Ah Kezi, my sister. I wonder what you're doing right now. I'm sending you some nutrigrain and vegemite little one. I hope you're not sad anymore. Just think of '09. It's not so far away, and then I'll get to show you round my side of the world.

Jo, Kezi and I mucking round with the camera. Far out I miss them. I know I've been saying I'll keep updating these pages, but it's really tough. As soon as I start looking at photos I start thinking of all the people I miss. It'll come, but it'll be little by little.

Mt Meru - Ch.1

How to climb a mountain hopelessly unprepared

This is not a recommendation. This is a simple statement of facts.

. Decide quite spontaneously one morning to climb the mountain. That day.

. Be in cahoots with someone equally as insane. This is probably the most important factor to take into account. Without such a partner, there will be all sorts of nasty disagreements about the sensibility of winging your way up a 4,562 metre summit.

. Realise that the only footwear you have in the country are a pair of thongs and a pair of cleats.

. Realise this five minutes before you set out.

. 

to be continued...

Jan and Corneel are in the computer room with me. We swapped blog addresses*. Then they informed me theirs is in Dutch. Pah. Useless. How am I meant to read a site in Dutch?

Nah, those two are great. Given how many comments I got on a two line post, I thought I'd do you the courtesy of expanding a little...

Later. Because I have to go do stuff now. Why does that always happen?

*Nicole, they're called URLs nowadays.

Mish is getting deported!

Ok not really. But I am on my way to the immigration department to put in an appeal for my working visa which they are refusing to allow for various reasons and which has thus far prevented me from getting a residential permit. So I've been here on a tourist visa, which is fine for three months... and as of today I've been here for three months. So, either they let all my paperwork go through, or else I have to leave the country and re-enter to get a new visa. Fun stuff. I don't really mind, a spontaneous trip up to Kenya or South to Malawi will be interesting, but still, it's a bit of a pain, we're talking a twenty hour round bus trip. You'll know in a day or two how it went I suppose...

Cry me a river

So. You know how I was telling you about the rain yesterday. Well, it rained all night, and we woke up to find the garden under water, and the road a river. Seriously. We're talking knee deep and flowing strongly. Awesome.

 

And this is Tessa's bright idea for getting to the McFarlane's house (who were on carpool duty) without being soaked by the rain...

Can YOU dodge a wrench?

Yep. We’ve well and truly hit the rainy season. First swimming class of the day was cut short again – one of the power lines dropped across the track that runs around the back of the school, and was shorting out and flashing a freaky amount of sparks in noisy bursts. Given that this was all of twenty metres from the pool, we got the kids out pronto. I wasn’t doing so well with the teaching anyway, as the rain was so heavy that the kids couldn’t hear me properly, and it was getting to the point where visibility was so poor that it wasn’t safe to have that many children in the water.

The whole school is off power right now. Power in Tanzania = unreliable. Power in Tanzania when it’s raining = well, to take a note from Hui’s economic’s analysis, 100% reliably not there. The only reason I can be typing this is that the computer room can run off generator power for about four hours, so right now it’s kind of a nice place to be. It being so overcast, the rest of the classrooms are pretty dark and uninviting. No internet though – that’s the first thing to go when the power shuts off. I shall be posting this up at a later time.

Wow. I’ve been here for sixteen minutes and it’s still pouring. Given that it started about ten minutes into the swimming lesson, that’s about fifty minutes of heavy rain. This is ridiculous. Ridiculously cool, but still ridiculous. It would be nice if it was raining like this in Benalla.

---

Ok, next swimming class was cancelled too, because it was still raining too heavily. So instead they just had PE. Brandon was taking the class of course, but I figured I'd stick around. We played dodgeball for an hour and a half. It was awesome.

It has now been raining with great enthusiasm from 7:45 until 11:15 and doesn't look like stopping anytime soon. Very cool. Except for what it does to the roads around here. Bet you there'll be a lot of cars bogged today...

Blur darter!

Was leading the fasa fris session this afternoon, when the boys noticed that the gardeners were behaving rather oddly. One of them would charge full speed down the path, hit a certain point, screech to a halt, and dash back the other way. I have since made the assumption that they were daring each other to see how close they could get to the ‘thing’ (soon to be revealed) but at the time it just seemed very childish.

