New Vocab

On Saturdays, I go with some friends into two local villages to teach English to the kids there. The first village is smaller and has two or three Christian families living there. Only 5 - 10 kids come to learn English in that village, and we teach them in the tiny one room church they have. One time I asked the kids how many people come to that church, and they told me 11. The second village is 100% Muslim, and we usually have 30 - 40 kids come - all elementary age! Depending on how many teachers we have, we split them up into groups by age/grade and teach them on the floor of the village elder's house.

Last week, we were teaching them family words. Father, mother, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, cousin, grandmother, grandfather, niece, nephew, etc. I had the third and fourth graders. We learned all the words, talked about how to spell them, played some games, worked on memorizing the words, then worked on a little bit of simple present tense. We still had some time left, so I taught them how to ask, "How many ___________ do you have?" (filling in the blank with a family word) So we took turns asking each other, "How many sisters do you have?", "How many grandfathers do you have?", "How many cousins do you have?" and so on.

We ran into a problem though. It all started when I asked each of them in turn, "How many fathers do you have?" Of course, they all said "I have one father". I made a joke about how it would be weird to have two or three fathers. Very seriously, they answered, "Yes, but lots of people have more than one mother!" So true in Muslim society. Later on, when I asked, "How many sisters do you have?", the first little girl got confused and asked, "Anak kandung?" Anak means child. Kandung means uterus/womb/fetus. So I thought she was asking me if I wanted her to count an unborn baby as a sister, like if her mom is currently pregnant. I wasn't sure though, so I asked her what she meant. The explanation she gave me went something like this, "You know, anak kandung. Like the kids in your main family. Not the kids that you take from the road or anything like that." OK, I was really confused then. I ended up telling her that she could count however she wanted.

Later on, I asked one of the men to explain to me what it means, and he told me that anak kandung means children from the same womb or mother. So if a man has two wives, and the first has 3 kids and the second has 2 kids, if I were to ask a child from the first wife how many anak kandung siblings they have, they would only count their mother's two other children as their siblings. But if someone were to ask them how many children were in the WHOLE family, they would count all four siblings from the same father.

Good to know. And strange that I live in a society that has such language for multiple wives with multiple children.