Last year I killed my wife (and other grammatical mistakes)

Rainbow agama I saw sunning on a rock

The tricky thing about Swahili is the surprisingly small number of phonemes and syllables that are used to construct a fairly complex language. This does mean of course, that tone and musicality are important to make ones meaning clear, but these are not as formalized as a language like Thai. What it means for those of us who are novices, is that we quite easily make often hilarious mistakes as our mispronounciations will almost always have an entirely different meaning, rather than sound like nonsense. Mwaka uliopita, nilimua mke wangu. The sentence, in an attempt to say I got married last year, actually says 'I killed my wife last year.' because of mispronouncing one vowel as oo instead of a long o. Another student studying here was explaining to all her Tanzanian friends who cared to know that she was 'drunk in Kenya' --meaning to say that she was 'raised in Kenya' but slighly misconjugating the verb (Nililewa kwa Kenya, instead of nilililewa). Other times it seems that very contrary things are homonyms. If you said to me, Zamani, nilipanda miti elfu moja. I would not know if you had planted 1000 trees or climbed 1000 trees. Oren told us on several occasiong that he was pooping snakes, when he was trying to say 'there is a snake'.

front view of  banda

So for those of you who have been following our adventures regularly, you know that we spent the past 2 weeks in a language intensive offered outside of the town of Iringa, in Southern Tanzania. More precisely, the school rents out small 'bandas' with a chairs and a table in a campsite outside of town next to a river. It has the feeling of being quite remote, although there are a number of camps like it up the river nearby. One reason it feels so rustic, I suppose, is the lack of internet connectivity. That made posting a blog on our arrival difficult and we did not even attempt to do another one while we were there after that.

The isolation, however, was ideal for studying Swahili, and we spent every week day from 8:30 to 1:30 in class, then had at least an hour of assigned homework and another hour of flashcard review each day as well. This routine was very productive and we learned a ton of Swahili, particulaly to fill in the gaps in the things we have been studying the past 6 months. The kids were in their own Swahili class while we were in lessons. They were not assigned homework because the long morning hours were already quite a lot for them. Oren, however did have to keep up with his school work as being in Iringa meant he missed 4 days of school. His teachers gave him assignments and he had to do about an hour of work every night to keep up. He was not happy about that at all. Fortunately one of the weeks we were there was a holiday week for the school, so he did not miss too much.

We usually spent some part of the afternoon playing games with the kids like badminton, volleyball or frisbee. There was also a playground with some swings and odd merry-go-rounds that we could ride together. None of it would be legal
in the US, but it was fun! David also really liked to climb the many huge boulders that were around. There was an abundance of them in the camp and offered opportunities to test out one's climbing skills. Some were actually too high to do without a rope.

We did climb to several vantage points above the camp and had some great views of the camp and the river. I admit it was a bit unerving to climb around through the tall grass and up the rocky crags because we were told that the place was full of spitting cobras, puff adders, mambas, and pythons. These were sighted frequently. On one of our last days, in fact, as she approached her front stoop, another guest was met by a spitting cobra that reared up and blocked her way into her house. (The staff dispatched with it -- sorry herpatologist friends!) We, fortunately had no encounters with snakes during our forays onto the rocks.

The river also had some very nice places to hike to including an area where a huge number of boulders had created a kind of long waterfall. It was a place David really loved to climb boulders. It was fun, but definitely felt risky in terms of slipping and breaking a bone and not being anywhere near good medical care.

We were not the only people here during our 2 weeks, although the demographics changed quite a bit each week. The first week, we were with a Mennonite missionary family who were working in Zanzibar. She was a physician he was an IT person. They had 2 young kids. We would see them at meals, which we would eat together at the cafeteria. In the 'small world' way that Mennonites have, we found that we had some common friends, notably her cousin Michael S. who we supported as a service worker when he was in Eastern DRC. I have mentioned before that he was killed while working with a UN group of experts in Congo last year. She asked us one evening to share some stories about him from his time with us in MCC. We enjoyed hearing about his visits to family in the US and how he is remembered by them.

