Visiting the site

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Every morning, dressed in our long skirts and t-shirts, we join our group at our meeting place under a big mti (tree). We'll have a short discussion and talk about our plan that day and sometimes have a Swahili lesson. On Tuesday we practiced teaching our lessons. In the next few days we will begin to teach HIV education in the nearby schools, so we are finalizing our lesson plans. We also worked at the OHS site today, leveling the field behind the orphanage. In the next few months they will be building a chicken coop for fresh eggs for the kids!

Wednesday, today, we went back to site, which is about a half hour walk from our houses, a lot of which is through corn fields and neighborhoods, or "bomas". Today we met the kids for the first time. There are 20 of them, from 1 to 18 years old. A few times a week we will come to site and work with a child we are paired with on homework or other activities. I will be working with Ema on math. Ema is about 12 and has quite a little attitude. He's the 'cool' guy.

Here's a short Swahili lesson for you. Swahili is an extremely easy language. It is also an agglutinating language, meaning that small word particles fit together to form bigger words, which hold the meaning of an entire sentence. There are also no irregulatires in Swahili. The subject of a sentence is your prefix. The tense of the verb is your infix. And the verb itself is your suffix. Just as we drop the 'to' of the verb that makes it infinitive, you drop the 'ku' of their verb before attaching it to the phrase.

Prefixes: I-ni, you-u, he/she-a, we-tu, they-wa

Tenses: past-li, present-na, future-ta

Some verbs: to speak-kusoma, to love-kupenda, to want-kutaka, to learn-kujifunza

Some other fun words: food-chakula, mtoto-child, mbwa-dog, wali-rice, maji-water, ndizi-banana

So here are some example sentences:

I (present tense) speak Swahili- Ninasoma Swahili.

We wanted food- Tulitaka chakula.

They love to learn- Wanipenda kujifunza.

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