Adjusting to Dar

(full disclosure: written by Becca and Sam, however the part that is "linguistic and annoying" is Sam's alone)

Hawajambo! Wiki hii, sisi tunakaa Dar es Salaam na tunaenda shule kujifunza kiswahili.

Hello! This week, we are staying in Dar es Salaam and are going to school to learn Swahili. Our class has three other students, another American (a grad student) and a really cool Dutch couple who will be living here for three years. We are all very much beginners. Becca's vast knowledge of Swahili was covered in the first two days of class, and so we've been soldering on through the morphological slog together. Kiswahili is an agglutinitive language, which means that tense, subject, and object are all reflected as prefixes (for the most part) on the verb. It makes the language somewhat like a fill-in-the blank puzzle where each element has a position that must be filled in. So, the vocabulary is by far the hardest part. The vocab is a mixture of Bantu and Arabic, with some Portugese and English words mixed in. Often times, the origin of a verb dictates the type of prefixes attached to it.

Our host family has been very kind and welcoming, only making fun of us a little bit for all of our linguitic fumbling. The father is a lawyer and the mother runs a catering business. Most of our time at home, however, is spent with their kids, who have been very nice to us. We're still figuring out the rhythms of the family, but we think that we've almost got it. We'll see what the weekend brings.

Yesterday, we went on "Expedition Mbili: The Search for Mpira kwa Soka" [Expedition Two: The Search for the Soccer Ball]. Our host brother, who does not play much football, suggested that we try the sports store at the local upscale shopping center. But they charged over $50 for a soccer ball! Instead, following the advice of an old man who sells us Coca-Cola after school, we hopped aboard a dala-dala (local bus) for an hour-long ride into the bustling center of Kariakoo, considered the most "African" neighborhood of Dar (as opposed to "Indian" or "mzungu" [white]). It was a great success! And three hours later, Sam was playing soccer with a new ball and a bunch of local schoolboys. And Becca was showin off her Swahili by explaining to the host family why, for the first time since we arrived in Dar, the two of us were not side by side.