Studying Swahili. Don's blog

Each time I have come to Tanzania, I study Swahili for 3-4 months in advance by myself with one of those teach yourself language courses.  I have marginal success so on my return to the US, I vow to continue studying so I will proficient the next time we go.  Years later, I am planning another trip so I open up the Swahili course again for the first time since I returned and pretty much have to start over with chapter two since I do recall the chapter one greetings.

Last year I was here for 6 months, but I was desperately studying tropical medicine so I had no time for Swahili studies.  This time, I procrastinated, got some misinformation, then procrastinated some more, but finally got started on tutored Swahili lessons.  Right now, we are working on verb conjugations.  My tutor's teaching method makes it so much clearer about how to conjugate.  None of my books or Rosetta Stone explained that there are mainly Bantu and Arabic verbs and that conjugation is handled differently according to the verb origin. That makes it so much easier. Nouns are a challenge too.  There are 8 different noun classes and each class indicates singular and plural differently.  We probably won't get to nouns this time out.

My tutor says he had a very smart student become fluent in 2 months with twice a week lessons. What with being old and feeble -minded and taking lessons once a week, I hope for fluency in 6 months next time out here.  According to the International Language Fluency Society, my level of fluency qualities as the dog level.  I aspire to achieve dolphin level of fluency.

Tanzanians all say that Swahili is easier than English. I suspect they are right.  Swahili developed as a language for trade between East Africans and Arabs. The original written form of Swahili was in that swirly, loopy script used for Arabic.  Fortunately, Europeans changed that and used the Greco-Roman script in use in Europe. They wisely chose phonetic spelling so pronunciation is easy. None of that silent letter stuff - every letter is pronounced. Every letter is consistently pronounce the same way. There are none of those shenanigans with the same sound being spelled differently like "ough', "ow" and "o" in though, tow, and go.  How about the pronunciation of "ough" in enough and though?  It is enough to make a Tanzanian say, "Uff Da."

Word origin is interesting.  There are competing explanations of the origin of referring to Caucasians as Wazungu.  The first explanation I heard was that the word means "explorer" and was used to refer to the first European explorers who started arriving in this area in 1498 (Vasco da Gama) (VdG was not real popular since he was, frankly, a pirate). The term was then used to refer to all Europeans, then all Caucasians.  The second explanation is that the term also means "one who wanders aimlessly" which makes sense since most explorers don't really know where they are going.  It is less complimentary explanation.  Vasco da Gama actually did know where he was going.  He sought and pioneered the ocean route from Europe to India. He actually did make it all the way to India.  Take that, Columbus.

Don

Tarangire National Park

Sunrise, Tarangire NP

posts done at a previous blog site.

3/23/2016

WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?

We are actually moving to Africa because I was born there. While I am sure they don't claim me, I claim membership in the Wasamba tribe who occupy the Usambara Mountains where I was born on the very northern edge of Tanzania. I have grown up with Africa in me. I am told that my placenta was probably buried in the ground so in a way, Africa contains me as well.  Africans are my people as much as my genetic Viking ancestors and living relatives.

I have planned on moving to and working at a hospital in Tanzania for decades. Debi initially would break into a cold sweat when I talked about that, but after visiting the country, she now shares that goal. Unfortunately, what used to sound like a fun, exciting thing to do is becoming more real and scary to both of us.

People often ask if we are ready to go. The answer is a resounding "no."  The used car we purchased  from a company in Japan is somewhere in the Indian Ocean right now. We don't have housing figured out. We don't speak Swahili (more on that later). I have been reading about diseases I have never seen like malaria and all those weird parasites. However, reading about them and diagnosing malaria in a feverish person who could also haveg some other disease is another thing. We are not ready and will never really be ready. We just have to go - ready or not. We will figure it out as we go.  We leave on April 19th.

