Nimechoka

Jess has lent me her laptop for tonight so that I can get a whole lot of typing done to upload later. It’s becoming too hard to fit in time to write at school, so this is a good solution.

Tommy came up to me at the beginning of lunch break with a book in his hand. I thought he was going to tell me another impromptu joke, but instead he asked if I’d read with him. It’s so nice when the little monsters of the class show a really sweet side. Anyway, despite numerous interruptions from other kids wanting my attention, we made it through the whole reader by the end of lunch. I kept asking if he wanted to go off and play, but he said he’d rather read with me, and I didn’t mind spending my time that way. I was so impressed by his persistence though – it took us twenty minutes to get through the one story.

I got the impression that the rest of the kids weren’t happy with the fact I was concentrating on someone other than themselves, so I figured I’d make them all happy and spend some time in the classroom. I’ve been staying out of there recently because they tend to get a bit distracted in the euphoria of having my company. (I know, I know, you all feel it sometimes). Miss K set them up listening to a tape (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) (except it was a silly tape because it wasn’t accurate to the book) in what was supposed to be their quiet time. However, Jordan was being particularly hyperactive, and by the very nature of this was stirring up those around him, so I sat with him and helped him with a little project he was doing. He’d decided that he wanted to collect information from and about everyone in the class. So was going around loudly asking each kid one by one how old they were, what their favourite fruit was, what their favourite toy was, who their ‘friend’ was, etc. This of course, was not all that good an idea when the rest of the class was meant to be lying down resting. Luckily, I convinced him that I knew what everyone liked, so spent the next ten minutes rattling off ‘pineapple, teddy, Jake, mango, Frisbee, Jua…’ Yes, I got him to put Frisbee on the list.

Anyway, the class was getting more and more fractious, and Zoe was feeling the strain of a long day, so asked if I wanted to take them for another session. Ah, being put on the spot. Just what I love. Frantically searched through mental database of sea creatures...

S.O.
S.M.
F -> G
J. D.

As we walked in the gate, we ran into April and Marie chatting to Hamisi in the guard house. He's a pretty friendly guy, and must get bored on the night shift, so we stopped by as well. Turned out he was correcting Marie's Kiswahili homework while at the same time getting her to add words to his English vocabulary. With our addition to the group, it soon turned into a somewhat impromptu Kiswahili lesson. Which was awesome, I really enjoyed it. So I thought I'd share some bits of what I'm learning, haven't given you much at all. Mike especially will appreciate this I suspect. It's so much like those linguistics assignments we did - working out the grammatical structure and rules from a series of sentences. Hamisi's English is pretty good, but he couldn't explain the grammar or tenses all that well, so used examples to convey his point.

So if we look at the sentence:

Adam is cooking an egg.
Adam anapika yai.

The verb ‘to cook’ is kupika. In the form anapika we divide it as such a/na/pika, with the ‘a’ denoting he/she, the ‘na’ giving the tense, and the ‘pika’ being the verb root. Yai is egg – if we wanted to make it plural we would add an m.

ie. Mbili mayai – two eggs.

There are probably quite a few inaccuracies. Not only was it challenging to follow Hamisi’s grammatical instruction in itself, but I really don’t have an extensive enough vocabulary yet. I know lots of random words, but no verbs. Useful hey. But yeah, most of the grammar I was assuming from the sentence structure.

The dog is barking now.
Mbwa anapigakelele sasa.

The dog barks everyday.
Hua Mbwa anapigakelele kilasiku.

From what I could gather, barking is actually formed by two verbs in Kiswahili. Kupiga – 'to do', and kelele – 'a bark'. So effectively you’re saying ‘to do a bark’.
As I mentioned, Hamisi’s English wasn’t always technically correct, but I believe the ‘hua’ was the key part in changing the tense of the sentence, rather than a change in the verb structure. He couldn’t really explain that bit though.

Je umechoka? - Are you tired?
Sijechoka – I’m not tired.
Umechoka – You are tired.