Banks in Tanzania feel familiar. They’re clean, sterile and quiet. The lady behind the counter wears a blue blouse. She types numbers into a keyboard. There are posters about customer service on the walls. They have that counter with all the different forms that you fill out before you see […]
Tolerate ambiguity. Reserve judgement. It’s not wrong, it’s just different. These are the phrases we repeat over and over to ourselves as we navigate culture adjustment. We’re working hard to ask questions rather than pronounce on things. Our default is to assume that things aren’t the way they seem to […]
Today we were introduced to vocab around marriage. In Swahili, there are different words for ‘to marry’ depending on whether you’re talking about a man or a woman. To simplify, you talk about a man being married in the active voice – he marries someone – but about a woman […]
Every day as part of our Swahili homework, we write a journal entry about what we did that day. I thought I’d post an English translation here as a way of giving a window on what an average day looks like at the moment. Plus, it should give an idea […]
I watched Captain Planet growing up. I participated in the KESAB campaign (Keep South Australia Beautiful) like most primary school students did. I put my rubbish in the small bin and the recycling in the large bin. We bought recycled paper and toilet paper. In more recent years, I’ve chosen […]
The other day, we bought the wrong bananas. There are cooking bananas (which you can’t eat raw) and eating bananas. We bought the former when we meant to buy the latter. No big deal as far as we were concerned – it’s all part of learning about life in a […]
Walking through the market, two men called out to me ‘mvivu’. It sounds a lot like ‘mbivu’ which means ‘ripe’ (often overripe), a common word in such a setting. But we couldn’t work out why it was directed at me. Arthur wondered if it had some sort of sexual innuendo. […]
Meet Jesus at uni 