Started up Kiswahili classes yesterday out at Slipway, an overpriced but pleasant place where foreigners go to eat expensive spaghetti and pizza and shop for bejeweled souvenirs. The intermediate class is just me and a Korean nun, Epiphania. I immediately liked Epiphania. She conveys kindness immediately and smiles at every awkwardly executed sentence I say in way that never seems to convey condescension. I am trying to imagine her life. She lives in a small village ten hours away from Dar as a nurse. She has been here for a year and is staying all together for four. Her English is not so good…in fact, I think we can maybe converse best in Kiswahili. Her Kiswahili is pretty limited too, even though it is far better than mine. In October I think she said, she will be working alone at the hospital. Not quite sure what that really means, but I am picturing trying to care for patients when you have a limited ability to even listen to them explain what is wrong let alone tell them what to do. I guess she will probably be fluent before long. Really though for her, it is like learning two languages at once, since her dictionaries and anyone who does teach her or help her is not going to know Korean. Our teacher has been late both days…like two hours. She is old…I was sort of taken aback by how frail and, well, old she looked when she arrived. The other teachers were young and energetic at the other tables and with a job like this, they were probably doing relatively well. Mama Jengo though arrived in these old dusty patent leather heels that looked thirty years old…with what looked like a piece of paper fashioned for an insole. Her dress just sort of hung on her three sizes too big and her neck and face looked like mosquitoes held her hostage every night. Out of her bag comes an endless stream of well-used goods, like scraps of old paper that she writes our lessons on, some clothes and a pair of foldable reading glasses as if space in that large bag was at such a premium that reading glasses needed to be half their normal size.
The teaching is a bit infuriating. It is hard to deny that things here happen slower…and with teaching too there seems to be no premium on efficiency…we wait as she refolds the paper and writes down more words and then we copy them and pass the book for exercises between the three of us. She is a good teacher though and will hopefully save me from terrible kiswahili. Mama J better be on time tomorrow though. Epiphania I can tell is getting a bit perturbed by all this waiting and is liable to lash out real soon. Its going to get ugly.