This semester I am auditing ‘Literary Theory and Development of Kiswahili Literature’ in Swahili! The main purpose is to push my Swahili forward, especially my listening comprehension over longer periods, but I’m also hoping it will give me more of a connection with students on campus. So far there’s only […]
Several months ago I wrote a very excited post on Facebook about how Dodoma now has a gym. However, it’s quite expensive (with no reduction for membership) and the classes weren’t at a great time for me. I went along to one but it wasn’t a very good experience – […]
We’ve done a fair bit of travelling in the last few months which has inevitably meant seeing lots of police. We had some early not so good encounters with police in our first few months in Tanzania so we are generally pretty nervous about being pulled over by them. However, […]
A couple of months ago, Mama Velo, our normal house mama, starting sending her daughter Esta instead of coming herself. We heard that Mama Velo was sick but then we heard that she was better, and yet, she had not returned. Why not? One of the things we learned in […]
We picked up a couple of books of Swahili proverbs a while back and I’ve been using them for a language exercise. Each proverb is stated, with a short explanation of it in Swahili and then some comments about how it is used. Some of them are very telling about […]
We’re back early from Arusha and the last few evenings on the St John’s university oval, there’s been some sort of rally. We think they’re just using the oval rather than it being a student thing — semester doesn’t start for another two weeks and students aren’t really back yet. […]
We are currently in Arusha on our first holiday since we arrived in Tanzania so this will be the last post for a couple of weeks. We chose Arusha because we were told it’s more western than Dodoma – being the gateway to the Serengeti, it gets a lot of […]
Meet Jesus at uni 