Lost in Translation

A 'Hey, how's it going?' conversation in Arabic typically proceeds as follows:
You: Sallam 'alaykum (Peace be upon you)
Them: Wa 'alaykum sallam (and peace be upon you)
You: La Bes? (All is well?)
Them: La Bes, Bekher? (All is well, everything good?)
You: Bekher (Everything's hunky dory)
Them: Hamdullah (?)
You: Hamdullah (?)

For a long time this 'Hamdullah' thing perplexed us. It typically followed the whole 'La bes, bekher' quagmire, and was said with a smile and a shrug. It was this shrug, I think, that made us believe it meant something along the lines of 'Everything's okay, you know, life goes on, the day to day struggle to live is sometimes hard, but we prevail through a sense of good humor and perserverance'. Or something like that. Also, we noticed that when we said it, it always got a laugh or a smile. We thought we had an immediate 'in'. Some magical Arabic phrase whose subtext was 'I am not a tourist. I am with you. Brother. (Insert a fist bump).'

So we started saying it instead of 'Bekher'. People would say 'La Bes?' and we would say 'meeehhh...Hamdullah (::wink wink, nudge nudge::)'. We never thought to double check its meaning.

Last night Dave finally asked Abrahim what it meant. Apparently it means 'Praise Allah'. So when people would ask how we were doing, we were apparently responding with 'eeeeehhh...praise God (smile and laugh)'. I don't think anyone found this offensive. I think they just thought we were ignorant. Which, of course, we were. We really should have looked it up.

One of the favorite pasttimes of the local children is building small fires in roundabout around the corner from our house. And in the open lot across from our house. Pretty much anywhere, really. No one seems to mind. It's perfectly natural for kids to burn grass and trash outdoors in residential areas. But I guess they've got to do something with their free time, and it's certainly better than say developing a drug habit or vandalizing buildings.


I wonder if it's a catch phrase they use in schools: 'Don't do drugs. Go burn something!'
A sure sign that I'm used to Morocco is that these fires don't worry me one bit.

I'm going to attempt to make pizza tonight (with a side of garlic bread). All of the ingredients below, collected from four different vendors in the haddaf (marketplace) cost around 7 dollars. I'm really hoping that the package at the bottom contains yeast. It smells right, but who knows. Though my haddaf Arabic is progressing, getting that one across was a real challenge.

Work in the forest is coming along nicely. Chris thinks Dave and I are now competent enough to collect usable focal data, which is excellent, as it means there's less pressure on him, but it adds just a little more stress to an already extremely difficult job. Now we're not only doing scan samples every other hour and keeping an eye out for any defecating monkeys, but we're also trying to do 40 minute focals on all 9 males in one day. Give it a month, though, and I'm positive that everything will feel more natural. At least I really, really hope so.

On the monkey poop collection front, it looks like we've had a breakthrough.

I'll give you a second or two to stop laughing.

...

There's a vocalization that the females do called a 'copulation call' which sounds sort of like your typical monkey grunt ('hoo-hoo-hoo'). We thought was only associated with copulation, but it turns out that they also make this sound when 'making a sample' so to speak. So if we hear this call come from a female and she's on her own, there's a good chance we'll get a sample from her if we can get to her location fast enough. This small and embarassingly simple realization has given us a huge boost in our daily sample collection numbers, and alleviated much of the freaking out that was occuring over our previously short-of-quota daily harvests.

I promise my next entry will have no mention whatsoever of monkey poop. Don't get the wrong idea; behavioral data collection is a huge part of the job too, only it's much harder to write about.

Miss and love you all.