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A chat with the security guard [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-30
I’ve been to a lot of countries in my career, including working in France and French-speaking Africa, and I spent five years in school learning French. It’s my original second language but now it’s really my third, Spanish having supplanted it. We don’t speak a lot of French in Mexico.
Recently a new Soriana Hipermart opened near us. This part of Mexico is quite racially homogeneous so when you notice a Black person, it’s natural to speculate: are they from Haiti? Brazil? South-east Mexican coast?
I was out shopping with my half-orange today and encountered a young lady with a decidedly French-sounding surname, so I spoke to her in French. She’s one of four Haitian staff at the store. Later I chatted to the Haitian security guard but to begin with, it was really difficult. He didn’t seem to understand my French even though I was being careful and therefore slow. Finally he told me something I hadn’t known: that the percentage of people in Haiti who actually speak French is not high, and that everyone speaks Kreol. (Creole) is a form of pidgin based on French, West African (Senegal) eg Wolof, bits of Spanish, Indonesian… as such it’s a lot further from French than Pidgin English is from English. (I speak Pidgin but not Kreol.)
Once I understood I was wasting our time trying to use French, I just switched to Spanish; he’s been here long enough to be fluent. And he explained that he had to flee Haiti. His area, where he lived and worked, had been taken over by the gangs.
Gangs, equipped with American firearms and financed by wealthy US Haitian exiles. And that was why he didn’t want to learn English. Because.
NB: I have not included his photo because that would be intrusive and unnecessary, so I thought you might enjoy some eggs instead.
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