Whisper to their souls to go

This Saturday I'll be off again to West Africa, arriving in Accra on Sunday and then in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire by Tuesday. That's right, my research will be taking me to a new country, just west of Ghana, and I'm certainly excited by the prospect of seeing if the money I spent on the first two levels of Rosetta Stone French will actually pay off. (I'm also excited to see a new country.) I should be in Abidjan for 2-3 weeks, and then I'll be back to Ghana until mid-April working on another research project.

Of course, a new tour of Africa necessitates new gear--my more astute readers will note that this post comes right after the post-holidays sales...

First, Rosetta Stone, to enable me to communicate/ask where the bathroom is in French while in Cote d'Ivoire. RS is a clever program. It comes with speech recognition and all sorts of fancy pictures to aid one in learning a language. So clever, in fact, that I am convinced that the software is pre-programmed to identify which syllables in French will be most difficult for me to pronounce; ironically, many of these are true cognates, on which I shall elaborate below.

Nonetheless, RS is not entirely fool-proof, and I have found some gaps in their translations.

For example:

Les eleves d'ecole primaire aiment les sciences. = [look for the Asian kids]

Ce temps est le pire. = The weather is really bad. [look for the flying cows from Twister.]

Il joue du piano le mieux. = [look for the Asian kid]

Some exercises are less obvious, such as those that show you a picture and have you speak the caption. This exercise is hard in that the possibilities for the caption (as with New Yorker cartoons) are endless:

[Photo: Man eating alone at restaurant]

Me: "Uhhhh, l'homme dine a la restaurant ... ?"

[minor third chimes indicating incorrect answer]

Me: "Uhhhhh, l'homm--"

[minor third]

Me: "What the ..."

Answer that flashes on screen: "La femme est en retard." [The woman is late.]

Seriously? Wow.

Most of the time my microphone picks up what I say and it registers it correctly on the screen. There are however some glaring deficiencies--partly my own, but in my opinion partly the software's--with certain (mono-)syllables of the French language. Primarily,

bleu = blue
voiture = car
chaussure = shoe
d'Australie = from Australia
professeur = professor

For some reason, I often can't hit the right frequencies for these words. And this is where one gets ... Rosetta Stoned.

Speaking exercise, you will here three sample sentences. Please repeat the final sentence:

(1) La fille veut un chat. [The girl wants a cat.]

(2) Le garcon chante bien. [The boy sings well.]

(3, my turn) Le professeur d'Australie veut acheter une nouveau voiture bleu. Il ne porte pas des chaussures. (non sequitir? you get the point) The Australian professor wants to buy a new blue car. He does not wear shoes.

It feels something like this:



In actuality, RS has been great for teaching me French in the past six weeks, and I would recommend it. Especially with all those hidden gems.

I'm currently in packing mode right now. Much of today was spent figuring out how to re-treat my mosquito net with permethrin. I thought that would be a simple task. But, no, those instructions are remarkably difficult to find online. All these formulas you have to abide by ... and they don't really sell permethrin at high concentrations in individual-sized amounts. I mean, if it's that hard for me to figure out how to re-treat a net, then what's it like for the people in Africa who need it day in and day out? I ended up concocting a watered-down version with Sawyer's Permethrin solution for clothing, which has left my garage with hints of toxicity. Apparently it's also highly toxic to cats, and since none of my neighbors' cats have died on my lawn (yet), I think we'll be fine. Will it work in Africa? Perhaps, at least for a little while, right?

Je ne sais pas.

Give Me a Break

Fairtrade British Kit Kat. Image sourced from this Guardian article.

Apologies for the lack of posts over this past month--I spent much of November travelling up the East Coast visiting friends and family and basically just relaxing after five months in the field. It was good. However, I intend to get back to reporting on Ghana and fair trade now. Though, as I told someone earlier today, my blog should now be called "Out of West Florida", though that's not quite as exciting as "Out of West Africa." So it goes.

On Monday, approximately 23482301283.21 of my friends alerted me to the fact that Nestle was switching its line of British Kit Kats to Fairtrade. You know who you are. This barrage of e-mails--many of which arrived before I woke up that morning--has led me to believe that my friends now think of me whenever they see fair-trade or organically certified chocolate. Excellent. I, for one, cannot walk through a Whole Foods or a Wal-Mart (that covers the whole spectrum of grocery choice, right?) without nosing through the chocolate section, perusing the various organic, fairtrade, rainforest-friendly, we-love-the-insert-cause-here lines of chocolates. But I digress.

This is exciting news, nonetheless. In case you don't believe me, look at all these outlets covering the story:

The Guardian

Times of London

BBC News

Wall Street Journal

Nestle sources much of its chocolate from Cote d'Ivoire, a country to which I will be travelling in January. Cote d'Ivoire's cocoa system is set up quite differently from Ghana's, and the country's political situation is a bit more fractious--as a result, the cooperatives formed from this fairtrade switchover could have significant implications for democracy in Cote d'Ivoire. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Update: Please see comments below for Mike Brady's perspective on Nestle's fairtrade Kit Kat announcement.