"Teacher, come!"

Yes, I’m a teacher now – an English teacher. I’ve never been in front of class before, but it was the one way I could help here, for now. Apparently I’m doing alright. The students are motivated, if somewhat dazzled by all the tenses, irregular verbs and pronunciation rules. Well, it was quite a refresh for me too. Their own language (Swahili) is a bit like Japanese, strangely, except without all the different characters. Most of their syllables are made of just two letters – one of them being a vowel. Words like “thoughts” and “hundredth” are quite daunting. Besides that, they have huge problems in trying to keep the “r” and “l” apart – sometimes it seems they’re swapping them deliberately.

But a few of them can make lengthy stories in English already, which is great fun to hear. Yesterday they were to tell about how they met their wife / fiancé and their marriage (“When you went on honeymoon, what happen?”). Apparently some tribes don’t go through the stage of “boy- and girlfriend” like we do in Europe. And yes, in by far the most cases the man had to pay the woman’s family, in cows and cash.

We also made them discuss whether women are allowed to wear trousers, as it’s generally not done here. The Bible says that God doesn’t like women to wear men’s clothing and vice versa, and trousers are definitely men’s wear here. The discussion was a bonfire, and a very fun kind of way. It struck me that during the discussion, people were able to find Bible texts like the one on men’s and women’s clothing very rapidly.

Next week three out five teachers will be at a YWAM conference for East Africa, elsewhere in Tanzania. For a while it seemed Joshua and I would be the only ones to teach all week, but fortunately we’re blessed with some reinforcements – actual British reinforcements even, so the lessons should be all the better.

After that, I’ll try and start a computer school with another Tanzanian, who’s actually Joshua’s best friend. There’s nothing but an empty classroom so far, but we’ll see what we can manage. If God wills it we will be making Tanzanian nerds here.