Swahili Lessons

Hamjambo! Jina langu ni Erin na ninasikia vizuri. Mimi ni mjitoleaji wa VSO na ninatoka nchi ya Canada.

Translation: Hello! My name is Erin and I am well. I am a VSO volunteer and I'm from Canada.

Not exactly eloquent but it will do for now. I just hope no one wants to move into any conversations deeper than what kind of meat they like, how many children they have, or what neighborhood they live in.

I have just finished 2 days of VERY intense language training. My teacher is nice and very quick to laugh which I love. She calls this a crash crash course in Kiswahili. I think Anne(ESL teacher) would have a lot to say about the methodology as there was no apparent order to the lessons and we covered irregular verbs before we even learned how to pronounce the vowels. But we did learn a decent amount for only 2 days.

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There are 16 volunteers in our group and we are from the Philippines-5, the Netherlands-1, Ireland-1, England-3, Uganda-3, Ghana-1, USA-1, and Canada-1. Everyone else is staying 1-2 years and we’ll be placed all over Kenya. We should all be able to stay in touch quite well and are hoping to get together for Christmas. A rumor has been circulating that we get a decent amount of vacation at Christmas but we’ll see if that is actually true.

We have been very busy with classes so we haven’t had time to go more than a few blocks from the hotel. We have classes in Nairobi all week but only 1 more day of language class so we may have a little more free time to explore after that. I’ll write again when we get a chance to see the city.

I’ve found a Kenyan dance off show on tv and I’m loving it (with the excuse that I’m practising my Swahili of course).

Kwaheri!

(Goodbye)

Culture Note:

One thing I had been told about Africa is that you really notice that people don’t think of paper as disposable like North Americans do. My teacher seems to be absolutely terrified of wasting paper and only uses one flipchart paper per day. The result is an absolute mess of words and phrases written just large enough to read jammed into one small space. Towards the end of the days she is squeezing words wherever she can find random space so if you look down at your notes for a few seconds and don’t see where she is writing you’ll never find how to spell that word. Definitely more challenging to learn this way. I'll certainly appreciate paper more from now on!