3/30/2016

STUDYING SWAHILI

• I have studied Latin and Norwegian. I know how to learn a language at least if I am in a classroom with other people and a teacher. Studying by yourself in the basement with a textbook and Rosetta Stone is a different matter. First of all, Swahili is  a made-up language. About half is from Bantu with borrowed words from English and other languages and a big chunk is Arabic. I don't think they picked the best of each language.

My experience so far has been with languages that have two types of nouns. Swahili has six types with the singular and plural forms being handled differently in each noun type.   Adjectives have to match the noun form. Verb conjugations are the stuff nightmares are made of.  First, second, and third person are indicated by prefixes as is the tense. Then if the verb is expressed as a negative, you don't use a word like "not." You indicate person and sometimes tense in a whole different way.  Words borrowed from English tend to be easier. Words are spelled phonetically and end with a vowel. "Suit" becomes "suti" and "socks" become "soksi."  Then for no apparent reason, "slacks" translates into "surali ndefu."  There are no silent letters so you do pronounce both the n and the d as n-day-fu.

What I am told is that it all clicks after a couple of months.  In the meantime, my basement floor is slippery from all the pulled-out hair. 

4/22/2016

SEGOVIA AND MADRID

Madrid was great.  The Royal Palace was built by a French royalty transplant into Spain so it is modeled after Versailles. It was closed for two days for a Royal Function.  I checked - it wasn´t a Reception for Us.  I mentioned Debi just to make sure, but it was still no.  When I persisted, the guard said something in Spanish that didn´t sound like a very gracious apology, but I graciously accepted it anyhow.

There two great art museums in Madrid.  The Prado has whole rooms of works by various masters.  Usually there is a marauding horde in line for tickets, but we went in the afternoon and the hordes were sacking elsewhere so we got right in.  Fabulous.  Really, one should spend 2 whole days there, but that would result in one being assasinated by one´s wife so the afternoon was adequate.  We celebrated by going next door to the Ritz and having Ritzy drinks at Euro 20 each.  

The other one is the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophia.  This is the Picasso museo and the House that the Guernica painting made famous.  This was painted in the 30´s but Picasso wouldn´t allow it to be shown in Spain until democracy was restored.  This didn´t happen until Franco, who with Hitler was the source of the outrageous slaughter in the town of Guernica, died so it didn´t arrive in Spain until the 80´s.  Spending time looking at photos of the work in evolution, hearing its history, and contemplating this huge painting (bigger than any wall in your house) really gave me a feeling of the horror expressed in the painting that has made it so famous without resulting in an assassination attempt.  Little did anybody know that Guernica was only a minor scale portent of the atrocities to follow in WWII.  

The Spanish eating schedule is shifted. Many breakfast places don´t open until 8 and lunch starts at 1.  Dinner is in the 8 - 10 PM range.  Due to jet lag and traveling, sleep has happened only on the confluence of sleepy and able to sleep.  Our gastronomic and somniferous schedules are chaos.

We traveled on the 140 mph train to Segovia and spent the day there.. The 2 millennia old 16 Km long Roman aqueduct still stands as evidenced in the photo.  No mortar, just exquisitely hewn stones.  We haven´t seen a lot of European cathedrals.  The Gothic/Renaissance style Segovia Cathedral was a wonder to behold and testimony to the odd Catholicism of the time.The public part was ringed with the private chapels of the aristocracy.  Avoiding assasinatory time frames, we moved on to the Alcazar.prison which housed three categories of prisoners over the years - royalty when it was a palace, convicts when it was a prison, then nuns when it was a convent.

4/23/2016

RITZY DRINKS

At the Madrid Ritz after visiting the Prado museum, I ordered a house specialty drink, the Dalitini.  I don´t usually drink martinis but was intrigued by the backstory so I tried it.  Dali went into the Ritz Hotel for a haircut and spotted a cute woman in the hotel lounge.  He went in to chat and ordered a cocktail (Reported to be the first time he had a cocktail.  His work was surreal enough without alcohol.)  The martini glass he received had a sharp edge on the rim whereupon he cut his finger and lost a few drops of blood into his drink.  He covered for this odd situation by grabbing a cherry out of a fruit bowl and dropping the cherry into his drink. I was served a martini with a single cherry in the bottom.  The waiter then produced an eye dropper and dropped in a few drops of a red liquid into my drink.  I am reasonably sure that it wasn´t actually Salvador Dali blood or anybody else´s for that matter.  Also, I was not required to cut myself and bleed into my drink.  It was a fun experience, but doesn´t need to be repeated.

