Monday: The first day of Swahili lessons - Habari za Asubuhi?

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After having divided ourselves in groups of 4 or 5 the previous evening, we were to start our first day of Swahili lessons. Somehow I felt transported back in time to my school days. The youngest ones of us, that was Kevin, Sandra, Sara, Mathew (the 12 year old son of a volunteer couple) and myself formed the group ‘Ndizi chisi’. We had to give ourselves the name of a fruit in Swahili, so we went for ‘Crazy bananas’.
Learning a language in 2 weeks seems a quite daunting mission in any case, so the set-up of small groups and 6 hours of lessons a day makes it feel at least a little more viable. The first 2 hours were devoted to greetings - a big difference between Swahili in Kenya and Tazania: While Kenyans like to keep it short and simple with a ‘Jambo’ for every occasion, Tanzanians celebrate the greeting rituals thoroughly: There is a special greeting for people older than oneself, taken from Arabic ‘Merahaba’, which requires a specific answer ‘Shikamoo’, then there is one to be used to greet more than one person and then there is ‘Habari’ - which stands for ‘What’s the news? This can then be combined with a multitude of combinations to enquire about how one is this morning/afternoon/evening/night, then you can enquire about home/work/children and so on. The expected answer is always ‘fine’, an actual statement of the facts is considered inappropriate. So you can spend a little while enquiring about each others well-being without really telling anything! But we moved with a speed I hadn’t experienced in any other language class before, covering in the second 2 hour, what you normally do in 2 weeks - conjugating verbs in present tense, pronouns and more stuff!
Then it was break time with the ‘second breakfast’! This consisted of a doughnut and a hotdog, a typical Tanzanian combination as I was to experience later.
After this healthy treat (I gave my hotdog to Mathew), it was another 2 hours of Swahili - conjugating more verbs and counting up to 100.
For lunch, this started to get a little repetitive now, rice, chips, the same soupy tomato sauce, meat and a bit of boiled white cabbage. Then another 2 hours of Swahili with a different teacher again, this time we were to listen to a language tape - something I never liked in any language lesson and something I find rather pointless, when you’ve got not just one but 5 native speakers as teachers, so opportunities enough to get used to different pronunciations… and a little early for this kind of exercise, as there wasn’t really any time to study what we had learned so far.

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Mogole Convent
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