kreyol lesson

I´ve been away from the clinic for about 36 hours because I went into Santo Domingo to meet Lydia, mybest friend from Maine and who I went to nursing school with there so many years ago.  She is a nurse practitioner at Colby college and is here to help me for a week.  She brought a nebulizer ' for people with asthma and bronchitis, and a hematocrit machine, old style one with pipettes you stop up with clay that I haven´t seen since the 70s, so we can see who is anemic.  I´m going to set her towork as a lab technition, something she was before she went to nuring school, and she will be doing rapid tests for sphyilis, maleria, HIV, glucose, urine screening.  It will really help us out because on a normal day one sees about 3 or 4 pregnant women who have never had such testing.  The lab at this clinic stopped 2 months ago when the lab tech got another job and people have to cross the border to get the basic screenings in the DR which basically means that people don´t go at all....

As of the day before yesterday my 2 surgical victims were doing remarkably well, but time will tell whether abscess or God forbid, gangrene sets in.  I´ll seethem both today, and keep you posted.  I credit everything to the will of Bondye, the big guy or gal upstairs.

That sets the theme for today´s lesson )!!!!!), the kreyol language.  As you probably know, this language came out of the slaves working for the French field bosses who may not have been too cultured and didn´t speak the best french, anyway, the slaves modified its structure a lot.  Now only about 15% of the population speak french, and everyone speaks Kreyol.  By the way, there are three other types of Creole, one from Louisiana and Guyana, one from the Lesser Antilles, and one from the Mascarene Archipelñago in the Indian Ocean.  I am gtetting all this info from the lesson  book and lexicon that I have acquired from Indiana University where there is a department of Creole languages.  It´s a great method and the Haitians get a big kick out of the dialogues and stories in the text because its all about the funny little quirks and expressions of every day rural life.  I thought in this blog I could give you a few samples every day of my favorite expressions.  When you read it written, it cracks me up because it looks like someone is talking with their mouth full of mashed potatoes, but doen´t sound that when when it is pronounced.  For example, Jesus Christ died on the cross is ¨Jezikri mouri sou lakwa´¨  Kreyol was originally written in french style, then adapted in the 40s by some anglophones to match better phonetically, then in 1975 some Hiatians modified it further but it was not recognized by the gov´t until 1975.  Duvalier never spoke to his people in kreyol, only french, even though 85% couldn´t understand what he was saying.  Orthography wasn´t taught in school and the director of my program here, who grew up in Port a Prince studied kreyol orth. at Aristide´s house every week for his teenage years, when Aristide was the ¨little priest,¨before he became president.

So a few words I want to leave you with=  FREKAN )freakin´!)  means arrogant. 
BOURIK  is the word for a donkey, but it also what you use to mean impolite
YING YANG  means a feud
a few important medical terms
KOKO, vagina
Aparey ' penis )apparatus= also known as ti gigit, ti pijon
Fe Bagay ' literally ¨to do that thing¨´  do I need to explain???

more later, hopefully with photos  xxLouise