PNS: Good evening. This is Rita Trevalyan with Planetary News Service here to interview Obogado Onoye of the Proserpina Exploratory Mission. How are you tonight, Mr. Obagado?
Onoye: Mr. Obagado is my father. Please call me Onoye.
PNS:All right, Onoye. What is your job in the mission?
Onoye: My specialty is hydraulics. Anything having to do with water, I’m your man.
PNS: So on the trip over, you assisted Nadyezhka with her plants, and now you are assisting the natives to irrigate their crops.
Onoye: Yes. It is very exciting. When my father was a very young boy, the American Peace Corps came to his village and taught the people how to have fresh water for drinking and cooking, and water for their crops and bathing. Now I do the same thing for these people. Davida started by digging up an ancient irrigation channel, and I found the rest of the channels.It is like the Peace Corps all over again.
PNS: That does sound very exciting. How hard is it to learn the language?
Onoye: Oh, Winifred has taken care of all of that. She learned it first, and had 2 natives to help her with accent and modernize her pronunciation, and the three of them have been giving us language lessons. She is a true polyglot. I don’t know of a language that she hasn’t at least tried to learn.
PNS: How many languages do you speak, Onoye?
Onoye: Only 4. English, of course, Afrikaans, That’s a dialect of Dutch, I’m learning the language here, I’ve picked up a little Russian, mostly swear words, I’m afraid, and X!hosa, my tribal language. Father would never forgive me if I forgot that.
PNS: What is your present ambition? What would you like to do on Proserpina that you haven’t done yet?
Onoye: Continue learning the language, of course. Being able to communicate with these people is such a basic part of life that I don’t know how we could proceed without it. And once I have become a bit more grounded in the language, I’d like to learn more about the people and the culture they set up when they had to live in the lava tubes. I am also an anthropologist, you know.
PNS::Thank you, Onoye. Tune in next week for another stimulating interview with a member of this team.
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