habari jioni…

12th October 2016

Over the past couple of days, we’ve been lucky to receive some Swahili lessons from one of the guys working here – his name is Prosper, a softly spoken young man who has the patience of an angel!

The title of this blog means ‘good evening’ and the majority of the words we have learnt so far are greeting words – it’s a big deal here! Seems you have to ask how people are doing in many different ways – also dependent on the age of the person you’re greeting!

It has been sooooo long since I last learnt a new language. I keep getting all sorts of French words into my head for whatever random reason – it’s not at all similar!! And my French is pretty crappy, so cannot understand where it’s coming from!

So in short, am not finding it easy and although Swahili is quite a simple language, I am still struggling to get the right words for ‘my name is’.

But I have nailed ‘kaa chini’ [sit down] – essential for the ‘babies’ class!

And now it’s almost bedtime – we are 2 hrs ahead of London and 1 hr ahead of Denmark here…and it seems like I just need more rest here…no ‘stress adrenaline’ to keep me going, I guess.

The working day is actually quite short – and I wouldn’t really call it work either – it’s 3 hrs in the morning and 2 hrs in the afternoon! But the energy spent on getting to know new people, new language, new skills, new culture is draining…should get easier next week though.

So ‘usiku mwema, lala salama’ [goodnight, sleep well] – and until the next time!