English Lessons with Mr. Sylla

I’ve been doing English lessons with Mr. Sylla, the local representative of the National Tourism Office.  He already knows quite a bit of English—vocabulary and grammar—but, like many adult learners, doesn’t like to use what he’s got because he knows he’ll make some mistakes when he speaks.  I’m not very well qualified to do this kind of teaching; I can explain how to say things but not why.  Not the why of the grammar rules, and not the why of practicing speaking even when you’re unlikely to need to communicate with someone in English.  We do have a fair number of tourists coming through who aren’t fluent in French… but very few of them find their way to Mr. Sylla’s office, across the street from the prefecture, in a building that still bears the signage of a community bank.  Mostly the tourists stay at the hotels in Tangama, pass through the market and the bush taxi station, and sometimes come to ALDET’s tourism center in Tangama, but I’ve never yet come across anyone anywhere near Mr. Sylla’s quiet office in the slowly decomposing bank. 

Still, he wants to learn, so we practice together, on Mondays and Thursdays.  We’re trying to make our way through Bill Bryson’s “I’m a Stranger Here Myself,” about moving back to the US as an adult.  It’s a good text—his writing style is informal, closer to the way people speak, and the topics are easy to relate to—but—we’re still only on page 3.  We read a little, he struggles through translation, I explain weird words, and then we try to have a conversation about what we’ve read.  Not much progress on getting Mr. Sylla to express himself—he likes to answer questions, not pose them, and tends toward one-sentence replies—but I’m enjoying learning more about his life and this town through all the questioning. 

Yesterday we read a bit on going to the hardware store, so we chatted about hardware stores and home maintenance.  Mr. Sylla’s favorite hardware store is Alhassane’s, kitty corner to the hospital—but—he’s never actually bought anything there.  Anything.  So I switched to another line of questioning.  His last home repair was to fix the steps in front of his house and also some cracks in the kids’ room with cement.  His house is owned by the government (most government employees get their housing this way), he pays no rent, and he got no choice: he was given the house that his Tourism predecessor lived in.  Does he like it?  “I have no choice.” 

Last week we’d talked about Dalaba town.  Bryson talks about why he and his wife chose the town they moved to:  good schools, walkable downtown, nice restaurants, a college campus, a good public library.  Oddly enough (this is why I love Bryson’s book for this purpose), Dalaba’s got all these things, too.  I was surprised, though, at which ones were most important to Mr. Sylla.  Turns out he spends a lot of time at the library (each morning, he goes there to read.  Each afternoon, he goes to play cards.  I’m not sure where he fits in his official work for the Department of Tourism, but this seems pretty normal here.  I’m recalling a conversation with another volunteer talking to someone higher up in the Tourism department, about getting official admission tickets for the governor’s mansion.  “If we printed tickets,” this man reportedly said, “More tourists would visit.  And that would degrade the mansion, which is a historical site.”  There are so many false connections in those phrases that I don’t even want to start picking it apart.  But you get the general attitude of this department.)  Back to Mr. Sylla.  He knows all the restaurants in town—but he’s never dined at any of them.  “My wife cooks.”  He knows all the movie theaters in town (little cafes that show a lot of football (soccer) and movies in Pulaar), but he’s never been to one.  “I have a TV at home.”  I asked Mr. Sylla what attracted him to Dalaba, what made him want to move here.  “I had no choice,” he said.  “I was assigned here.” 

Too many questions end with that response.  “I had no choice.”