Christmas 2017 from Tanzania. Debi's entry

Dear all, I just wrote two quick messages about our Christmas for my family, but I may not get around to composing more at this point so I will send to all of you as well. 

We leave here exactly two weeks from today (12/26)!  There is so much to do to pack up and leave our house ready for the next renters. We can only take a suitcase and a carry on to get home because we are making so many stops on the way. We arrived here with nine large bags plus there is much we have accumulated here to make our lives more comfortable.....so a lot will have to be stored for our next trip...whenever that will be. We want to be home for at least a year this time. Six months here and six months there was too disruptive. 

Thank you for sharing this journey with us and for supporting us in so many ways. It is truly life changing!  We have been blessed and I hope and pray we have been used to help change this small corner of the world. 

❤️Debi

12/25

Well, it is nearly 11 pm here so our Christmas in Tanzania is coming to a close. 

Our pre-Christmas three days at Tarangire Safari Park were magical!  On the drive there the ground was bare and brown and dry. As we approached the park, it got greener and greener. The grass was long and ponds were full of water. The animals know where to congregate!  So we could stop the car to look at elephants and see so much more at the same time...zebra, impala, buffalo, ostrich etc.... just mind boggling!  Here are some of the highlights:  baby warthogs. They ran around in circles chasing each other...cutest thing ever!  I even saw a warthog wallowing in a pond of mud. He did not like me stopping to stare so he jumped out and ran away. Saw a whole pack of bat-eared foxes emerge out of a hole in the ground. For me the best thing happened just outside my tent. Don got up before sunrise at 6:00 to go on a guided nature walk. I was awake and saw an elephant through the mesh window of my tent. I decided to get up and see if I could see anything. Soon it appeared two tents away and was headed my direction. It was huge with giant tusks. It was walking on the path which was just a few feet away from my porch. The people in the next tent were on their porch too. Soon another elephant appeared behind that one, then another and another. Altogether 7 elephants paraded by including two babies!  They were 15 feet away from me. The last one stopped to scratch herself on the tree right in front of our tent. By then the sun was coming up. As she scratched, a cloud of mud or sawdust could been seen. She scratched both ears, her side and finally her butt!  Quite a show!

It was fun to watch nephew Seth and Amber deal with four children. The second son is a handful and very talkative (age 7) and entertaining.  

We got home on the 23rd. On the 24th we were planning to go to Simonson's along with 25 others. At church I learned that some of them were sick. Right after church Seth vomited as did one of his sons. By the time we got home Naomi sent an email cancelling the dinner that night. Nine of them were sick!  We ended up staying home alone. Bernice and Erik went to her sister’s house. We were going to go to a nice restaurant but I ended up cooking instead. I guess we must have been tired. It was strange to be alone on Christmas Eve. 

Today we packed up hamburger and hot dog stuff and the bbq and headed to a “resort” on a small lake. Erik & Bernice and Wema’s family came too. We were able to rent canoes and paddlers so all of Wema’s family got the FIRST boat ride of their lives!  They are just so much fun and so grateful. They loved their gifts. I got them family gifts and a beaded heart for Wema which she loved. We had ordered UNO, plastic playing cards and a deck of Five Crowns that Ann brought out. We also gave them chocolate and a bag of coffee. They were absolutely delighted!  They gave us an electronic rap song that they made up. It is not finished but I will be sure to share it. It is very cute and full of humorous gratitude for all the things we have exposed them to like BBQ turkey!

