تفسیر درس

Hi and welcome. This is Kristin Dodds and today I am going to be doing the vocabulary lesson and the commentary for the conversation “Marvie”. Now before we begin I want to let you know that I’ve chosen some words, some slang words, some idioms, some phrases that I thought might be difficult for you to understand in the conversation. So I’ve written down those words and phrases in this little notebook. So you might see me looking down occasionally at the words and phrases I’ve written down.

And also I want to say that if I tell you what something means, it could mean something else in another conversation. But I am telling you what it means for this conversation. Okay, so let’s begin.

The first phrase is actually a slang phrase and it’s “whatcha been doing”. So “whatcha been doing” just simply means “what have you been doing”. And like I said, it’s slang so we just say it really fast, “Whatcha been doing.”

“Marvie”, Marvie is the name of a friend of mine and Joe’s who is currently living in the country of Mali in West Africa.

“Cramming”, cramming, now cramming means to study or to wait to study right before you take a test or an exam, cramming. I used to always cram. I was always cramming for my tests in college.

“Pull an all-nighter”, pull an all-nighter, this is an idiom because usually when we say pull we’re saying, we’re talking about bringing an object towards us, pulling something towards us. So to pull an all-nighter, you can’t really pull the night toward you. So what it means is to stay up very late into the night or to stay up all night doing something such as studying, pull an all-nighter.

And next another word is “switched”, switched, and switched simply means changed, switched. I switched jobs last year because I didn’t like my old job so I changed jobs, switched.

Okay, “shut down”, shut down means to close down permanently, shut down. So, for example, my favorite coffee shop just suddenly shut down unexpectedly, shut down.

And next, “lack of funding”, lack of funding is not having enough money or financial support, lack of funding.

“Come a long way”, come a long way, I guess this could be considered an idiom because usually when we say come, like he’s come a very long way from home could mean like he’s traveled a very far…or he’s traveled very far from his home. But in this conversation, come a long way means to make a lot of progress or improvements, come a long way.

“Liberia”, Liberia is the name of a country in West Africa. And that is the country that Marvie is originally from.

And “Mali”, Mali is another country in West Africa and that is the country where Marvie is currently living.

And that’s where we met him, in Mali.

“Bamako”, Bamako is the name of the capital city in Mali, the country of Mali.

“Laid out”, okay laid out I think would be considered an idiom because usually when we say we’re going to lay something out, like I’m saying I’m going to lay…uh what would be an example…like I’ll lay some books out on a table. But in this conversation it actually means to be told something in great detail, so laid out.

“Ravaging”, ravaging means destroying, ravaging. So Marvie was telling us how the war in his country Liberia was ravaging his country. It was destroying his country.

“Refresh”, refresh simply means to help remember, refresh.

“Rebels”, in the conversation Marvie was talking about rebels. Rebels are a group of people who are against a government, rebels.

“Informed”, informed simply means to be told something, informed.

“Gather”, gather means to get your things together. So let’s say I was in a coffee shop and I had books all over the table and I was getting ready to leave, I would gather my books and put them into my bag to leave, so gather, to get your things together.

“Assassinated”, assassinated means to be killed or murdered, assassinated.

Okay “front of his eyes” or it could be…sorry, “front of his very eyes” or it could be “front of her very eyes”.

What this means is something happens at a very close distance from you. So, for example, Marvie was saying in our conversation, Marvie was telling us how he saw his father shot in front of his very eyes. So his father was very close to him when he was shot.

“Shock”, this is a sudden disturbance of the mind or emotions, shock.

“Reunite”, reunite means to bring together, reunite.

“Incident”, incident is a public disturbance or upset, incident.

“Flee”, flee means to escape or leave quickly, flee. So Marvie’s family had to flee his country, Liberia.

They had to leave very quickly because of the war.

“Refugee camp”, a refugee camp is a place for people to stay, people who have had to leave their country for a reason such as a war, refugee camp.

“Guinea”, Guinea is the name of another country in West Africa. That’s the country where the refugee camp was located that Marvie went to stay at, so Guinea.

“Faced the same fate”, this means had the same unfortunate ending or destiny happen, faced the same fate.

And “kidnapped”, kidnapped is when a person is taken against their will and held, held against their will.

They don’t want, they want to be able to go but they can’t. That’s kidnapped.

“Bend over backwards”, now this is an idiom because when you…someone says bend over backwards you think of a person bending over backwards. But the way it’s used here it means to do whatever possible to help someone. So Marvie would bend over backwards to help Joe and I. He helped us many times. He’s just very nice in that way.

“Participated”, this means…participated means to take part in or join in, participated.

“Sponsoring”, sponsoring is to be responsible for someone, usually financially, sponsoring.

“Conflict resolution”, conflict resolution means to settle a disagreement peacefully. So the conflict would be the disagreement and so, yeah, to settle a disagreement peacefully, conflict resolution.

