They're first reaction was to play the gender-guessing game. Fingers pointed to different photos, accompanied by the words, “Boy. Boy? Girl. Girl. Boy?” New Isatou (there is another Isatou, not Pippi Isatou or grown-up Isatou, who has recently been hanging out at our compound) hasn’t been to school, but she knows the words for “boy” and “girl” in English, so she played Girl?Boy? and practiced English.
After we'd been through the book once, we started again from the beginning. Salimatou, Mamadou's "wife," started to tell a story about one of the pictures, with elaborations by Pippi Isatou.
When the children were done with the book, Kairaba's niece Kadijatou asked to see it. She flipped through quietly, but asked about the bears. It’s unfortunate that I keep coming across photos of bears because there’s really no Gambian animal that I’ve decided makes for a satisfactory comparison. One volunteer told me she's explained bears are “like a dog,” which I guess is sort of true. Bears are more dog-like than goat-like, at least.
Another day I brought out the book and the boys played the “whose wife is this?” game. I liked to point out pictures of old ladies and shout, “Hiruna’s wife!” to which Hiruna would reply, “uh-uh.” “You do not accept?” “No.”
The boys were also fond of pointing at every object in every picture and declaring “My car!” or “My horse!” or “What is this?” “Bread.” “My bread!” The object of this game was to point and shout the fastest, thereby declaring as many objects as your own as possible. At one point, just before I decided the book had put up with enough abuse and needed to go back into my house, the boys took to licking (sometimes actually, sometimes make-believe) the pages that pictured juice or bananas or meat.
Sometimes, however, I would bring out the book and the children wouldn’t whip themselves up into a frenzy and I could quietly turn the pages and answer questions about the pictures. I like to wait until they ask me “What is this?” before giving my explanations, because I like their explanations better. For example:
- The table of contents displays each chapter number inside a colorful circle. These circles are footballs
- The family portrait with the grandfather holding a baby in the center and lots of other people around was taken at a naming ceremony
- The basketball is a football
- The marbles are footballs (and this is strange because I have seen Gambian children playing with marbles and I have asked what the marbles were called and no one told me “footballs”)
- The vehicle that looks like a train is actually a car.
- The Capitol Building is actually a mosque
- Oh, and that orange is a football too.
Also, because I made fun of that English textbook for only featuring sweatered children, here’s what I’d think of America if all I knew was this textbook:
- Americans occupy their time with preparing to eat, eating, or playing games. Most often games involving a ball of sorts
- If a person is not wearing full-length pants, he or she is wearing short shorts.
- And a person wearing short shorts is also most likely wearing striped knee-high socks, and you’d wonder, since the combination covers nearly the entire leg, why the person wouldn’t just wear pants.
- American houses are all shades of beige or brown
- Americans will eat banana, tomato and lettuce salads for dinner
- Americans like to give speeches
- American moms sometimes interrupt breakfast to skewer oranges in a demonstration of the orbiting planets. So apparently, metal skewers are a part of the American breakfast utensil line-up.
No comments:
Post a Comment