Reconnaître (Thursday, 2012 June 7)
Some words are really difficult to translate into French (lately I’ve been thinking about "home", "acknowledge"/"acknowledgment", "mind", and even "get"), and at first "grateful"/"gratitude" gave me a hard time too. But if you open your trusty M-W French-English dictionary, issued by Organization Cameroon Headquarters in Yaoundé, to page 534, you’ll see that "grateful" is translated as reconnaissant, literally "recognizing". Oddly, "gratitude" is translated as reconnaissance or also gratitude. Thanks, the French language!
Anyhow the point I’m trying to get at is that I was recently "recognized" in some way for the "work" I’m doing here in Cameroon. Honored Directress intercepted me at a bar in Yaoundé and said she’d received this weird Congressional thing from my Congressman, and that it was a really nice thing saying thank you for serving as a Volunteer. All of us at the table looked at one another like, "Wait, why Ethan??" and I even asked her "Do they know how much I drink?"
So thanks for the recognition, the Honorable Ed Towns — but if it were me, I’d prefer to recognize: my postmate Queen Cristina, Kim from the next village over, Rosalie in the Far North, and maybe one or two others. Side note: there are four different Volunteers all over the world just from our voting district?? New York is amazing.
While I’m uploading stuff, here’s a blurry picture taken by the Boys of one of my students, the one named "Nouyock Luther Theo" — the one who stood up almost two years ago when I said I was from New York, and said "Monsieur, that’s my name!" (Apparently "Nouyock" in local dialect means notre chose, "our thing".) He’s even wearing traditional garb for my borough, the hoodie:
Here’s a slightly better one, where he’s looking a little like a Volunteer himself.
