That's a What?

Well, two days of language classes down. Our site supervisor just came to the house and nailed up a whiteboard on our wall (a Kenyan whiteboard is apparently a white, high gloss piece of metal with the edges pounded under, so that they aren’t sharp) so now we can keep track of some of the bazillion new words we are learning.

I have pages and pages of words that I have been told the meaning of, but it takes a few times of actually hearing them in context before they actually stick.

Pronunciation is pretty easy, except for the fact that they combine consonants far more frequently than we do in English. For instance, the word that means “clever” or “witty” is spelled mjanje, and it is pronounced in two syllables, “mja-nje.”

With the exception of the “v” (it sounds like an American “v”), everything is pronounced just the same as it is in Spanish



We’re slowly starting to meet people, mainly down-countries who know the old intern team, but a few Somalis who live in our neighborhood as well. Most of the Somalis have very traditional Muslim names (Muhammad, Hassan, Fautma, etc), but, among certain of the down-country tribes, it seems like everyone and their uncle has a female relative named Jessica.

It’s kind of funny (maybe Jessica is just one of those names that is common all over the world) and it makes it way easier to introduce myself.

Several of the tribes don’t have a distinction between the “l” and “r” sounds (or just plain don’t have those sounds), so Laura and Warren have a really hard time getting their names across sometimes.