This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Swahili. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
Now Presenting
Tomorrow we all have our big language project presentations. That’ll be a fun day of class. Jonathan and I are hosting “Jiko la Mama Clinton” (Kitchen of… Mama (that’s me) Clinton (that’s what one of the teachers preliminarily named our son) – no, that’s NOT going to be his name). We’re going to teach the “audience” to cook Kraft macaroni and cheese (in Swahili, of course). Too bad they can’t ever cook it because they can’t get it here but oh well. It’ll be fun to cook and eat it. We got a family size box in one of our care packages so we’ll have plenty to serve to our guests.
One girl is going to teach us a game and then we’ll all play it. Fun. Another girl is going to talk to us about the cultural differences between America and Tanzania. Interesting. And there’s another guy presenting but I’m not sure what he’s doing.
After tomorrow we only have 5 more days of class because our last day will be our little “graduation”. At some point we’re supposed to be tested as well but I haven’t heard when that’s going to happen. They’re brilliant how they test us too. No written exercises or papers to prepare. We’ll sit down with one of the head teachers and have a conversation with him. What better way to test our knowledge than to see if we can listen to Swahili, understand it, and respond by using Swahili. Makes sense to me! I think they record us and send it to the SIL main office too. Gulp. There they give us a “level” of where we are.
But of course the learning has just begun. We’ll continue to gain through using it in real life – building on the foundation we’ve received here. I’m surprised how much of a language you can learn in merely 16 weeks!