Moore 101

Thanks to our friends at the marché, "Emy" and "Harouna" have slowly been improving their Moore. Here are a few key things we've learned:

sida = husband: Learning this during training would have really saved me some trouble. In French, AIDS is called SIDA so you can imagine my confusion when everyone at the marché one day kept asking me how my "sida" was doing. I told them, in Moore, that I actually don't have AIDS but they insisted I did and wanted to see it. I actually started to get a little upset as more and more people joined in to insist that I had AIDS until finally someone mentioned "Harouna" and I figured it out.

If in doubt, mmbaa or mmdaa: It turns out that this is an official response to a lot of things, so if you're not sure what someone is saying, just throw it out there and there's a good chance it'll work. There is supposedly one of these that women say and another one for men, but I can never remember so I just kind of mumble it. The other day some old guy rattled off some incomprehensible Moore to me so I gave him a nod and an "mmbaa" and he looked shocked and told all his friends that I speak Moore.

wend.....-> amina: There are a lot of different ways to say goodbye and they normally involve some kind of blessing and the word "wend" (might be "wenda") for God. Anytime you hear a sentence start with this, you can just tune out the rest because the answer will always be "amina" (amen).

ligdi ya wanna?: Pricing in Mooré is kind of odd. We've learned the Moore words for most of the prices we use in the marche (100F, 50F,...) but it doesn't actually mean we've learned the words for 100 or 50 in Moore. This is because there is a conversion of 4, or maybe 5 (I missed this session in training), between Francs and Shells. Moore prices are given in Shells which means when I wouldn't use the same Moore words to buy 25 mangos and pay 25CFA.

There's been lots of other things, but we'll leave it there for today. In case there are any lingistic scholars out there, many (and probably most) of these Mooré words might be spelled wrong. Since we learn by talking to people, I just write them how they sound to me and have no idea how to spell them.