Saturday, December 10, 2011

Parlez-Vous Anglais?



I’m in Madagascar, staying in a hilltop bungalow overlooking the beach called "Coucher de Soleil". The name of the place, if my long forgotten French serves me correctly, translates as “Sleep of the Sun”. I think what they mean is "Sunset".

I can think of lots of worse names for a place where you bathe with cold water from a rusty 50 gallon drum, flush the toilet with a bucket of water from the same drum and brush your teeth over the toilet because there’s no sink. There's also non-stop squawking from the resident parrots and the soul-numbing “thump-thump-thump” of the devil’s music emanating from the bar nearby until 2 each morning.


I’ve been in 18 countries in the Pacific, Asia and Africa in the last 16 months, and this is the first time I’ve felt intimidated by the language barrier. Ironically, it’s because everyone speaks French!

I sat through a LOT of French classes in high school and even in university, so I feel embarrassed that I’m not more proficient. But in my defense, and with apologies to Miss Crichton, most foreign language classes of that era focused on reading and writing and passing tests, rather than on actually speaking French.

Just two days ago I was in Zanzibar, greeting people in Swahili. After five weeks in Kenya and Tanzania, my vocabulary included the words for “please” “thank you” “how are you?” “I’m fine” “good” “I’m sorry” “I understand” “foreigner” (I heard that word a LOT, preceded by what I feel certain were colorful, if not complimentary adjectives. My favorite, if for no other reason than it sounds exactly like what it means is “hakuna matata”….”no problem."


In those countries, I was obviously an outsider and didn't encounter many other foreigners, relatively speaking. Nobody expected me to speak the language with any degree of fluency, and people seemed genuinely surprised and delighted that I was making the effort. But here, the place is crawling with French people, so even though I blend in more on the outside, I feel much more conspicuous when I open my mouth to speak, because all the foreigners here (with a few exceptions like myself) speak the language fluently. Do you follow my somewhat twisted logic?

That said, I had managed catch a taxi (which I shared with a couple from Barcelona who only spoke Spanish...but that's another story) find a place to stay and even make a feeble attempt at negotiating a lower rate.

Yesterday I found a dive shop, and entering, I confidently said "Bonjour! Comment ça va?" then sheepishly told the proprietor "Excusez-moi...je ne parle pas Français tres bien." He told me in French that my French was better than his English, which made me feel good, even if it was a bald faced lie. I've heard that the French are loathe to speak English, but at least he had the decency to appeal to my ego.

I left there not sure whether I had signed up for a scuba diving excursion or as a cabin boy for a voyage to Mozambique, but when I “retourned” this morning, I was relieved to find that in addition to two French divers, there were three guys from South Africa and a fellow from the Netherlands, all of them conversing with one another in English. I had to laugh when the dive master assigned the Dutch guy and me to each other as dive buddies and he leaned over and said “Man, I thought I was the only one in this country who doesn’t speak French!”

Not that it matters underwater, except that when diving outside the U.S. or Caribbean, your pressure gauge is calibrated in millimeters. When you’re accustomed to beginning a dive with 3200 pounds per square inch of pressure in your tank, you don’t want to look down ten minutes into your dive, 75 feet under water …(sorry, make that 22.7575 meters) and see the needle resting on the number 200.

This afternoon I rented a motorcycle and rode around the island. At one point I was stopped at a police road block. He carefully flipped through every single page of my passport, looking intently at each visa stamp, and his facial expression indicated that this was a grave situation indeed. He was speaking rapidly in French the entire time, and kept repeating a phrase I just couldn’t make out.

“Je ne parle pas Français tres bien” I said. "I don't speak French very well."

He kept repeating it.

Finally I said “Plus lentement s’il vous plait” which I hoped was something close to a very polite “Could you repeat that more slowly please?”

“Avez-vous quelque chose pour mois?” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

“Pardonnez-moi, je ne comprends pas” I replied "I don't understand"….as the light bulb in my head begain to come on.

“Avez-vous un cadeau pour mois?” he repeated…this time a little more sheepishly.

As he said that phrase, my mind suddenly expanded to give me a bird's eye view of the entire scenario as well as total recall of every bit of French I had ever studied.

My thought process went something like this:

1. I’m in a foreign country
2. It’s one of the poorest countries in the world
3. This guy’s got my passport so he knows I’m American, which to him means I've got buckets of money
4. He’s holding in his hands a document containing page after page of visas from countries I’ve visited, which only confirms his suspicions that I am filthy rich.
5. From the dim, dark recesses of my feeble memory, I somehow managed to dredge up the cobweb covered, dim, dusty recollection that the word "cadeau" means "a present".
6. This is a shake down. A stick up. Highway robbery. Literally.

With a huge smile on my face, feigning total lack of comprehension, I said again “I’m sorry, my French is really bad” while taking my passport from his hands and once I’d safely retrieved it , I asked “Quelque chose pour vous?”...”A present for you?”

“Oui!” he said smiling, happy that I had finally understood his request.

“Au revoir!” I called over my shoulder, as I sped away, a fugitive from justice.