Swahili: Complete!

 It’s crazy that we crammed a semester’s worth of knowledge into three weeks, but by living in the country I think I will retain more of the language than of the three years I spent learning French in high school. Tomorrow we are going to a fishing village north of Stone Town for a few nights where we will be cooking for ourselves.  I’m really excited, but some people in the group have never cooked before so it should be interesting.  The school gives us money every week to go out and buy food for lunch.  Rather than spending a lot of money ($5 is a steep price for anything), a few of us have been pulling our money together to buy fruits and veggies from the market. Then we buy chapatti (Zanzibari version of a crepe/ tortilla) and make wraps. I haven’t found a combination of foods that doesn’t taste good wrapped in a chapatti. 

This past weekend we went to a Zanzibar park and to a donkey sanctuary.  Donkeys and cattle are often over worked in Tanzania from pulling heavy carts.  The sanctuary houses the animals until they are healthy enough to work again.  Zanzibar park is similar to a small zoo that you would find in America.  We saw many of the animals you typically think of when you think Africa: monkeys, exotic birds, alligators.  I have to say my favorite was the hyena, thought.  Not because it is cute (because that is one ugly animal), but I liked it because it make a sound like you would not believe. Definitely not the laughing animals from the Lion King; its groan sounded like Chewbacca, Godzilla, and Morgan Freeman combined into one creature. 

Babboon at Zanzibar Park

We saw this pelican swallow a whole fish!

Crane at Zanzibar park

Crazy Hyena

Swahili Time

It’s scary to think that I’ve been here for less than three weeks because I already feel like I’ve been here for months.  What is even scarier is that we have out final Swahili exam in five days.  So with 20 hours of Swahili class each week, we will cram a semester’s worth knowledge into 21 days.  If you include our homestay and daily life in Zanzibar, we are constantly exposed to the language.  Because I should be studying for my final right now, I just wanted to write a quick post about “Swahili Time.” People in Zanzibar definitely live by their own time because it isn’t uncommon for our lectures to start up to 30 minutes later than scheduled. To make it even more confusing, people living in East Africa function using Swahili time.  Our teachers described it to us as subtracting 6 hours from the clock in the AM and adding 6 hours in the PM.  Therefore, 6 AM (English time) is considered to be hour zero, but is referred to as 12. Noon is considered hour 6 and six PM is called 12. HOWEVER, all the clocks are set to English time on the normal AM/PM time scale.  Not only do I have to do math in my head, I have to do math in my head in another language. It doesn’t help that all Swahili numbers 1-10 sound exactly the same.  We mzungus are still baffled by the time difference.  I guess it’s because they want the working hours between 6 AM and 6 PM to correspond with the amount of time they have been awake. What confuses me most is that they don’t switch their watches to display the time they speak.  I don’t try to comprehend why they do it, I just need to learn my numbers better so I can do mental Swahili math a little bit faster.  

Google Image Search "Swahili Time" and this is the first result.

Yes, it's a cruel joke