Since I last posted, I've attended three four hour long Swahili classes, lecture at a different school, been partnered up with a conversation partner, and a day at a spice farm. All in all this leads to tons and tons of great learning opportunities both academically and personally. If learning was easy we would all do it, but this week it's been a mixed lot on how " easy" something is.
Swahili is a fascinating language. It mostly comes from Bantu tribes found in Tanzania, but also has an Arabic influence from traders coming down the shipping routes centuries ago. Just like with any other language one needs to be aware of tenses, vocal and tons of devices used to make a coherent sentence. This week we have learned the tense for when something is always done the same everyday, and how to make a clause ( when you go to store,....). Both of which are really important, but it is starting to get confusing on what to put where. Although I continue to love to learn, it is tricky to put parts in the right order. Overall though, my teacher (Mwalimu)is really good and helps sort out all the quirks one might have.
On Tuesday afternoon, we went to the Univeristy of Dar-es-Salaam Marine Biology school for a lecture on coral reefs. This was really interesting. Did you know that coral is actually an animal? Loss of coral reefs is a really big problem off these shores as individuals are using distractive fishing methods(dinamite for example) or putting pollutants in the water. There is also problems with water becoming to acid-y for the coral to be able to grow. It was really interesting and see how we are all connected and need to take care of the Earth we were put in charge of taking care of.
Also on Thuesday afternoon, we met up with conversation partners that SUZA assigns for us to practice talking for an hour. Besides being half sleep deprived from too hot temperatures and tired from walking all over, this was another challenging learning experience. Although I've been studying Swahili for awhile now new words are always brought up leading to halts in actual conversation and sometimes miss communication in language gaps. It isnfrustraing to be half confident going into the hour and coming out feeling that you actually don't know anything. But in that frustration is also the greatest challenge: Either you can give up and decide you weren't ever actually any good at it, or you can step up to the plate and continue to take the pitches. I can't give up. Not when I feel this is what God wants me to do with my life. So, even if I occasionally get hit by a pitch or strick out, I will continue to keep going to the plate and working hard.
Today we went to a spice farm. Here I learned that cloves(karafoo) will make your tongue/mouth numb if you eat even a little bit, there are four different types of pepper corn, There is this fruit called darran that smells like rotten eggs and tastes lice ice cream, nutmeg is fist a black seed that has red mace around it inside a tennis ball shape pod and it takes along time for a coco bean to become chocolate. Throughout it all, it was crazy to think how each one of these plants (besides coconut) were first imported into Zanzibar. It all goes to show that our influence may last around for a while.
This week has been hard. Tomorrow I go back to class to learn something more and will talk again with my conversation buddy. I still have homework to do that will take awhile and more vocabulary to learn. Learning is not always easy, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't do it. If I have learned anything about learning, it is that the hardest learning is often that which you remember you remember the longest because you had to struggle to get it.
Ps if you want to know about something specific I am learning or experiencing on this wild safari I am on, please let me know either in comments, Facebook or email.
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