We finished our meal and decided to come back to our house so we could get away from obnoxious music next door and listen to Christmas carols instead. So they got to enjoy our “tree” and they were fascinated by the little gingerbread house Linda’s family gave us. We finished the evening playing cards for several hours. When I took them home, their expressions of gratitude were just so special. They all said this was the BEST Christmas of their lives.  It is certainly one we will never forget!

❤️Debi

Here is the second message: 12/26

Just had to add this note.  We woke up this morning and Don got ready for work as usual. He met Mark, wearing casual clothes, by the cars. That is when he found out today is a HOLIDAY!  Boxing Day, whatever that is!  Too funny!  The lack of communication never ceases to amaze me!  Boxing Day!

That gives Don time to finalize the online registration so that Maasai Health can be recognized as a charitable organization by Microsoft. Kussy works there now and is determined to get us into the modern age with a website and electronic payment capability. We have the potential to earn $22,000 this calendar year because of her effort!

Maribeth went to our house in 6 inches of snow on Christmas Day to dig through files to locate a particular IRS letter we needed!  Just amazing!  

Thank you to all of you who have made a contribution to Maasai Health recently!  Rowbergs pick a charity to sponsor each year for Christmas giving in lieu of a gift exchange.  That raised $2500 so far!  This is most helpful!  

By the way, Kari’s old laptop that Ann brought out has been wiped clean and upgraded by Orjantan. It will be what allows doctors to read reports on the ward from the new digital X-ray machine at the hospital!  It is just amazing what a few resources can accomplish here!  

About the time I get discouraged that our efforts do not amount to much, I get to see the impact we have made on one family and one hospital!  The hospital wants to start a computer lab and an electronic medical record. Old laptops can be put to fabulous use here!  A little bit of money goes so far here...a lot of money creates miracles!

Thank you so much for supporting this effort!

❤️Debi

PS:  address in case you still want to contribute:

Maasai Health Systems

16714 91st Ave E

Puyallup, WA 98375-2244

Walking safari - looking out from a cliff over the Tarangire River Valley.

Waterbuck

Cute baby

Leopard tortoise 

bat-eared fox

This is as close as I want to let them get. Start up the car, Debi.

These baby warthogs are so cute.  They are constantly running after each other.  It like they had a big cup of coffee with lots of sugar.

African Christmas

It is hard to tell that we are approaching the Christmas season.  There are few decorations anywhere.  No houses have outside Christmas decorations.  Very few stores have any Christmas decorations. We don't have TV or radio so nothing there. When we heard in church that it was the second Sunday in Advent, we were both surprised.  Halfway through Advent and we were hardly aware of it.  Being the month of December should have been a clue, but it is 80 degrees outside and there's no visible evidence of the season.

Then a couple of days ago, we heard voices singing a Christmas carol outside our front door.  It was Linda from next door and a daughter bearing three gifts.  Kind of like the Wise Men.  The three gifts were a Christmas tree, a string of lights, and their surplus ornaments. Instant Christmas tree and Christmas season! OK, technically speaking, it isn't a tree.  It is several branches propped up with bricks in a bucket of water. Hey, if we wanted to set up an artificial tree in our living room, we would have stayed in Walla Walla. Actually, last Christmas we had to toss out our mangled 20 year old artificial tree so we put up lights on our huge Hoya plant.  It changes Christmas a bit to sing, "Oh Hoya plant, Oh Hoya plant, How lovely are your branches."

When we inspected our Christmas branches, we found all these small green balls. They look like they will become cones.  The branches have that coniferous look.  Both Debi and I immediately recalled the story of my parents' first Christmas in Africa years ago.  They found a treeish growth of the right size that had already grown balls on it.  "Great", they thought, "It already has the balls on it.  It is already partly decorated." To their surprise and dismay, they discovered that those balls were homes to a host of insects that enjoyed exploring the house.  Merry Christmas and Buggy Christmas are not synonymous.

