The days I drive to Kapoeta
can be stressful because most of the time I am the only white person in town,
and therefore I attract a lot of attention without trying. I had been getting
really annoyed with the traffic officers pulling me over for no reason and then
having to deal with their poor English and my non-existent Arabic. Someone
suggested that I speak to them in Spanish just to mess with them and I was
totally on board until I went to actually say something in Spanish and I
couldn’t even remember a greeting. The only thing that was coming to me was
“aloha” and I knew that wasn’t right. Then I thought I would ask if they spoke
Spanish (in Spanish) and what came out was “hablo iyong Espanol?” which is a
combination of Spanish and Toposa. Fail. I ended up having to ask Alyssa what
“hello” was in Spanish because I couldn’t remember it. Hola. Aloha was close,
if we were in Hawaii.
It’s been really REALLY
windy here for the past few weeks and everyone is talking about how they are
“eating dust” because of it. Someone asked me if it was windy in America and I
said that in my village it does get windy during some parts of the year. I was
trying to describe what is a common occurance in west Texas and for the life of
me I could not remember the English word for what I was trying to describe.
What I said in Toposa was that sometimes there are big thorn bushes that go on
the road when it is windy so when you drive you have to make sure you watch the
road. SIX HOURS later when I was in bed, I realized that the word I was wanting
was tumbleweed.
(A bonus that has nothing to do with Texas)
Last night during our story
group I started laughing while someone was praying because there was a goat
near me that had the hiccups. HA!
