English / Haitian Creole lessons translate more than vocabulary
There’s a group of laborers that have taken to having English / Creole conversations with me at our school construction site in Grand Goave, Haiti. We talk at lunch, but sometimes also at the end of the workday. We use my Phrasebook as a starting point; pick a page, and start reading. They read the English words, I help their pronunciation, and then we flip roles and I attempt Creole. Some pages are worthless; being able to ask if your flight is delayed is meaningless to someone who has never been on a plane. The most relevant pages stick to the basics of time, weather, work, and family.
I learn that Emmanuel has a wife and four children, two boys and two girls; Drivle is single, not even a girlfriend; we all laugh that he is ‘lib’ though I applaud his honesty since every other Haitian man I know boasts of his girlfriend, even as I suspect many are fabricated. Webert is single as well, but offers the conventional description of a girlfriend ‘at home’. Quiet Fanil allows that he has seven children, by several women, none of whom is his wife. I search for the Creole word for ‘stud’ but cannot find it. It figures that a dictionary that defines single as ‘silibate’ would omit sexually charged slang.