So far no bugs.  Now, isn't this the epitome of Euro-American Christmas?

Don

Debi's post-Thanksgiving post

So many of you asked about how our holiday went that I decided to include this information in my mass mailing. 

It was truly a traditional American holiday....Tanzanian style!  I set the time table as I enjoy it at home where guests arrive between 1:00-2:00.  We start with appetizers and games. Dinner is  4:00-5:00...dessert later.  

Nothing went according to plan!  Ann and I were so organized because everything took so long to prepare that we worked extra hard and we were ready a day ahead!  We had gravy and stuffing in the frig!  Green beans and carrots were even washed and ready. (We went three places looking for sweet potatoes, and the ones we got were so buggy under the surface that they all became cow food!). 

Ann made the most delicious pumpkin (roasted from scratch....could not find a can of pumpkin anywhere!) gingerbread.  I made a large pan of apple crisp. The apples we get here are extremely good. They last a long time in the refrigerator and the flavor rivals any apple from Washington!  Unfortunately, they are not the best baking apples. I kept setting the timer for 10 more minutes, but they never got soft. But crunchy apple crisp is still good. 

The biggest story is the turkey. To get a turkey is a whole new adventure!  Anyway, we got a frozen turkey and borrowed Jacobson’s Weber grill. I bought an extra bag of charcoal to be ready. 

Don was supposed to be home in the morning. “I don’t need to take the day off....there aren’t very many patients.”  By 2:00 when he still wasn't home, I was getting nervous!  I called him and he was finally on his way home. So many sick patients came in that day!  

The turkey did not get on the BBQ until after 3:00!  Remember my timeline?  The charcoal I bought was awful...even had soil and sawdust in it!  When Erik and Bernice arrived, they knew what to do. They sent Orjantan to buy homemade charcoal on the street. People do something with wood to make charcoal. We used my personal fan to make the coals heat up. [Don's note: Erik and Bernice saved the day.  I was ready to give up several times, but they persisted and got the charcoal hot enough to finish the turkey.]

The timeline was totally Tanzanian!  People showed up hours after they said they would. Good thing!  The turkey was not ready until 7:30!  We even had one uninvited  guest...a cousin of Wemas’s who was very curious and asked to be included. How delightful is that!??  I love having guests who WANT to come!  

So the timeline was perfect! TZ style!  We ate about 8:00 pm!  Since only Orjantan arrived in the early afternoon, he and Ann and I got to play cards. Bernice joined us for one game. Don and Erik worked on Don’s fancy new bike. 

This is strange...not sure how to describe it. Don roasted the 8.5 kilo turkey. It was brown and gorgeous!  We all ooh’d and ahh’d.  He carved while I heated up everything else on my small stove. 

He was carving and suddenly he said, “Debi, come and see this!”  He was carving the breast and cut into this knot of bloody red tissue. We had no idea!!!  I got Bernice and said, “Help!  What is this?”  We all stared. She said, "could that have not thawed??" I don't think so... Frozen tissue does not look bright red!

We did not know what to make of it and  are still puzzling over how strange that was...it was  like a collection of blood vessels, like a hemangioma. Or maybe the bird underwent trauma?  Who knows!  I wonder how we would react at home with the same presentation!? Everything seems stranger here. 

Don left that part uncarved. The other meat was delicious!  When he was done carving, I put all the good  bones in the pot to start making soup. Later Orjantan and Upendo (mama) came into the kitchen and saw all the bloody bones and discards. Orjantan told me his mama would like them so she could make soup. His first question was, “What are you going to do with that?”  I told him I was worried about what we saw so I might boil up everything for Linda’s dogs. He said, “My mama wants it.”  I told him twice why I was worried about it. In the end, they took those bones and the strange meat home and Orjantan said their soup was delicious. [Don's note: We started off with a blessing.  Since we have Jewish and Muslim dinner guests, we try to be inclusive of our friend's faiths including asking them to do a blessing. I talked about the first Thanksgiving as most of the people there only understood they were invited for a dinner featuring very strange foods.  Like pickles and olives.  The Swahili word for turkey, I'm told, translates as "crazy duck."  I explained that the Pilgrims arrived in the New World woefully unprepared to survive so they had a frightful death rate (over 50%) that first year. The Native American tribes taught them survival skills.The following fall, they celebrated still being alive with that first Thanksgiving Day.  I went on to explain that, minus the mortality rate, Debi and my story is similar.  We were taught survival skills by the people already living here.  We have prospered because of all the the Heaven-sent people who befriended us.  This Afrothanksgiving is the closest reflection of the Pilgrim's Thanksgiving that we have ever experienced.]

