Ugandan English

Uganda was colonized by the British, so all the public schools (somewhat unfortunately, in my opinion, at least for the younger grades) teach classes in English rather than whatever the kids' native languages are. This means that everyone who's been to school can speak at least a smattering of English, which is VERY convenient when you are not a quick learner of Karamojong! Anyway, I love how Ugandan English is definitely not American English.

Here are some of my favorite words and phrases (with a little Karamojong thrown in):

A lot of the little kids know how to ask "how are you?" - only it sounds more like "howah YOU?" - but if you ask it back to them, they're unsure how to respond, because that's the only English phrase they know. It's really fun to hear them shout it at you as you're passing by.

One of the polite things to say (in English) is asking "how was the night?" or "how is home?" when you meet a friend. Losike, the donkey herder, always asked me "how was the night?", which makes good sense when you could have raiders coming through to steal your cattle, or even just drunk people fighting or cobras coming inside your house! Losike also always called me by my last name, thinking that was my "Christian name."

It also makes sense that they use a lot of verbs in the present tense - when I was taking German, that's the first tense we learned. So you hear things like "I am fearing" (if you're afraid), or something "is paining me", or one of my favorites, you are "cowardizing."

And then there was the time the schoolboys said that they were being "overtortured" at school. Things change "slowly by slowly," and if you want to drive backward, you "revance". :)

People (including missionaries) deal with a lot more sickness there than we typically do in the states, so they came up with a very useful verb: diarrheating. You can talk very sensibly about digestive troubles there...

My own Karamojong acquisition was pretty lame. It took Rose a looong time to teach me the "how are you?" greeting (which I still can't spell), but when I *finally* got it, everyone was so nice to me - every time I'd say it to people I knew (who also knew how slow I was), they would grin and say "ejok" like I'd just done something really great.

All the Karamojong I met really are generous to slow learners of their language, although I wouldn't blame them at all if they joke about it afterward! Last year I was teaching Sunday school, and one of the schoolboys asked me to pray for a boy who was sick, Aleper. I didn't realize this was actually the boy's name, so I thought I was supposed to pray for a boy who had leperosy. Oops! But no one laughed (and I think I did just pray for the one who was sick, without mention leperosy specifically). This year I got the Aleper thing down, though. It's a very common name there: Aleper Paul, Aleper Emmanuel, etc.