Persevering through language barriers

I grew up speaking English and French, and last year I began learning Dutch to be able to converse with my grandparents in their native tongue. I also thought it would also be nice to understand my cousins when they talk behind my back. Amongst the ten staff at Camp Fi, we also speak Korean, Spanish, German, and Malagasy, (obviously).

Océane has been giving the American staff lessons in Malagasy.  Last week Jessica filmed us introducing ourselves to include our laughable accents in the opening ceremony presentation for Camp Fi 2018! It has been an adventure for all of us as we try to converse with locals or practice together. For example, it is not uncommon for one of us to ask for the hot sauce by saying “sakay por favor” instead of “sakay azafady indrindra”; often accompanied by “DARN IT!” as we realize our brain is processing the wrong foreign language.  Or today, Laura asked me “How do you say, how do you say in French?” and I responded “Cómo se dice”…..SILLY BRAIN! UPLOAD A NEW DICTIONARY, PLEASE AND THANK YOU! If only it were that simple. Instead, our brains tease us by responding, “ERROR. FILE NOT FOUND”. So instead we continue to laugh as we butcher word pronunciations 50 times before finally getting it right.
us far we have learned how to introduce ourselves and say simple phrases such as: “we are students and teachers at Camp Fihavanana”. I found Malagasy very phonetic once I got the hang of the vowel sounds. The trickiest vowel for me has been the letter “o” because it sounds like a long “u.”

Learning Malagasy and camper names outside of the mini class sessions have been a huge challenge, because natives like to drop syllables randomly. To make it even more confusing different people will add different accents or drop different syllables, making it nigh impossible to visualize the word said. Manahoana means hello in Malagasy but it is also pronounced

Manôan, and Manôna. And it gets even worse with people’s names. Unless the name is French derived, I haven’t been able to correctly pronounce any camper’s name until I see it written. However, it’s worth the effort to see the camper’s eyes light up when we correctly pronounce their name. Two days ago, I finally memorized every single campers name!

Organizing a camp like Camp Fi has taught me to be creative in my English and Chemistry lessons and soccer practice to surpass the language barrier and maintain the attention of 30 restless teenagers. The song “Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes” was came in handy to teach the campers body parts in an entertaining fashion. Campers have never heard of classic American games like red light green light, ninja, scoot your butt, WAH, Simon says, or classic camp songs like “baby shark”. Its weirdly awesome to see high schoolers playing red light green light with the enthusiasm of a 5-year-old who has never played it before.

Staffing Camp Fi is a lesson in perseverance. It demands the courage to be goofy in front of teenagers who have never seen a clown, be VERY wrong when learning new names and words, the creativity to have conversations in Malaga-lish and the boldness to direct 30 sometimes stubborn teenagers only a few years younger than you.  

I don’t know…it would still be cool to upload a new dictionary into my brain.