08 January 2011

My Shepard Moment

When I was in Senegal, one of the most pivotal points for me came when someone asked the room of people what "bergère" meant. I responded "shepard" and then stopped. I looked around the room, entirely composed of people who spoke French better than me, and realized I had been the one to answer. I was finally making it somewhere, and not completely lost.

I've been waiting for similar moments since arriving here, though it's been complicated by the fact that my French is better now, so I'm not quite so easily impressed. In addition, I don't speak a whole lot of French in my day, so I've had fewer opportunities for such a moment.

Today at swim practice, as the coach quickly rattled off our instructions (300 meters: 50 meters crawl, 50 meters crawl "rattraper")* one boy asked "what's rattraper?" In my head I quickly answered it's where you keep one hand in front until the other one catches up and touches it.

I looked around and realized that I was surrounded by native French speakers, and the boy asking was French. And for once I had the answer.


*for those of you thinking "hey, 50 + 50 doesn't equal 300" it means do this activity until you hit three hundred. So you could also be given the instructions "300 meters: 50 crawl, 50 backstroke, 50 breaststroke" so in that case you do it twice. In addition I now have a really random vocabulary of swimming terms.

1 comment:

  1. And I thought it had to do with trapping rats.....

    good for you!

    ReplyDelete