Cooking Day!

One of the nice things about the language course is that the teachers understand how full our brains are by Friday, so we tend to do fun activities like excursions or games that use our Swahili but without necessarily loading us with new information. The most enjoyable for me so far has been the cooking day.

First order of the day was to get the meat sorted. This is not the simple matter of popping to Tesco to pick up some meat, or even opening the freezer for it. No, the teachers had brought a box of live chickens for us to kill, pluck and cook. Now, normally I'm not too squeamish about these things but at the time I was still feeling the early pregnancy nausea quite badly so I didn't watch while the others killed, plucked and disembowelled our dinner. Fortunately, when Olly did language school here, he was one of the brave ones who did the killing so, actually, there's no need for me to learn. Plus, more often than not you can ask someone else to kill the chickens for you anyway.

While the non-squeamish were on chicken duty, some of us starting work on the coconuts that were needed for the cakes and the rice. First, we had to halve them, for which we were taught a nifty trick with a chunk of metal. Then we had to scrape out the inside using a 'kibao cha mbuzi' - a special stool with a serrated metal blade sticking out of one end. It was great fun, even if we did feel like small children compared to how quickly and neatly our teacher did it.

We also got to pound the herbs for chai (tea) and the ginger for the sauce (which we accidentally put in the chai as well - oops! It still tasted fine, just rather more gingery than it was supposed to...) - it was most of the students' first time using a mortar and pestle for real, so we got to take some fun 'I'm angry with these herbs' pictures!

All of this took place outside, where many Tanzanians will do the majority of their cooking. After that was finished we went inside to make coconut mandazi - small coconut dough balls, made into shell shapes, and deep fried. They went down very well at chai break!

After tea break we went back to the kitchen to sort through the rice - we had to sort through with our fingers, looking for small stones or anything we might break our teeth on, then we tossed it in a shallow wicker basket to get rid of any chaff that was in it. That's harder than it looks and it's quite easy for some (or a lot) of the rice to end up on the floor! While I was doing this, other students were working hard peeling and chopping vegetables - a job we were already familiar with.

The last thing to get ready was the chapatti - our teacher mixed the dough (we were running rather behind schedule and this was our own lunch we were making), then showed us how to make it into chapatti - it involves rolling the dough, oiling it, folding it, stretching it, and rolling it back up before rolling it out (again) into the right shape to be fried. These steps mean it's light and flaky and super delicious!

Finally our work was done, and we received our reward of lunch cooked by our own hands (although it has to be confessed that there were a number of students who couldn't bring themselves to eat an animal they'd seen being killed!). It was a fun day, and also brought home to us just how long cooking from scratch really takes -we started work at 8:30 and ate at 1:45. We were slow because so much of it was new to us, but even with expert Tanzanian hands, meals here take a very long time to prepare!

Ninajifunza Kiswahili!

I (Cat) am now eight weeks into the 16 week Swahili course and so far it's a learning experience unlike any other!

Firstly, it's the only thing I'm studying. I've always wanted to learn a language solidly without distractions from other courses or long 'to do' lists, so in that way it's a dream come true. That being said, it being the only thing you're doing can become somewhat intense! We spend about 5 hours a day in class, then the rest of the day is 'free' but we usually have at least an hour's worth (often more) of homework to do for the next day that will consolidate what we've learned in class. This usually consists of written exercises, either translating sentences from English to Swahili, or the other way around. Sometimes we have to write stories that use grammatical rules we've just learned, for example, when we learned how to use the relative marker 'which'/'who', we had to write a description of where we're from, using the aforementioned maker as much as we could (that may sound simple, but the marker changes according to which noun class you're using so there are actually 15 different endings that need to agree with the appropriate noun!).

Secondly, the class size is different - I have been in small classes before, but with language learning it makes such a difference! In school French lessons, there were 25-30 students so we rarely spoke French at all. Here, there are four of us in the class (and that's a 'big class') so there's no way to escape speaking. This is a challenge for me because I really hate to be called on and I hate to make mistakes and get things wrong but it's also very good for my language learning - there's no way to avoid trying to speak Swahili, and the more we learn, the more we're made to speak. For example, this week we were given a list of ten questions to think about overnight: things like 'a person you'll never forget', 'a place you'd like to visit' etc... And then in class we were 'interviewed' by the teacher and the other students about our answers. Of course, there's still a lot we don't know so it tends to be very halting Swahili, with a few 'unasemaje....?' (how do you say...?) questions directed at the teacher.

Thirdly, we move so quickly and learn so much! For example, one week we had four days of classes and during that time I wrote down 202 new words and we learned a new noun class, how to use colours (fairly straightforward, but not as easy as you might think - Olly, as the official linguist of the two of us, might write a blog about agreements sometime, and then you'll see what I mean!), a new relative infix (how to say 'how' - this is not a separate word but is in the middle of the verb, along with subject agreement, tense, object prefix and, of course, the actual verb) and a new tense (hypothetical conditional - past and present, for those of you who are interested!). That's a lot to take in!

Despite the crazy speed and sheer volume of new things every day, I love the classes! It's so amazing to start to make sense of what you can hear around you, and to start to be able to form coherent sentences in Swahili. Even I can tell it's pretty clumsy Swahili most of the time but the feeling is starting to come that I can actually make myself understood if I need to, even if it's not perfect Swahili yet. And I'm only halfway through, so I'm starting to believe that by December, I will be able to say that I speak Swahili which, after all, is the whole point of the course!