Week 6

24 August 2019 Ijumaa (Friday)               High stress last week due to mid-term oral and written Kiswahili language exams, plus completion of online quiz on safety and security response. Our Mashindei unit of 5 trainees have no cell service in the mountains, so I can only access online and get connected to the rest of the world while in the training town, and for the quiz, I had three tries. My second try was worse than attempt one.

Well, my third attempt was finally resulted in 81 points out of 100. I passed - needed at least 80% to pass. This week, my language tests came back. I bombed the written one, but at least I passed, barely. The score must be above 60% to pass.

I was rated as novice medium, very likely the lowest rank among 51 of us.

Folks, I was a A/B student before, in most of my school years, so now I have to admit that I am not a top student anymore.

Vote With Feet

I admire the people who designed the training program; they are excellent project managers because I can recognize most of the places where they need to troubleshoot and solve issues on the fly.

There are sessions where facilitators ask participant feedback on questions/talking points. The facilitators use participation methods to engage trainees. I like the parts where we vote with our feet. The facilitator would ask a question, and we walk to the line of neither agree nor disagree, or to the line of agreement, or the line of disagreement. For example, walk to a line if we think most chefs are mostly men, and walk to a line if we think cooks are mostly women. That was a session on gender roles and perceptions.

Brief on the Kiswahili Language

·        60% Bantu, 30% Arabic, 10% other (e.g., Hindi, some English, French words, etc.)

·        Global top 10 language out of 6000 languages

·        Top 12 critical languages recognized by the US government and the world

·        Estimated 250 million speakers

·        Tanzanian speak the best Kiswahili among the East African countries of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan.

Peace Corps-Tanzania has the best language teachers, who are our teachers. Case in point, Kiswahili in the online language learning software Duolingo is developed by Peace Corps language teachers. 

Some of us learners find the language very interesting. It can be very condensed, s single word, a verb, alilalafofofo, is all it takes to say she was asleep, in a deep, deep, deep sleep. Yet, on the other hand, the color orange is three words, rangi wa chungwa.

A dance troupe on traditional dance

Our language teachers in traditional clothes dancing

with the Duolingo language instructor

With another senior language instructor

making ugali, maize (corn meal) paste

We had a sports day for fun