Adventist

I think I'm being adopted into the Seventh-Day Adventist church.

My friend Dayale is quite involved with the church, and has brought me along to various activities involving it. So for instance, I thought I was going to a church service where I was going to have the chance to recruit during the 'Announcements' part of the service, but instead I just sat through the whole service, which was only excruciating due to an extended (90+ minutes) discussion of proposed architectural modifications to the church. Luckily, after the service was over, she introduced me to people who could help me. For example, one person who I will DEFINITELY be including in the study was talking to me when the service was over, and when we were talking, it was very clear that he mixed the two creoles a lot. As a bonus, he thought I was a French person who had lived in America so long that it had corrupted my French. So of course, I liked him a lot.

Then today, she introduced me to a friend of hers who is quite unique. She is an Aluku, one of the Bushi Nengue ethnicities in French Guiana. The Bushi Nengue are a group descended from slave populations that escaped from the early days of slavery in Surinam, and managed to survive in the Amazon, eluding those that came looking for them. Many of them ended up in French Guiana and continue to live in the Amazon, while others live in the cities. They speak an English-based creole. But this particular woman happens to also speak Haitian Creole with an impressive degree of fluency. Anyhow, what I thought was just a get-together between two friends was in fact a prayer meeting. So for the second time in as many days, I felt like I was at church. Almost like what I used to do at choir camp.

Then tonight, we were supposed to go to a radio station run by the Adventists to advertise my study. She asked me to listen to the radio, and I heard 10 seconds of one song in English and I was like, "That's clearly not the right station." "Why's that?" "Because the lyrics were 'I wanna have sex tonight, I wanna have sex tonite." Apparently they haven't mastered their screening process for songs. In any event, the program was not on, and I didn't recruit on the radio. But I've met lots of Haitians over the last few days, so things are on their way to getting done.