Ahh it's the weekend!!

Written Friday, 6 August, 2010

This week went by pretty fast it seems! My classes went well this week. I went over grammar with my students based on the minor mistakes they made in their first essays. We played a grammar game on Wednesday and I had everyone take a turn correcting a grammatical error that came up in the papers. I wrote example sentences with the mistakes and the students had to identify the errors and correct them for the class. Thursday I put the students in groups and they got to work together to make sentences using infinitives and gerunds. It’s funny because before I left for WorldTeach I didn’t even know what a gerund was – lo and behold it’s actually a verb that’s been turned into a noun by adding –ing to its ending (e.g. in the sentence, “She is cooking a pie,” “cooking” is the gerund). I feel like I’m learning much more about the structure of the English language and the rules for how our language works more than I ever have in my life. To be a teacher here you really need to know all the rules in case your students ask you, “Why is this word or this sentence like this?” Luckily I haven’t gotten any questions that have totally stumped me in class yet from my students, but that’s probably because I teach the grammar rules right off the bat in class. One question I did get is if I could bring in pictures of where I’m from and that’s definitely an easy one for me to satisfy.

On Thursday I brought in two picture books of Vermont and flipped through them trying to explain what the environment in my state is like during all four seasons. Right now it’s winter here and the students mentioned that they sometimes have to wear sweaters or long sleeves because they get cold. When I showed them pictures of our Vermont winters and all the snow we get, though, they were totally boggled! They asked me if I’m ever cold here and I said absolutely not – this is more like summer or spring weather for me so relative to them I’m not cold. I have to say, though, the mornings here when I have to get up at 6:30 for my 7:30 classes are pretty cold. I usually run to the kitchen to start boiling some hot water that I can dump into a bucket and mix with the room temperature tap water from our bathroom to take a bucket bath to warm up a bit. Usuall I can put up with the tap water by itself because it’s not too cold, but in the mornings I rather chicken out and heat up the water. We don’t have a hot water heater here so if you ever want hot water you have to heat it up on the stove. We have an electric stove which most of the time works great, but it’s pretty common for the electricity to go out here so sometimes we can’t even get hot water when we want it. Our Headmistress, Madam Mtima, gave us a charcoal stove which most people here use to cook with, but we never really figured out how to use it so she took it back for herself. Maybe if she’s willing to teach us how to use it then we can borrow it or just keep it so we can boil water and cook when the power’s out. For some reason the power always seems to go out around dinnertime, I’m not really sure why. I’ll have to ask Ms. Mtima about that.

My housemates, Alice and Abby, just left on Friday afternoon to go to Dar es Salaam this weekend. I wanted to go with them, but I decided to wait to go to Dar another weekend once I get my first teaching stipend from the Ministry of Education here. My finances are really tight right now so I want to wait until I have enough cushion money to comfortably travel to Dar and back. We have a month-long vacation coming up in the middle of September and I figure I can spend plenty of time in Dar then while I have time off. So this weekend I’m alone in our little house in Dakawa, but I’ve managed to keep myself pretty busy so far.

I’ve begun intensively studying Kiswahili again because I really do want to learn the language here. Last night I studied for an hour and a half before bed. I was filling out the exercise book I got from that girl in Dar es Salaam who is working for the U.S. Embassy here. I was happy to find out that I actually know a ton of words so far, even though I really didn’t think I did. I was able to fill out quite a bit of the book before bed and I continued working on it this morning. Right now I’m trying to learn as many verbs as I can because I know how to use the four tenses really well (past, immediate past, present, and future), so now it’s just a matter of learning more vocabulary to use those tenses with. Kiswahili is a pretty easy language to learn, especially in terms of tenses, but the hardest things to learn are the nouns. Kiswahili has seven noun classes and they all start with different prefixes in their singular and plural forms. Although sometimes it’s easy to figure out what the pronoun is for a certain noun because it falls into a certain noun class (e.g. there’s a class for all living things, which includes all people and animals), sometimes it’s really confusing because most of the noun classes have rather arbitrary differences between them. If you want to learn the nouns, you really just have to memorize them for the most part. Believe me, I’m working on it! I don’t have a Kiswahili teacher here in Dakawa so it’s a lot of self-teaching, but hopefully I’ll get to know someone who might be interested in teaching me more Kiswahili. I have a feeling I’m going to learn quite a bit of Kiswahili this weekend while my housemates are away. Usually we spend a lot of time chatting together as we’re lesson planning for our classes or grading assignments, but since it’s just me this weekend I can spend all that would be chatting time studying Kiswahili instead.

That's all for now, folks.

Talk to you soon!