Again with the drinks!
By the time that I leave this place, the amount of time I will have wasted away at cafes and bars in the company of Deo will be astounding, I am sure. Today, after a day at school and then spending two hours in the internet café, all I wanted to do was go home and relax. However, since Deo was in town doing some school business and I don’t have a key to his house, he said we would meet up in town after I was finished to go home. I knew what was coming, but there was no way for me to get out of it.
We met at the bus stop, which actually had made me think for a second that we might actually be going home. But my hopes were dashed when he said that Mr.Kimolo was waiting for us at a bar closer to home. Good thing I had my newspaper with me. Mr. Kimolo is a nice man and actually one of the most agreeable persons I have met here, but I have simply grown tired of sitting in bars sipping disgustingly sugary soft drinks (I never drink them at home anymore and certainly won’t when I get back) while Deo goes through a bottle or three (almost always the latter) of beer. When, hours later, if I get some money out to contribute, he invariably hands me the bill telling me the total amount (for all the drinks). I pay, simply because the money ($3 or $4) is not a big deal for me, but it seems to be becoming a pattern that, in principal, I find a little disturbing. I think I’ll leave it at that for now.
On a more positive note, as I headed into town today from school, I was on my own and noticed that I am starting to get a feel for the place and be a bit more comfortable in the surroundings. It sure helps that most adults with even a half-decent education speak English. I don’t think I had mentioned that before but it is in fact the case. Tanzania has two official languages, Swahili and English, and I have yet to meet more than a handful of adults that don’t speak it reasonably well. Certainly, they all have African accents when they speak, but the quality of the English (vocabulary and grammar) is quite exceptional. How people go from the level my students are at to the level I have seen in adults with the instruction that I have witnessed in school is beyond me.
For those who might be curious, I am slowly picking up a bit of Swahili. I haven’t had time to really get down to studying it on a regular basis simply because by the time we get back home after all the time wasted at the bars and cafes, we eat dinner, and then I am tired and still have a blog entry or two to write. However, I am slowly getting the hang of the grammar and very slowly adding new vocabulary, and it helps that Deo was a teacher of Swahili before taking his administrative role as a headmaster. The other helpful thing is that Swahili is written with the roman alphabet and it’s pronunciation is entirely regular. On the flip side, Swahili is a Bantu language in family, and agglutinative in type, meaning that verbs have stems and then the other bits and pieces of information like subjects, tenses and what have you are added as prefixes on to the stem. This can be comfortably regular, but there are also lots of weird exceptions, and having multiple classes of nouns, each having certain rules, helps to make things difficult. Fortunately people are always willing to help and very happy when you manage to spit out a few words of their language.
Well, as the end of my 8th day in Moshi draws near, I have just one thing left to say: I have STILL not seen Mt. Kilimanjaro. Yes, despite eating, sleeping, breathing and working right at its foot, it has still not emerged from the clouds. And I don’t mean just the summit, I mean all of it. Some days here are rainy, although mostly the mornings are cool and grey and the afternoons are brilliantly sunny and hot, but despite the daily clear up, the one part of the sky that never clears is the northwest, where Kilimanjaro sits perpetually clouded from head to foot. They keep telling me that next week I’ll see it. That’s starting to become a familiar refrain though.
We met at the bus stop, which actually had made me think for a second that we might actually be going home. But my hopes were dashed when he said that Mr.Kimolo was waiting for us at a bar closer to home. Good thing I had my newspaper with me. Mr. Kimolo is a nice man and actually one of the most agreeable persons I have met here, but I have simply grown tired of sitting in bars sipping disgustingly sugary soft drinks (I never drink them at home anymore and certainly won’t when I get back) while Deo goes through a bottle or three (almost always the latter) of beer. When, hours later, if I get some money out to contribute, he invariably hands me the bill telling me the total amount (for all the drinks). I pay, simply because the money ($3 or $4) is not a big deal for me, but it seems to be becoming a pattern that, in principal, I find a little disturbing. I think I’ll leave it at that for now.
On a more positive note, as I headed into town today from school, I was on my own and noticed that I am starting to get a feel for the place and be a bit more comfortable in the surroundings. It sure helps that most adults with even a half-decent education speak English. I don’t think I had mentioned that before but it is in fact the case. Tanzania has two official languages, Swahili and English, and I have yet to meet more than a handful of adults that don’t speak it reasonably well. Certainly, they all have African accents when they speak, but the quality of the English (vocabulary and grammar) is quite exceptional. How people go from the level my students are at to the level I have seen in adults with the instruction that I have witnessed in school is beyond me.
For those who might be curious, I am slowly picking up a bit of Swahili. I haven’t had time to really get down to studying it on a regular basis simply because by the time we get back home after all the time wasted at the bars and cafes, we eat dinner, and then I am tired and still have a blog entry or two to write. However, I am slowly getting the hang of the grammar and very slowly adding new vocabulary, and it helps that Deo was a teacher of Swahili before taking his administrative role as a headmaster. The other helpful thing is that Swahili is written with the roman alphabet and it’s pronunciation is entirely regular. On the flip side, Swahili is a Bantu language in family, and agglutinative in type, meaning that verbs have stems and then the other bits and pieces of information like subjects, tenses and what have you are added as prefixes on to the stem. This can be comfortably regular, but there are also lots of weird exceptions, and having multiple classes of nouns, each having certain rules, helps to make things difficult. Fortunately people are always willing to help and very happy when you manage to spit out a few words of their language.
Well, as the end of my 8th day in Moshi draws near, I have just one thing left to say: I have STILL not seen Mt. Kilimanjaro. Yes, despite eating, sleeping, breathing and working right at its foot, it has still not emerged from the clouds. And I don’t mean just the summit, I mean all of it. Some days here are rainy, although mostly the mornings are cool and grey and the afternoons are brilliantly sunny and hot, but despite the daily clear up, the one part of the sky that never clears is the northwest, where Kilimanjaro sits perpetually clouded from head to foot. They keep telling me that next week I’ll see it. That’s starting to become a familiar refrain though.
posted by CHRIS at 10:58 p.m.
1 Comments:
Yay! I forgot that you would know what an agglutinating language is :-) and was surprised for a second when I started reading that paragraph.
I love Swahili, very amazing and interesting in structure. Quite beautiful.
Do you think they are familiar with the term "britney spearsing"? Perhaps you can work on adding a new borrowing to the language.
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