RUFUS.
(Don’t ask. It just came to me as an inspiration in the middle of a night when our rooster, Mr. Jack was loudly auditioning for a spot on Botswanan Idol). The plural is RUFI (pronounced RU-FEE which avoids the unpronounceable RUFUSSSSES). “RUFUS” or “RUFI” would only need to be said once, and would take the place of all the markers anywhere in the sentence.
Some examples:
Instead of the phrases: thowswane onnye (Little flies) or tsiakope tsenye (Little grasshoppers), you could just say “Rufi itti bitti”. It is of course helpful when you can point to what you are referring to. So you could point and say
“Damit, lotsa rufi itti bitti”
Instead of needing to learn a whole lot of phrases for one-ton animals like: lekolonkwane kgologadi (a huge young elephant), kwena etona (a big crocodile) or natshana ee bogale (the angry bull water buffalo that waits in the bushes to attack the hunter), you can cover them all with one phrase “Rufus enormus”
BW would need only one yellow road sign warning of large animals likely to block the road “Rufus enormus crossin”. With the signs the way they are now and you are cruising at 60 mph, it is very difficult to accurately read which large animals are in the vicinity. Ultimately it makes little difference, since if there are none present, you have already whizzed past the spot before you translate what animal might have been there. If they are present and you survive the impact, you aren’t going to get out of your car anyway until people with water cannon show up.
A more urgent warning comes when you are about to hit one of these large animals in your car and then you can warn the driver “Aieeee watchee rufus!!”. This is usually accompanied by the universally accepted gesture of crossing your arms in front of your face in an X.
“Rufus” also becomes quite helpful to use with food, particularly mystery meat, food such as tripe (intestines) or the delicacy of sheep eyeballs. With my suggested improvements, it would be much easier to point and say “Yum Yum rufus”.
It does occur to me however that in my two years here, I may never have need of the phrase “Yum Yum rufus”. It is more likely I would exclaim “Rufus me gaggin”.
As a cultural side light, the eyeballs of a sheep are traditionally offered as an honor to the chief or Kgosi. Since my Setswana name is Kgosi, I am, for any ceremonies, changing my name to Ithsogobegela Setlhare which translates “one who stoops to hide behind a tree”.
Let me now close this entry since I just heard the newscaster say “blah blah blah DOWN JONES PLUMMETS blah blah blah”. I now figure that my entire 401K will buy two cows and a sheep. My challenge when I return to the States is to stretch out the organ meats from these animals to feed the two of us for the rest of our natural lives.
Your Botswana correspondent on the scene,
Ithsogobegela Setlhare me gaggin
(one who stoops to hide behind a tree to vomit after eating a sheep’s eyeball)
PS attached is a movie of the great cookie baking experiment. Unfortunately I think the major consequence of this film hitting the Internet is that Maureen's imitation of Mr. Jack will go down with Howard Dean's "rant". It has probably cost either of us any chance at running for the White House.
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