I am glad that I often am easily amused. I guess that is the flip side to being easily unamused. The girls were over this afternoon, “helping me clean the yard” for the party. I let one of them use my phone to text Lucia. By the time the reply came back, the girls were gone and I am left pondering what the text says. Mostly I can figure it out. But then there is another text that came in from an unknown number. And since she hadn’t texted anyone else, I don’t know if it is for me, for her, or a wrong number. I understand just enough of it to wonder if I understand it at all and it had me pulling out the dictionary, which is probably a good thing since I so rarely do it.
I promised myself and PC that I would get more tutoring, so now that it is January I need to contact my tutor and get things rolling again. I need the discipline of a teacher who knows how to teach and knows how to ask me things and give me answers to my questions.
I still think the girls are better served by speaking English with me, but even when they don’t I am starting to pick up on more of what they are saying, even though I am haven’t the ability to respond quickly or cleverly. Okay to be honest, I haven’t the ability to respond to quick talking teenagers at all, here or anywhere else. But I can give them looks when they are talking and sometimes the looks they give me back indicate they were saying something they maybe shouldn’t have and didn’t realize I understood. I give them looks that look like I understood, which of course I didn’t. They don’t quite realize that, so in a strange way, I am keeping them honest, but none of us know how much. Like I said, I am easily amused. And distracted.
So anyway, this text message, a mixture of English and Setswana reads, “No? Bby (short for baby) ncheke fa phalafala ka 8 plz (please) ke a kopa….? Reply by Thabang.” That last part indicates to me that someone is using Thabang’s phone to send a message to someone else. I think ncheke means the person wants to check on the person they are calling Bby either at 8 or on the 8th and ke a kopa means “I need, or I am asking politely. So the word that stumps me is phalafala. As its own word, it doesn’t exist in my crappy dictionary, so I get to wonder if words that are part of it actually add up to it. Hmm. “Phala” is an impala, a roebuck, a whistle, kind of flute, or horn. It is also a verb meaning “to excel.” Fala is a verb that means “to scrape the surface, as a pot with a scraper; or wood with a knife, or to scratch a wound till the scab falls off.” Nice. I am guessing it is slang for something…. Hmm. I wonder who that message was supposed to go to? Could it be that someone wants to play his flute or blow his horn pretty mightily so that something falls off or is scraped clean? Or does he just want to excel at cleaning his pot? This is not the way I should be studying this language.
Oh, except Lucia’s message also has the word “phalafala” in it! Cool, so now I can text her and ask her what the heck it means. Maybe she and the other email were both simply expressing a need for a new new pot scraper, or a scab fell off and they were sharing the news.
While I await her explanation, more about my day…today is January 2nd and we have it and the 3rd off. I spend New Year’s Eve in Ramotswa at Tom’s then came home yesterday and goofed off as best I could, but also prepared my guest room for company and vacuumed the house. I did my best to avoid working on that dang narrative report. But today, I started early and after doing my laundry, I spent five hours working on the report. I will email it off on Wednesday. They will revise it, ask for more information, and otherwise find it unsuitable. I then got ready for the girls by making a large amount of chocolate pudding and buying a loaf of bread.
They said they would be bringing friends to help clean the yard, and Motlalepula decided on the menu I would provide the workers. Seven young girls arrived at 3 p.m., ages 10 to 15, including Nonofo and Motlalepula, without tools and in the heat of the day. There were some clearly harder workers than others, and we managed to do a bit of clean up, but there is so much more to do and it is a bigger job than these little girls are really up for. They loved the reward of chocolate pudding, toast, juice, sitting in the house with the fan blowing and learning to play Irish Sevens, which is really why they came at all. Nonofo and Motlalepula acted like they were in charge of everything, including keeping the kids and me under control. It was nice to see them act maturely and as relatively good role models around younger kids. Or maybe they were just controlling food portions.
They plan to be back tomorrow morning around 8 am so we aren’t working in the heat of the day and Motlalepula won’t need to rest as much. I think this is going to cost me another loaf of bread, a dozen eggs and a good amount of milk. I wonder if they would eat French toast?
And that text? Turns out Phalafala is a street name somewhere here in town. I haven’t seen any street signs around, but now I know that the message says for her to meet someone at this street around 8. I had been hoping this Phalafala person was going to come over here tomorrow at 8 and was asking what kind of tools to bring. So now I have learned a new word that isn’t even that useful because I still don’t know what it means.
The other thing that amused me this week was standing at a bus stop at 8 a.m. with it feeling like it had already hit the 100 degree mark it was supposed to hit that day. I was going to be doing a lot of walking so had put on my real shoes with socks, and so I didn’t look like a total old lady I had decided to wear my long dress to kind of hide the shoes. My feet did great all day but the dress just gave me more material to sweat all over. All that isn’t what amused me though. (Although in the grocery story my long dress kept getting caught in the grocery cart wheels and I almost took a header out of the bus because of the dress and both of those things are kind of amusing. But not in the moment.) It was that I was the only person standing at the crowded bus stop not staring down at my cell phone texting someone, totally oblivious to the world around us. Okay, it was amusing at the time, but like I said, I am easily amused.
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