Month: February 2009

Kenya, Rants

Last week I was reading about the evolution of Latin languages in Western Europe and it made me think about Swahili here in East Africa. Swahili is the official language of Kenya and Tanzania (and apparently Uganda, but I’ve been there and I didn’t hear much). The thing is, while most Kenyans do speak Swahili, everyone knows it’s not the sanifu (“pure”) brand you’ll find spoken in Tanzania. After independence, Tanzania’s first president was all excited about forging a strong national identity, and part of that was pushing for the adoption of Swahili as the national language. I read in Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari that one independence-era government official’s words were: “English is the language of the imperialists.” Sure enough, traveling in Tanzania is hard if you don’t speak Swahili because English is by no means pervasive!
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Kenya, Teaching

Whenever you think that things couldn’t possibly get more busy/stressful/expensive/whatever, they do! Here’s the deal, I posted a few weeks ago that our semester had started and that I was teaching four classes; it turns out that I’ll be teaching five!

A student came last week saying she failed a class in 2005 and she wants to come sit for the class again. The thing is that it’s my favorite area, and I’m really the only one at the school who can teach it. The course is Operating Systems II, basically Unix/Linux system administration. It’s not really terrible, it’s just bad timing because we’re already in the fifth week of classes.
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Kenya

I met a new mzungu a few days ago.  She’s Pat, and she’s a Peace Corps volunteer in Nguluni, a very small town a few kilometers from Tala.  I’ve never been there, but I pass by it in matatus all the time.  Maybe this will give me an excuse to go there.

She’s working at Kenbric Vocational Training Centre. They’ve had Peace Corps volunteers before, well at least one that I know about.  He was around when Mark (the previous VSO volunteer at my placement) was around.  I never met the guy, but Sara and I used to see him when we first got to Tala a little over a year ago.

I run into her every so often in our college’s “Cyber Cafe” or walking to Tala.  We made plans to go eat chapati and drink tea in Tala this coming Saturday morning.

Her blog is located at http://patinkenya.blogspot.com, go check it out!