During Peace Corps' language training a fellow volunteer remembered the Monty Python skit with the smutty Hungarian language phrasebook. ‘My hovercraft is full of eels,’ a mustachioed and bespectacled John Cleese reads from the booklet to the clerk, Terry Jones. Who, after consulting the book, I think, said something in reference to Cleese's non-existent mammary glands...
We hadn’t learned the requisite vocabulary for the eel line, so Bob said one day in a thickly Hungarian-accented Nepali, “in my airplane there are many leeches!” (see above for the Nepali). All the volunteers doubled over with laughter, but our language trainers couldn’t possibly get it. And of course our explanations, as is usually the case with humor, did nothing to help. The trainers offered plaintive smiles, and went on with our lesson: “the stick is red; this one is black,” we were told, as we picked out some of the newly learned words, guessing at others from a pantomimed lexiconography. How to pantomime red?
The language was instructed by way of the ‘silent method;’ we were not allowed to speak any English, no comments or questions, though we often couldn’t help ourselves, like little kids in church. The trainers never lapsed.
Will my sons pick up any Nepali on our trip this summer? I imagine they will learn the word for leech - jugaa - it will be monsoon season after all, when leeches are really on the prowl. And they probably won't be too happy about it... I'm hoping we don't have to learn the words for 'maoist insurgent,' a more dangerous blood sucking creature. In fact, due to their nationwide strike, we may not make it to Nepal at all in August.
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