The blind leading the blind. . . sort of.

As I mentioned in my last entry, languages fascinate me. They confound and frustrate me as well, if I can’t get my point across, but I love to learn expressions and the undercurrents of phrases and sayings. Even in English, I wonder where certain sayings come from – like a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush or a stitch in time saves nine. How did those sayings start?

I love to hear sayings from other cultures. For instance, if a Yalunka wants someone to listen, they say, “Stand up your ears!” or to look at something, they say, “Stand up your eyes!” If a child dies, a mom will often say that her child was “taken from her hands” or that her baby “didn’t last long in her hands.” If you are worried, angry or frustrated, your liver is warm or is not sitting down. When you are released from worry, your liver “cools” or “sits down.” (

s I mentioned in the past, to a Yalunka, the liver is the seat of your emotions – used in place of our “heart”. But interestingly, the temperatures differ. To have a warm heart here means you are upset – while for Americans, a warm heart means you are affectionate. To a Yalunka, a cold heart means you have peace, while in our culture, to call someone “cold-hearted” has a negative connotation.

Here are a few more examples:

If someone is crazy, they will say, “her head is not sitting down well.”

If someone is blind or deaf, they say their eyes or ears are “not there”.

While we would say that someone “fell” sick, an African might say that a person was “held” by a sickness.

I had an interesting discussion with Sayon the other day. He was sick. I wrote down a medicine on a paper and how many pills he needed and I told him to go and buy medicine in the market that was coming that day. I followed that by saying, “please, when you buy the medicine, bring it to me because sometimes what I write and what the person selling the medicines sells you is not the same.”

Sayon has heard my speech before. It goes something like this “PLEASE do NOT just go and buy medicine in the market for your child, because, while that person selling the medicine probably has a good liver (translation – they are a good person), they are not a doctor, and they don’t know what medicine you should take. And kids and adults are not the same and don’t take the same strength of medicine…… and on and on I go.

So, he said to me, “Yes, I will bring you the medicine because it is like this: Usually, the person selling the medicine is like a person with no eyes because he is not educated. And the person buying the medicine is also like a person with no eyes, because they are not educated. So you have two people with no eyes who grab each other’s hands and fall into a hole.” I started to laugh. I said, we have that same saying in our language – the blind leading the blind. It amazed me that the same expressions surfaced – worlds apart.

We have also been amused to discover the expressions they use to excuse themselves because they need to go to the bathroom. I have heard Americans say – “I need to go and talk to a man about a dog(or horse)”. Our friends here might say, “I need to go greet my in-laws.” Our guard told us the other day when he returned from the bathroom “Sorry, I had to go and post a letter.”
They can also be very emphatic about things. I treated a little girl the other day and I told the dad that I wanted him to bring her back in a few days so I could see if she was better. He looked at me and said, “If I am NOT dead, I will be back in a few days. If I am not DEAD, I will be here.” I thought, alrighty then. I guess that is about all I can ask for, isn’t it?

Medical cases always bring new expressions too.

If a person has diarrhea, they will say that their bellies are running. I have been told that people have things “walking” in their bellies or “snakes” in there. If a baby has an ear infection, they will come complaining that the mom’s breast is coming out of the child’s ear – for which our teammates coined the term “nipplitis”. (The explanation is that the infection is usually so bad that there is pus draining from the ear, which looks like breast milk, thus the mom’s nipple has fallen into the ear.)

And so goes the school of language and culture. It keeps us on our toes and certainly keeps us humble.