“Running these programs”, now the way that this is used in the conversation is an idiom. Running would be an idiom because usually you think of someone running, doing the physical activity of running. But a program obviously cannot run. So what it means in this conversation is managing a program, running these programs or running a program.

“Athletic league”, an athletic league is a group of sports teams. So you could have a basketball athletic league, a soccer athletic league. It’s just a group of sports teams, athletic league.

“Sense of normalcy”, this is to feel natural as if nothing bad has happened, nothing bad or nothing disturbing, sense of normalcy.

“Letting go of their past and being able to move forward”, now this is somewhat of an idiom because when you think of letting go of something, you’re thinking of…usually we’re talking about having something physical that we let go of. Like if I had this glass and I just let go and let it drop. So obviously you can’t, I mean the idea of letting go of your past, the past is not something physical that you’re actually holding. So it’s somewhat of an idiom and it just, in this conversation, it means forgiving and/or forgetting a difficult event or events so that you can continue on living your life, so letting go of their past and being able to move forward.

“Fortunate”, fortunate just means lucky, fortunate.

“Impressed”, impressed means affected deeply in a positive way, impressed.

“Admirable”, admirable, the way we used it in this conversation to describe Marvie, it just means wonderful, admirable.

And “laid back”, laid back would be an idiom because usually when we’re talking about something like, let me think of an example, if I laid something down, let’s say I laid a book down that would be the most common use of laid. But in this situation, laid back, I mean yes, I could lay my back, I could lay it down, but here it means a very relaxed personality. So Marvie had a very laid back personality. He was very relaxed all the time, laid back.

“Adversity”, adversity just means difficulties, adversity.

And our final phrase “just really speaks to his moral character”, so what that means is it just shows the qualities that he has as a person. So this is somewhat of an idiom, too, because the qualities aren’t actually speaking. They’re being shown through who he is as a person. So just really speaks to his moral character.

Okay, this concludes the vocabulary lesson part of this video. So stay tuned for the commentary Okay, welcome back to the commentary for the conversation Marvie. Now in the conversation, Marvie was who Joe and I were talking about and he is a very inspiring person to both Joe and I. But I would like to say that on our trip to West Africa, Joe and I met many inspiring people. And I’m going to come back to one in particular in just a moment.

But first I thought I’d talk about why Joe and I went to West Africa, what we were doing there. So I’d say a few months after I met Joe, he and I both had learned that we liked to travel to other countries. So we started planning a trip together. And neither one of us had been anywhere on the African continent. Joe knew about a music festival in the Sahara Desert. So he said to me “How about if we went to Africa?” Now for me, I’d always wanted to go to East Africa to go see the gorillas, the mountain gorillas, in Rwanda and Uganda. But when he specifically said West Africa, I didn’t really know much about it. I remembered from my high school French classes learning that there was French spoken there because many of the countries were colonized by France. But other than that I knew nothing about West Africa.

So I was interested. I was curious. So it started with that music festival that Joe knew about. And the music festival actually takes place in the country of Mali. So from there we decided to go to Mali and Morocco. And Morocco is actually North Africa. But when we started our trip that’s all we knew that we were going to be doing. So we flew into Morocco. We only stayed a few days and we flew into Mali, to Bamako, Mali. And took a boat trip up the Niger River to the city Timbuktu, which is this city, or town I should say, in the northern part of Mali right at the edge of the Sahara Desert, and went out into the desert. We stayed in Timbuktu a night or two and then went out into the desert to this music festival which was fantastic.

And that’s where we met Omar. We hadn’t met Marvie yet. So we met Omar and Omar is a Tuareg.

And the Tuareg people are camel people. So they have herds of camels. They use the camels for transportation and they live in the desert. So here Omar approached us. He’s all wrapped up, covered, all you could see were his eyes. Long flowing gown and, oh I can’t remember the name of it, but anyway material wrapped around his head. And very friendly guy and we were at the music festival for three days, I think. So during that period, he was just there to enjoy the music. It actually was originally a Tuareg music festival.

So we got to hand out with Omar and get to know him. And his story was that he really didn’t have any traditional schooling. His schooling was his grandfather taking him out into the desert at night and teaching him about the stars. Because, as he got older, he’s now in his late 20s I think, he rides his camel and takes other camels to trade, takes camels across the Sahara Desert over to Morocco, I believe, Algeria, Tunisia, and trades camels for salt, big slabs of salt, and brings them back to his village in the desert in Mali. And I was just amazed by this story because he was telling us how it could take a month, I believe, it was a month, just to travel across the desert. And they travel at night because the sun is so intense, it’s so hot in the daytime they travel by night. And that’s why his grandfather was teaching him about the stars, so that he would know how…what direction to go.