With Ann’s help, I cooked up our bones and gleaned the meat. I made lots of soup...one big pot with Mexican seasonings and corn and beans and another pot with traditional vegetables and flavorings. I invited 14 people to share soup with with us tonight.  I love including Tanzanians. They seem so grateful to be invited and they seem to love tasting new things.  [Don's note: After having hamburgers for the first time last year, Dora went home and dreamed that night about eating hamburgers.  That was her favorite food until she came for Thanksgiving here.  Now her favorite food is gravy which she had never had before.]

So, our first major holiday in TZ [Don's note: Not counting Saba Saba, Nane Nane, and Eid Al-Fitr] has come to a close. Having Ann here did me a world of good. Everything  was more fun with her company!  And she got to experience the real deal...we lost electricity often and even water at least once. You can't escape the roads and the traffic or the noise or the litter.  She even got to see me be harassed by the police twice!  I told Ann before she came to TZ, if she said, “This is not so bad.  Debi, what is  your problem?”  I might have to slap her!  Before she left, Ann said all the right things , including...”I love visiting here, but I could NEVER live here!”

We will leave in 6 weeks (January 9). Time to use up things in the pantry!  I very much look forward to being home!  Life is easier in America...trust me!  But living here certainly has its benefits. There is something sooo delightfully rewarding about our relationship with Wemas’s family. Wema will be home for a long Christmas break on December 8. I am looking to seeing her!  And it is such a bonus to have family here!  I can’t imagine being here without Erik and Bernice. 

❤️Debi

Arusha National Park

Arusha National Park

Arusha National Park

Debi's pre-Thanksgiving post

It is Wednesday night as I write. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I purposely wanted to stay one time in Tanzania to experience the holidays in this country. 

Ann Rowberg has been here for three weeks and she is helping me prepare the Thanksgiving meal. I do not think I will ever forget this holiday!  It is an exercise in substitution!  We have been working on this for two days!

A turkey is a rare thing and costs 28,000 shillings/ kilo or roughly $7.00/pound. We splurged and got a 8.5 kilo bird! Jacobsons have a weber bbq just like Don has used for years, but the charcoal is very different!  Poor Don!  I have no idea how he will manage, but he always does!

We have invited Erik and Bernice and Wema’s family to join us, plus some  medical students. I delight in including Tanzanians!  Wema’s family has become our Tanzanian family. I cannot explain this relationship. We are sooo different and yet I love them so dearly!  They will probably find our food so strange that they will only take a small bite. They now love guacamole that  they feared  at first!

The cultural differences are hard to describe. When Orjantan heard we were going to serve a turkey, he asked how I could slaughter such a large bird!  You have to laugh picturing  me catching  a bird to slaughter! 

We will celebrate this American holiday in this foreign place with food substitution galore!...With people of all faiths!  Isn't celebrating gratitude and Thanksgiving  universal???  I know I am grateful for  another year of life!  I am grateful for a husband who has exposed me to this part of the world. Honestly, it is hard to describe!!

Happy Thanksgiving!
❤️Debi

I am living between worlds. I am struggling to figure out how I can belong in this very strange place. So on the brink of this holiday, let me say I am thinking of you....and wishing you a happy Thanksgiving. 

Sunset from Baraka Beach on Zanzibar.