Delightful! Delightful! Delightful!

I don’t remember who it was, but before leaving, somebody told me that Kiswahili is an easy language to learn.  I wish I could remember who that was, because I have a noogie for that person.  Kiswahili is hard.  Case in point: there are several different ways to say “it” depending on what class the noun falls into.  Some classes are logical, like living creatures, trees, or (most) fruit, but others you must simply remember where they belong.  For each noun class, there is a different way to say “it,” “of,” “my,” “which,” “that,” “all,” and etc., plus the adjective agreement, and it’s different for singular and plural—It’s enough to just make you sick!   So whoever it was that said Kiswahili is easy, please feel free to come forward here and we can have a pity party for me in the comments section. 

I complain about the noun classes, but it is nice that there is no formal/informal--“you” is the same for a child as it is for an elder.  But for anyone older than you, you should first greet him or her with “shikamoo!” to express respect.  This is for elders, yes, but also people who are even 5 years or so older than you.  The correct response is “marahaba!”  Good kids will say this to me all the time, so walking to and from my house, I am usually saying “Marahaba! Marahaba! Marahaba!” because there are a lot of good kids in my neighborhood.  I was really tickled to read that “shikamoo!” literally means “I touch your feet!” and “marahaba!” means “Delightful!” So, I stroll through my neighborhood saying, “Delightful! Delightful! Delightful!”

Sometimes it can be difficult to figure out who should be shikamoo’d.  A lot of Tanzanians look younger than they are.  But it’s easy to razz age-phobic Americans with this custom--I bristled when a fellow trainee, 23 years old, greeted me with “shikamoo!”  Not delighted.

Before coming here, I was familiar with “African time,” meaning that you might schedule a meeting for 8 and people don’t show up until 10.  Well, I’m pretty sure that Tanzanians do read clocks on “Africa time” but they also read them in “Kiswahili time.”   Here at 4 degrees latitude, the days are split pretty evenly between hours of daylight and darkness.  So at 6am, the day starts, and so does the Kiswahili clock. 7am is 1 in the morning.  8 is 2 and so on and so forth, until 7pm when it becomes 1 in the evening.  So if you ask someone what time it is at 4:30pm, they will say it is 10:30 in the afternoon.  It is taking some getting used to. 

So, I should probably take this opportunity to brag about some of the cool stuff I’ve done during training.  At my homestay village’s primary school, a few trainees and I led students in building a compost pile, and on another occasion, a permagarden.  PC Tanzania has a permagarden specialist on staff, who gave us an excellent training.  It is an awesome design of double-dug beds, berms, swales, and holes that make for a soil and water-conserving, high-food-yielding, pretty-good-looking-nutrition-machine.  Hopefully I can get some pictures up here.  Mama Halima wanted one, and we wanted more practice at building one, so we made one for her, too.  The damn chickens promptly rooted through our terraforming, but I was so happy that the next day Mama Halima and Fatouma spent the hot afternoon building a fence around it!  Mama Halima was really interested in the idea of redirecting and conserving water.  Also, I showed my family how to make a mosquito repelling lotion with neem tree leaves.  Fatouma is planning on making more and selling it.  Today is Thanksgiving, and I am feeling thankful for my families--my family at home, whose love and support I am so grateful for, and also my Tanzanian host family for their effort and patience.

Coming up next…the big reveal: where is Nora going to live for the next two years? Site announcements are on Saturday!