Language Blunders

Part of my job here in Africa is to greet people.
Yeah, that’s right, I get paid to greet people.
Alright, well, maybe not just like that. But our ministry right now is language and culture learning with relationship building, so that involves a lot of being out in the community with people. And it’s just the way of life in Lopit that you greet people.
And it was in this that one of my all-time favorite language blunders was birthed.
I’ve said before that everyone wants to know where you’re going and where you’ve been. And when we first got here, this was about the extent of our language learning, so we jumped right into this tradition of inquisition, even if we didn’t know exactly what they were saying in response.
My roommate Pattie met a woman on the path one morning and, being the culturally appropriate missionary she is, asked where this woman was headed. “Awu nang aler,” she said.
“I’m going…” mystery word.
This wasn’t the first time Pattie had heard this word, but she had no idea where “aler” was. We’d come to recognize the village names, the word for the sorghum fields and the word for the peanut fields, and this wasn’t any of them, so she pressed for an explanation.
After a few awkward minutes of the woman miming, Pattie suddenly had a pretty good idea where “aler” was.
It just so happened there was this old Lopit guy who speaks a little English coming down the path, so she stopped him. “What does ‘aler’ mean?”
(I’d like to note that there was absolutely no pause, no awkwardness in this man’s response.)
“To defecate.”
Yeah, she was going to the bathroom down the mountain a bit. I have no idea how many times we asked people this and just nodded our approval or gave an enthusiastic “olibo bino!” (really good!” another one of our early phrases) as they went along.
Oh, language learning.
And our question now is… how do you respond to that?
The traditional thing to say as you leave one another is “eno no libo!” which means…
“Go well!”