Catching Up

Apologies for the delay between posting. It's been a bit busy around here.

In September I spent two weeks in Arusha attending a Swahili course, which was enormously helpful. The truth is, my language skills had plateaued for a period of about three months after I moved out of the place I was living with the Tanzanian family and finished the introductory textbook I was studying from. Still I felt inordinately proud of my ability to carry on a basic conversation, so long as the subject matter didn't deviate far from travel logistics, soccer, and motorcycles.

Ah, how little I knew about how little I knew. The first day in the classroom was a real eye-opener for how clueless I was when it came to advanced grammar. Someone once told me that Swahili was an easy language to learn because the grammar was so simple. I don't think I've ever been so thoroughly misinformed in my life. Perhaps people have that impression in the US because so few people from the US progress farther than learning the basic tenses, which are fairly straightforward. But underneath that superficial impression lies a complex set of verb-based structures that allow an extreme precision of meaning and subtlety of expression using a startlingly concise vocabulary. And all of it had gone straight over my head for the past year.

I enjoyed the course immensely and feel that I gained a much better foundation to move forward. The school, MS-TCDC, also had a lovely campus and a very talented teaching staff. The accommodations were very nice too, but the room and board fees were just shy of highway robbery, so I stayed with the parents of a friend of a friend in Arusha and commuted by Dala Dala every day. The last part of the commute was a nice walk with a view of the volcano, Mount Meru.

I also found another chameleon. I was surprised again by how terrified people are of the little critters. Still not entirely sure why.

Also, I saw something interesting while taking a walk around the perimeter of the school. Someone was growing some sort of edible greens on farms right in the middle of the river. They had built stone walkways all across the river to tend to the crop. I don't think I've ever seen that sort of riverine aquaculture before. It made for a nice place to take a stroll, so long as someone wasn't trying to go the opposite way on the same set of rocks.