I immediately deduced that as I don't possess enough control of these kids to keep their attention in said circumstance, it was to my tactical advantage to shout out loudly "oh cool! Let's go see what they've found!" drop the disc and rush off. Turned out they'd disturbed a huge lizard - Tanzanian's are quite superstitious about lizards, and this fellow was likely to have had his head squished in as soon as they'd gathered up the courage to get close.

International Day!

I haven't uploaded any of my own photos yet, it's a time consuming task, but I will scam some photos from Jan and Corneel's collections to show you a bit of the colour...

The Australian contingent:

Traditional Tanzanian dance troupe:

Korean fan dance:

I am in Zanzibar. It is cool. I will tell you about it when I am not paying for internet time. Zanzibar is too cool for me to sit on the internet anyway.

This is Epiphany. Indescribable in words. But maybe, just maybe, you'll get a sense of her exuberance. Most joyous child I've ever met.

I'm sitting next to Eliza in the computer room as the kindergartens play with the paint program. Did I mention how much I love that kid. She is so sweet, such a beautiful child. She's drawing a face, white outline on a green background with long blonde hair. She started putting blue streaks all down the girl's face. I asked why she was crying.
"She's not crying. It's just raining on her face."
The kid next to me on the other side has drawn three faces of different sizes that look remarkabley like monkeys.

Afterschool today we're going to dinner at Artemis' place. She's one of the grade 1s, their family is Greek so they've apparently been wanting to invite Zoe (and by default me) over for a while. It'll be fun, but some small part of me would rather the evening at home.

This morning I had grade 2 swimming followed immediately by the grade 4s. Both classes went really well, we're getting into a good rhythm. The kids know what to expect now, and are showing such improvement already. I am getting a ridiculous tan from all these hours in the pool. Silly really.

Tanti Aguri Gammi

Savana, Lucy and I didn’t get to sleep until three in the morning. We didn’t talk about anything all that specific, they just brought up teenage girl kind of stuff. It felt a little weird actually, to be playing that kind of role for them. Shouldn't have really, given Cath is the same age, but still. Anyway, we had a fun time, I had answers for some of their questions, they gave me a rundown of the social acrobatics of their class. Quite interesting actually, because many of them have been in the same one class with the same kids since they were in kindergarten. They were telling me that most of the boys were at the same maturity level that they were at in grade four. Funny that. An international tendancy perhaps?

Went over to school to try and skype call home. Took me about an hour and a half to get the connection working, and there was a huge delay in the line, but hey, got to say happy birthday to my little sis, so it was worth it. We basically just ended up taking turns talking, because my responses to her questions would get through to her a couple of minutes later, by which point she would be talking about something completely different. But that's ok. It's all about hearing her voice.

Walked to the Afrikana junction with the intention of getting a biketaxi. I shall have to explain what they are to you. Takes about fifteen minutes to walk there, and just as I got to the corner Cindy drove past with Kezzie and asked if I wanted a lift the rest of the way. That was neat, I haven't been on one of the bikes yet, and they can be a little intimidating. It is very rare to see a white person on one, let alone a white female, so you get a whole lot of attention from everyone you ride past.

Leah’s party. Kids flattened. Bumped heads and bleeding lips. Island adventure story. Went home feeling a little drained. Too little sleep, too much day/sun, not such good food, predictable result I suppose....

For I have learned to be content

God has blessed America.

*Note: This theme came from Youth group, it was the discussion topic for the night, and my thoughts on the matter shall be coming soon...

Why drive when you can walk?

I went by myself to Mbezi Chapel again this week. It's only a ten minute walk, and really a pleasant way to start off a Sunday morning. I don't think I even wrote it up properly the first time I went, (in my second week here) but the service is done entirely in Swahili and last time I understood a grand total of about three words. Well, today I could actually get complete sentences every so often, enough to vaguely follow the general idea of it. Neat!

Afterwards I went with Suzy and her dad to their place again, where Ruth had prepared lunch for us. (Zoe had gone to Vineyard today, so arrived later with Karen's family). Spent the afternoon playing with the kids and trying to windsurf. Fun stuff.

Aaah, Eliza is such a gorgeous child. She is absolutely beautiful both in character and looks. Every day at school she runs up to give me a hug. She's not demanding, just so amazingly sweet and friendly.

