Tutaonana

Today was our last day of Swahili class. It's hard to believe that we have already been in Tanzania for three weeks. Richard gave us an exam which was a little bit of a surprise. Eleuthera was quite sure that we were going to have one but the rest of us didn't believe her. Richard promised he wouldn't put any vocabulary on it that he "was sure we didn't know," and he was true to his word, although there were definitely some conjunctions that weren't particularly familar.

In some ways, my Swahili is improving. I can read ads now and sometimes understand the focus of other people's conversations. I used to struggle because the Swahili 'r' is not at all like an American 'r' and whenever I tried to roll my 'r's I wound up with a French 'r.' Although Eleuthera assured me it would be cute if I spoke Swahili with a French 'r,' I'm subbing in 'l's instead as some Swahili speakers (mainly ones from the Northwest?) seem to do. If anyone asks, I learned Swahili up near Lake Victoria.

Eleuthera can communicate almost anything in Swahili at this point as long as she has the vocabulary. Last night, she had a long conversation with our security guard about what we could do for his sick mother using the subjunctive. She makes up for it by consistently talking about which teams she is 'voting for' in the World Cup instead of 'supporting.'

Along with the rest of Dar es Salaam, we were pretty excited for the USA Ghana match yesterday. As far as I could tell, we were the only ones at the restaurant who cheered when the U.S. scored (and Eleuthera abandoned us to cheer for Ghana, the traitor). A Canadian woman sitting near us felt bad and bought us drinks. Although we were all a little disappointed to see the U.S. lose (especially Tim, who intially picked the U.S. as one of his teams), everyone here is so excited about Ghana that it is contagious. When Ghana won, they started playing 'One Love' in the bar which was cute.

Tomorrow, we are taking a six am bus ride to Arusha, a city in Northern Tanzania where most safaris start. From there, we are going on a five day safari to Lake Manyara, the Serengeti, and Ngorogoro Crater. Being me, I'm secretly more excited to see Arusha, which is the seat of the East African Economic Community, the city in which the Burundi peace accords are being negotiated, and the place the Rwandan genocide tribunal is being held than I am to see Ngorogoro Crater. However, seeing (baby) elephants, lions, giraffes and zebras sounds amazing, even if they aren't the epicenter of East African conflict resolution. Caitlin has never been camping before, which certainly adds to the excitement.

After that, we are spending a few days in Arusha before heading back to Dar and starting our internships. We will be interning at the Economic and Social Research Foundation of Tanzania (www.esrftz.org). During our time in Arusha, we are probably not going to be able to check email but we will write very exciting posts about the safari when we get back, I promise.