Habari za leo?

I am in my element. I love where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m learning inside and outside of the classroom, and I love who I am with. We’ve begun exploring the city more. We wandered for a while yesterday after classes and ended up at a Maasai market. We didn’t buy much because they weren’t really willing to bargain but we did hear some pretty good lines from them. My personal favorite was, “I give you good price because you are student, not tourist.” Okay, buddy, so you think 60,000 shillings (about $60) is a good price for this scarf? Or my other favorite, “since you try Swahili I give you good price.” But then there are the lines that you have to learn to ignore or you will be broke in weeks, like, “I will sell for low because I have no money today and need to eat.” It pulls at your heart, but you can’t let that make you buy things, because so many people are in the same boat here.

Today Martha, the program director in Tanzania, took the five girls to a small shop on the other side of town where young women our age sell fabric and make clothing and use their profits to pay for college. We all bought kangas (pieces of fabric that have proverbs in Swahili) and had them make skirts for us. I think we all felt especially good about those purchases because we were helping girls like us pay for something we all see as so important.

Classes started yesterday and they were great. The Beginning Swahili class was wonderful. The instructor has been teaching Swahili to English speakers for 25 years and his style seems to fit all of us really well. It has been a while since I learned a new language, and by that I mean like ten years. So it was kind of a strange feeling. We learned standard greetings and how to introduce ourselves and say where we are from, but even those minimal conversation skills already make me feel so much more comfortable. I also had my international law class yesterday, which should be a very good class. The professor is a human rights lawyer from Malawi who studied law in South Africa. He said that we will do a couple of field visits, including a tour of ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda), which is located no more than 100m from the classrooms. We will also have a number of speakers on the issues we are studying in order to give us an idea of international law from an East African perspective.

On another note, my roommate Christina and I have gotten into a local show called Bongo Star Search. It is basically American Idol in Tanzania and it is horribly fantastic. Talk about a cultural experience. We now have a plan for every Sunday night at 9:30 and also a conversation starter with locals. - The title of this post, "Habari za leo?" is a greeting that basically translates to "What's the news today?"