If you could see through my eyes

The five of us from the compound (so without Brandon and Rachel) drove to Slipway today. Slipway is a local market sort of area, a whole series of stalls and little shops selling bead work and carved pieces and artwork and clothing and all sorts of traditional Tanzanian crafts. It's a lovely place, I really like just wandering through there, but you tend to get a fair bit of attention. Not so much because of being white, it's an area catering specifically for white tourists, but simply because they want you to buy from them, and for that you need to be looking at their stall in more than a general context. This photo is of one of the Slipway artists working on a set of name plates in Tinga Tinga style. The artwork here is amazing, I have great admiration for their technique.


We had lunch at a place on the wharf. I gave some of mine to a stray cat. He wasn't as skinny as the cat that hangs round our place, funny that. I have a feeling he picks up lots of scraps from people. We were just leaving when I heard my name called out, looked round and it was Aishi and Dorothy and another friend of theirs. Had a bit of a chat to them - they were in town to sit practice examinations.

I look at Dorothy, and I see a tall, beautiful, native Tanzanian, star of the soccer team and a hardworking intelligent girl. She has two sisters, one who graduated last year, and Angela in grade four. Her father works at Hopac and by this has put the three of them through school. Her older sister won a scholarship to Harvard last year. Dorothy is likely to do very well too.

They don't have running water at home.

See what I meant when I said Hopac was an unusual school. To be offering not just an education, but an education at the level where students can compete internationally, is a pretty amazing thing.

The whole Slipway trip had taken longer than we thought, (correction, longer than we hoped. We're way past the stage of honestly expecting an excursion into town to take less than six or seven hours all up), and Zoe and I were due at the O'Neil's for dinner, so we decided to drive straight there rather than go home first.

Apparently it was the best day of Tommy's life. Makes you feel good hey. Played Yahtzee, In a Pickle, kids went to bed, chatted to Steve and Denae...

I worked with Ju on his own today. A good decision I think, because it allowed me to see exactly how much he relies on Ha to cue him into what I’m asking of him. He was a little obnoxious, but we were still mostly productive. I’m never confident that he’s trying to remember, trying to understand, what we do in the lesson though. Ha on the other hand has picked up so much since Rachel and I started working with her. She’s got a very clear grasp of the language. Ju is still at the parroting stage. But that’s ok. We’ll get there. So, when I went in to get him out of the classroom, Julie suggested that according to what the rest of the class had been doing I should go over suffixes with him. Yeah. Not that I don’t have faith in his intelligence, but there wasn’t a chance of him being able to process something like that yet. I mean, the word ‘child’ had to be defined, let alone getting to the stage of dealing with ‘childish’. We had a fun time learning about neat vs messy though, and making different choices relative to the word ‘or’.

Zoe had promised her class I’d come by in the afternoon to talk about another animal. I decided to go with seals because they’d been demanding that for a while. It was fun, although I’ve since found that my seal drawings are not considered up to scratch by six year old standards. As if! I thought they were fine. Ok, maybe not as good as my sea otter, or clownfish, but hey, they were clearly seals. Gosh. Give me a break! Anyway, we got into a detailed description about thermoregulation and the adaptations necessary for living in the cold ocean. I’m constantly amazed by how well they handle the concepts I’m throwing at them – I mean, I simplify the way I present them, but still, some of it’s complex stuff. We somehow finished up the session talking about pupil dilation and how your eyes regulate the amount of light that enters. They’re all going to go home and get someone to turn on and off the light while they stand in front of the mirror. Haha.

I haven’t written it up yet, but on Saturday afternoon Jess, Marie and I went down to another local school to talk about teaching there one afternoon a week. Well, at three o’clock today we walked over and spent an hour with the kids there. The school is. Oh I can’t describe it right now. Check back later. So so different. So so barely there in any physical sense, yet at the same time as big as any other primary school. Anyway, at the time we got there it was a break between teaching, which in a way was perfect for us. We spoke with the African lady in charge of the school, who knew a little English, and she said we were welcome to do what we wanted with the kids. For Zoe, this may have meant eat them. Thankfully, the rest of us are not so cannibalistically inclined.* So we called over the eight or nine kids hanging round, and took them out into the little dirt patch of a yard so that we had a bit more room. First we took them through some basic greetings, just to get them talking and such. Then, using a stack of laminated label cards I’d made, we played a cool body parts game. This involved me dragging one little boy to the front, where I told him to stand with his arms out like a scarecrow. Poor kid. He had no idea what was happening. Jess then started handing out the cards with a little bit of masking tape, while Marie instructed the kids to stick them on the correct place. Each child got a sweet for sticking a label in the right place. I have no objection to using bribery to get children on your side. Anyway, it finished up with this boy being absolutely covered in white labels, they all found it hilarious and it set the attitude of the lesson off so well...

