Another Year in Africa: Kiswahili

Our two weeks of KiSwahili training are finished and it's back to Dar es Salaam for us so Michelle and I can do pikipiki (motorbike) training. After Morogoro, Dar will seem even more crazy!

Morogoro has been a wonderful training ground for us. The trek into town from Amabilis is about 20 minutes walking in a relaxed African style. We greet everyone as we walk. There are shops beside the road if you need water, soda or beer to sustain you and you can buy barbecued mealies (corn), peanuts and bananas if you are hungry. It's good that you can get hot food but it adds charcoal cookers to the hazards to be avoided on the footpaths.

Once in town it is important to keep your wits about you. Just as in Dar the traffic is unpredictable and chaotic. Cars, trucks, handcarts, motor bikes and bicycles compete for space on the narrow, potholed roads. Pedestrians fill the footpaths which have deep, sometimes uncovered, drains to cope with the rain in the wet. People dash across the road and it's a wonder there are not more serious accidents. Steve sadly witnessed the aftermath of a fatality on Wednesday when he was out birdwatching with a Norwegian agricultural scientist who works in Morogoro.

We came to know the market well. An assignment in the first week was to go the market and buy what was needed for our cooking the next day. Youngsters were falling over each other to help us with our purchases and carry our bags in the hope of earning some shillings. The stall holders were mostly patient and listened to our halting KiSwahili, ignoring the boys who were anxious to interpret for us. I had success buying my bananas at a good price, Steve probably paid over the odds for the maize flour we needed to make the ugali. The fruit and vegetables are all fresh, ripe and locally grown.

We used the other little shops in town too. Some of the girls bought kangas - the brightly coloured printed cloths Tanzanian women, including the nuns at Amabilis, wrap around their waists over their other clothes. Each kanga has a motto printed on it - always of an improving or moral nature, usually religious.

We occasionally ate out at the local restaurants. A highlight on Saturday, our last night, was pizza at Dragonaires. Dragonaires is owned and run by an ex-pat South African and his Korean wife. The decor would best be described as eclectic as there are little touches of Asia, Africa and Britain - paper lanterns, painted dragons and Zanzibar beach scenes, posters for Kilimanjaro and Serengeti (beer) and a dart board. It also had a very good wood fired pizza oven and produced excellent pizzas!

Over the two weeks our KiSwahili has improved daily - it is astounding what a difference being immersed in a language makes to how quickly you learn. The nuns and others who worked at Amabilis made us use our KiSwahili - they talked to us, questioned us and corrected our answers until we had it right. Their expectations of us increased as the fortnight progressed. One day I will write about Bantu noun classes and why there are at least six words for each of it, they, this, these etc! Those of us over 40 who had been taught about prepositions, demonstratives, tenses and other finer points of grammar managed this better than the youngies. What we don't manage so well is remembering the vocabulary. Well, we have 5 months to practice and learn before we do the intermediate language training in Feb 2011, and learn about the rest of the noun classes!