David with stoneage slingshot

They left after the first week and a new crew of people came in. Over the weekend though, we took the opportunity to explore some of the sights around Iringa outside the camp. The one place that was quite close was called 'Isimila' named after the river that runs by it. It is a sight where artifacts from a stoneage civilization have been found. It is also near a geological feature called 'natural pillars' which are found in only one or two places in the world. We were curious about this place and took a drive out to it on a Saturday morning. It was not easy to find as there is a single small sign pointing it out. It was several kilometers off the main road and offered a small museum with a curator who also did guided tours of the site.

After seeing some of the tools, dated back 200,000--400,000 years in the museum, we went out to the site. I was quite surprised to find it so undeveloped and yet so abundantly full of artifacts. It felt like we were one of the first people there. We saw hundreds of stone ax heads, scraping tools, spear heads, and round sling projectiles just lying around. That is because this is in a dry river bed that floods regularly and continues to unearth more and more layers of artifacts. It was pretty cool to be able to just pick them up, examine them and imagine someone making and using them at some point in the ancient past.

We continued to walk up the river bed and eventually got to the natural pillars. These are some really strange features and look at first glance like giant termite or ant hills. They even look quite fragile, but are like cement. They are made from a top layer of some kind of mineral that resists erosion while the bottom clay layer erodes away. What is left after millenia of erosion are these pillars that were once the edges of the river that ran through there. The kids actually seemed to enjoy seeing these sights eventhough it was a fair amount of walking during the day.

On Sunday we went to an English speaking church in town and met up with some relatives of friends from our church in Arusha. They had kids just a bit younger than ours and we went over to their house for lunch with them. They are Danish and it was really fun to talk with them. It reminded me a bit of talking with our friends the Spanners in Burundi. It was interesting to talk to them about culture and they seemed utterly perplexed (as most of the world is) about America's complete fetishization of guns. We had a good time with them and made a plan to meet them the next week at Mama Iringa, an authentic Italian restaurant with an imported pizze oven that made the most Italian pizza in  East Africa (according to them).

The second week felt quite different in the camp. There was a different couple with a young child and grandmother who were working in Dar. There was also a young Swiss couple working in Zanzibar, and there were 2 women from Washington DC who work as policy analysts for an NGO, and a nurse from Moshi. It was a full house so to speak so meal hours were much more lively with conversation. We all studied language during the day as we had the first week, but we all had individual teachers, except for Rebecca and I who shared a teacher. That is one nice thing about the study here, it is tailored to your level. The director of the program would check in daily to be sure that we were satisfied with the quality of the teacher.

We continued to go on outings every day in the afternoon, either to the falls near the river, or bouldering. We also visited another set of natural pillars that was within walking distance of the campsite. They were a bit different and some of them actually created a kind of labyrinth that you could walk into and feel like you would get lost.

We kept up our study as well and created hundreds of flashcards which we did our best commit to memory. This was a great help in increasing our Swahili knowledge. We also learned how to conjugate every way we needed including conditional, subjunctive, past and future perfect and continuous. As well as the negative of all of these. We learned the 7 noun classes and ways to remember the agreements with a table we constructed.

Most evenings, after studying, we played a game in our banda with the kids like 7 Wonders, or King Domino, or San Juan. We also had a flashdrive of movies we used to watch in Burundi and watched some of our old favorites, like Rango & Wallace and Grommit.

Among the really surprising things we found here was how cold it was at night. Iringa is on a high plateau, but we were really unprepared for how cool it was when the sun went down. We needed a heavy blanket to sleep under.

We decided to make the trip back in one day so we packed the Landrover on Friday night and planned to leave at 6am the next morning. It was hard to get up that early but we did it and made the 12 hour trip back listening to The Return of the King from Lord of the Rings, and various music albums. The kids were pretty good considering how long a trip it was. Unfortunatelty the AC quit blowing cool air about an hour into the trip, so we drove across the hot savanah with our windows open and it was hot! We got to Arusha at around 6pm.

We got up and went to church today and then had a treat of watching Black Panther at the theater near our house. It was a good end to 2 weeks away from our normal routine, but now I am ready to get back into it.