“Scrabble” translated into French is “Scrabble”

French language training, and as a logical consequence my overall sojourn in Northern Virginia, are rapidly coming to a close. Although only six days of actual classroom time remain, I honestly don’t know what I am going to do during that 24 hour chunk of training.

After six months of back and forth classroom discussion à la McLaughlin Group, my brain has long-since registered itself as vacant. In fact, I’m pretty certain that my mind is somewhere off of the Virginia Capes, trying to navigate its way to the Cap Vert peninsula. This state of “spacing out” (yes, a scientific term) normally wouldn’t be such a big deal, but my trusty classroom “teaching tool”- a game of travel Scrabble – was packed up with my household goods last week. Looks like there’s no more daydreaming for me, unless I can find an old game of Battleship and make my school believe that we are simulating war games between the Senegalese and American navies. I’ll have to file that idea away for serious consideration.

Despite my baseless complaints, I do have to say that I was incredibly lucky that Marie Diop was assigned as my language teacher. Although we come from two completely different backgrounds, we hit it off from the very beginning (heck, she calls me her white sister). To wit: we are both anti-social people who don’t like large groups, believe most women to be crazy (but bien sûr, not ourselves!), and also have the same twisted sense of humor. I did suffer through two substitute teachers while she was away for a month- one was an old French women who always told me that she was trop gourmande and needed to exercise just before digging into a nice buttery croissant. The other was a smelly Lebanese dude whose French was worse than mine and managed to relate everything back to the 1915 Armenian genocide by the Turks. It probably goes without saying that this guy was of Armenian descent…

Okay, so language training hasn’t been too painful. After all, I’m not deployed, and I’m no longer doing military exercises with Southeast Asian navies where chauvinist naval counterparts affectionately call me the “Lady Officer”. Life’s pretty good, but I’m still going to look around the cellar of this house to see if I can’t find some classic board games.

How do you say say “Candyland” in Wolof?


I’d like to say that these Scrabble matches really upped my vocab proficiency, but I was always too lazy to write down the words that I didn’t know. I would just nod and make like I was mentally etching them into my brain- and then this learning would invariably be erased seconds later when I started to ponder more pressing issues like “what am I gonna eat for lunch today?”