Inside joke. Sorry.

So, I quite enjoyed typing up some of the Swahili of yesterday. But I figured it was unfair to throw you into it without giving you some of the basics...

----------------------------

Ok. Begin lesson. Enjoy. Or suffer through. Either way.

First of all, background information – in Swahili, words tend to have all the determining factors attatched. As a language Kiswahili is phonetic, so the spelling and pronunciation isn’t too much of a challenge. It’s just the structure that takes a bit of getting used to.

Verbs have prefixes to denote the subject. There are various noun classes that group together similar types of noun and generally behave in the same way. For the M/Wa class of nouns, the prefixes are as follows:

ni – I
b – you
a – he/she
tu – we
m – you (pl.)
wa – they

Most of the other classes of nouns only have a singular (it) and a plural (they) verb prefix. I think this is because the M/Wa class deals almost entirely with nouns referring to people, whereas the others don’t.

The nouns themselves also have prefixes. In the M/Wa class, the root of the word will either be preceeded by ‘m’ if singular, or ‘wa’ if plural.

For example:
mtoto – child
watoto – children

If the noun starts with a vowel however, the prefixes change slightly. The singular prefix will be mw while the plural prefix will depend on the vowel. Wa for a words and we for words beginning with e or i.

For example:
mwana – daughter
wana – daughters

Actually my simplification of the plural vowel prefix isn’t technically correct. For words beginning with a, the wa + a forms wa etc.

There you go. That’s the only noun class I’ve learnt in a grammatical sense. I have no confidence in my ability to disect the others yet, so you’re being spared further grammar for the moment.

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The days of the week are easiest to learn in conjunction with numbers. Take the first day of the week as Saturday…

One – moja
Two – mbili
Three – tatu
Four – nne
Five – tano
Six – sita
Seven – saba
Eight – nane
Nine – tisa
Ten – kumi

Saturday - Jumamosi
Sunday - Jumapili
Monday - Jumatatu
Tuesday - Jumanne
Wednesday - Jumatano
Thursday - Alhamisi
Friday - Ijumaa

I like numbers in Swahili. They have a pleasant harmony. Look at four - eight for instance, nne – nane. And then 6/9 is sita/tisa. Neat.

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Hmmm… I have a feeling everyone but Mike may have tuned out long ago. Ah well. It’s been bugging me that I haven’t felt like I was learning enough, I just had lots of random words and limited capacity for sentence composition. But writing it out for you guys really forces me to get it clear in my head, I process the language much better this way. And I’m broadening your education. So I’m going to keep doing it every so often, and you shall just have to deal with it. I’m not forcing you to read it anyway. :-P

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.

Asante sana squash banana

I wonder if anyone can tell me first of all what movie that line is from, and secondly who says it. Zoe and I watched the dvd last night on Jess’ laptop, and were amazed to find this particular character lapses into Swahili every so often. We just looked at each other and burst out laughing. It really was funny to be watching this particular movie at this particular moment in space and time in this particular current location.

I was reprimanded a while back for not putting up photos which I was in. You almost didn’t even get the one of the cliffs of Moher. So I have finally got a few photos to put up, and will take this request into account. There are two with me in them. That should last you another month or so. Haven’t got many photos of the area yet, but they’ll come. Patience.

After dinner we wandered over to Rachel and Brandon's house, as I'd found out earlier that they were both avid card players...

Cannot get the computer to upload photos. You shall have to continue to be patient...

Haven of Peace Academy

What on earth did I do on the 15th?

I think I should describe HOPAC to you. It's the one thing I haven't talked about so far, yet the nature of the school is so integral to all I'm doing here. Actually it's not the one thing I haven't talked about so far. There are many things I haven't talked about so far. But I'm trying ok!

This is Zoe standing in front of the Baobab tree in the playground. It is one awesome tree.