Mandinka

“In shallah” or good morning to you and me.

We have a new language to learn. Mandinka.  It’s full of phonic sounds, said loudly and with a big smile.  The training is intense.  Two hours of vocabulary, phrases and new sounds, and we are asked about you all, by everyone, all the time.

“Suu moolu lee?”

“I bee be jee”

It transpires that greeting everyone, at length, is essential as not to do so causes great offense. This means that you have to go through a long ritual about everyone before you can ask if you can borrow a pen. If someone comes into the training room everything stops for half an hour.

In a group of two there’s nowhere to hide and it’s reminiscent of O Level French (not my forte) with list of vocab for homework and tests next day.  So saying the tutor is a tall, thin, impeccably dressed Gambian man who speaks 5 languages and laughs at my poor attempts whilst being very encouraging “abaarake abarte”.  Luckily Pete is in a different group as he seems to find the whole thing much much easier – swot.

We have now covered the dizzy heights of greetings, numbers and on Monday we have the language for market bargaining.  A double whammy of four hours which we will have to put into practice at the market alongside the tutors later in the week.