__Adventures in Outer Froglandia: Home, Sweet Home & My First Creole Phrase!

My house in Martinique is much like many of the other houses here – double level with the bottom floor very open and airy. This allows for flooding to dry up without difficulty. The night that I arrived here though, I didn’t notice or understand any of that. Darkness falls quickly in Martinique. It starts to get dark at around 5:15 or 6:15, depending on the season, and ten to fifteen minutes later, it is pitch black. By the time we pulled up to Sylvie’s house – my new residence – I couldn’t really make out much. Nor did I try, in my state! Sylvie showed me the room upstairs where I would be sleeping for the next week or two until she could get my downstairs quarters all sorted out, and I hit the hay! I lay in bed on that warm first night, nice and securely protected under my mosquito net from my lovely roommates (swarms upon swarms of those insatiable, gluttonous, bloodsuckers! …Not that I’m bitter…), as enchanting music wafted in through the wide-open windows. A choir somewhere was singing traditional French songs. How surreal. I let the sweet harmonies lull me to sleep...

In the morning, Sylvie explained to me that her neighbor hosts choir practice at her house every once in a while. I’ve only heard them practicing that one night, so I’m just going to imagine they were singing to welcome me! She also let me know that there are not normally this many mosquitoes. My homies were rollin’ deep because of all the grass in the yard. (Shout out to anyone who actually uses the word homies, or who knows what “rollin’ deep” means.) The gardener hadn’t come in two months because, well, basically he’s lazy! This is when I learned my first Creole phrase, “Wi pani poutchi.” Basically, “If you say yes, you have no problems.” It essentially means that if you say yes, people stop hassling you. This is a very prevalent mentality here in Martinique! If you say, “Come mow my lawn!” and the other person responds, “Oh, you see, I can’t really because I have this thing with my daughter’s teacher’s cousin’s garden thing thing and then I have to go bake a watermelon and water my cactus…” etc, etc… then you don’t give up. You continue, “No! That’s two months since you last came and my house is swarming with mosquitos and na na na!!” And it escalates so on and so forth. According to Sylvie, Martiniquans are very nonconfrontational. Thus, they have a very practical way of avoiding this entire downward spiral of chastising, finger-pointing, puffed-chest, hands-on-hips shouting matches. They simply say “Oui” – “Yes, OK, I’ll come!” – And then they don’t. Smart, no?