And he also told me, I thought this was fascinating, he can’t do this but his grandfather’s generation could actually be anywhere in the desert and lick their finger and put it in the sand and bring it back up and taste the sand and know where they were. They would know from just tasting the sand where they were in the desert, what location they were at. And I was just amazed by that. And amazed, too, that people still traveled such long distances, such as not by taking a plane or a train or a bus.

He lives a very nomadic lifestyle. No, that’s not necessarily true. He does continually go back to the same village but when he is traveling to go to other countries to get salt, that’s a little bit nomadic, I guess.

But anyway, Omar is still a very close friend of ours. He and Joe actually stay in contact through e-mail.

And we were sad to say goodbye to him.

But going back to the music festival, we had so much fun at the music festival. The music was just so rich and so alive that we decided to go to another music festival which was about an hour and a half to two hours north of Bamako, the capital of Mali. And it was right on the Niger River so the stage where the musicians played, where the bands played, was actually out on the water. And that was a three-day music festival and that was a lot of fun as well. And our friend Omar actually, he knew that we were going to that music festival and he showed up at it and surprised us. So that was really neat.

And after that then we met Marvie at our hotel in Bamako. And Marvie, as we said in the conversation, was just so nice and so helpful. We took him out to eat at a restaurant one night because he’d been so helpful to us. And that’s when he told us his whole entire story of his country, the war that had happened in his country in Liberia, and why he was now living in Mali and what he was trying to do with his life, and his dreams of eventually going back to his country. And we still keep in touch with Marvie. In fact, we’ve helped to sponsor him with his program in school.

And there are so many other people, guides that we had, and just people that we met along the way. I truly found Mali, well, I would say…well let me back up. So we went to Mali was the first country. We spent about five to six weeks in Mali. Then we decided, okay we want, Mali being a French speaking country and my French being very little, Joe having no French, we decided we wanted to go to an English speaking country.

So Ghana was colonized by England. So we made the decision to go to Ghana, deciding to go through the country Burkina Faso, another French speaking country, to get to Ghana. And I thought we would just be taking a bus right through Burkina Faso as quickly as possible to get to Ghana. And we actually ended up meeting a guide who was very nice, very helpful. Took us around to a couple of different towns and here again we just ended up loving Burkina Faso, that we ended up staying I think a little over a week.

So then we went on to Ghana and visited…this whole trip we were visiting villages, visiting mosques, and visiting some churches. There’s Christianity and Islam there present in West Africa, along with still their traditional religions, spirituality. In Ghana we also visited a wildlife preserve which was really neat. I got to see elephants at a fairly, right in front of my eyes. If you remember from the vocabulary lesson, that meant I saw the elephants at a close distance. They were right in front of me. But actually they would be several feet from me. And, of course, we had a guide with us who had a gun just in case something happened.

But also in Ghana we went to a rain forest. And suddenly we went from these two very dry countries, Mali and Burkina Faso, to a very tropical country. Ghana is very tropical. And we went down to the coast and stayed on the beach for about a week, just relaxing. We went and visited some slave forts where slaves were kept on the coast until they were shipped to America, to the United States or even up into Europe.

And from Ghana then we flew back to Morocco, which is where we ended our trip. We ended up spending about three weeks in Morocco which was completely different from West Africa. And I was really sad to leave West Africa. I originally had gone into the trip thinking that I was going to like Morocco better. And I have to say I think I enjoyed my time in West Africa. I would like to go back to Morocco and other countries in Northern Africa, but, yeah, West Africa holds a special place in my heart.

In Morocco, one of the things, one of my favorite places was Fes. And I loved Fes because we stayed in the old city. So it’s called a Medina and it’s like a maze of alleys and small narrow streets. And it’s just the old city of Fes, so you have the newer city, the more modern city on the outside. But we actually stayed in the old city.

And, yeah, so I would say what I took away from our trip, we spent about three months total between all four countries, and what I brought back with me was wonderful friendships that we still have, as I said, like Omar and Marvie. And an appreciation, I came back to the United States with an appreciation for the simplicity of village life, which we got to experience in Mali and Berkina Faso. Visiting and staying with villages, just seeing how simple their lives were. I really liked and appreciated that.

And also I came back with a love for many different kinds of West African music. In fact, since coming back, Joe and I have been to many shows here in San Francisco. Many groups, some that we even saw at the two music festivals we went to, we’ve seen some of those musicians who have traveled here to the United States. And as I did, we did a conversation about, I think it was AJ and I about me taking djembe drum lessons. And that was an inspiration as well from coming back from this trip because the djembe, I believe it actually is an original instrument of West Africa.

So, okay, that concludes the commentary for the conversation Marvie. And your homework is to watch this video many, many times and listen to the conversation many, many times until you have 100% understanding. And also make sure that you get on the Ning site and become active on the Ning site.

That is there for you and the other members to help support each other.

So, okay, see you next time. Bye.