Ninajaribu kusema Kiswahili (…I think this means, I try to speak Swahili)

So the first indication that my Swahili skills are not quite up to par is the fact that the name of my blog: muzungu diaries, should actually be spelled mzungu diaries. Oops. And apparently mzungu does not actually mean “white person,” but the literal translation is “traveller”. It just so happens that most of the noticeable travellers in Tanzania are white people, thus “white person” and “traveller” in Swahili have become synonymous.

Although most people here speak some English, I am surprised at how often I am misunderstood or feel unable to communicate. More than simply being frustrating, not understanding the language can also be scary. I noticed this soon after I arrived as my taxi driver Edward was stopped by armed soldiers on our way out of the airport. Of course they conversed in Swahili and while I’m sure they were probably just saying “Hey Edward, how was your day? You must make good money driving those mzungus who get abandoned by the UN to and from the airport” for all I knew they were saying “Drive the mzungu abandoned by the UN over there so we can slit her throat and take all the money from the money belt she is trying to hide under her pants.”

My next must-learn-Swahili moment occurred soon after I moved into my new apartment when I went to the “Stop and Shop: Convenient Store” next to my house to buy groceries. I asked the guy stocking the shelves if he knew where the matches were and he stared at me blankly. So then I start repeating the word “Matches. Matches? Matches!” and attempting to make a lighting a match hand gesture like the silly mzungu I am. Finally he referred me to the lady at the counter who said “He doesn’t speak English” and then asked him in Swahili to go get me some matches. I was totally embarrassed, and couldn’t wait to get out of there and curl up into a miserable ball of non-Swahili speaking shame, but when he came back with my matches and said something which to me was unintelligible, the lady who was at this point packing my groceries into bags said, “He told me to double bag it for you do it doesn’t break. You see you have made a new friend here.”

Even despite these thoughts, I did intend to learn Swahili before I arrived, so I signed up for the free classes offered by the UN at lunch time. Our teacher, Almasi, is a very cute person and very patient with our complete inability to pronounce anything because despite the fact that Swahili is a phonetic language, basically every second letter is an m or a w or a string of consonants. It’s also a language where the pronoun, the negative and all sorts of other things, rather than being expressed by a different word, are just strung along onto what is called the verb stem. So while “kwenda” means “to go” “ninakwenda” means “I go” or “I am going”. I think the best example of why this makes Swahili difficult to learn and makes me feel rather ridiculous is the word “kumbuke” which means to remember and by itself does not make me feel so ridiculous, but if I want to say “I did not remember you” it becomes “sikukukumbuke.” Yeah.

Our second favourite taxi driver, Peter, has also become our surrogate Swahili teacher and is somewhat obsessed with forcing us to speak Swahili and scolding us when we speak to him in English. We later discovered that he is actually a teacher who took up cab driving because it was more lucrative, which might explain the no-English rule and scolding. I nearly lost it at one point when I got in the cab tired and late for work and said “Hello” to him in English, to which he replied “I think you are not so serious about learning Swahili.” It did the trick, however, and so I made a point of learning to say “You are late” in Swahili as my private revenge.

Despite my regular attendance in class, I have to admit my conversation has not progressed much past general greetings. Lucky for me, however, Almasi informed us that in Tanzania, people will often greet each other for approximately one-half hour, so I actually have a half-hour’s worth of conversation under my belt. I have also mastered useful words like "wikendi" (weekend) and "checki" (check). And at the very least, I can now enter the Stop and Shop with pride and ask my new friend “Habari?” (How are you?”) and respond “Nzuri” (Good) when he asks me the same thing. I still, however, do not know how to ask for matches.

Almasi and I after class. Please don't judge my appearance... half the time I don't even have power...

Getting started

I figure it’s about time I talk a little a bit about the reason I am here: my internship. The fact that I had been abandoned at the airport and that I received no answer to my frequent email requests to begin working a few days early (I wanted to beat the rush of interns, and to be honest, I was pretty bored) made me a wee bit nervous, so when I showed up at the visitor’s entrance to the ICTR I was pretty relieved that the guard told me I was expected. The internship coordinator Felicia took me to get my UN ID badge and then escorted me to the Office of the Prosecutor (which is actually several floors of a building, not one office) for my assignment.

I’m not sure if it’s the UN or Africa (probably actually a combination of both), but getting started was extremely slow and complicated. To get my assignment I had to talk to one person, but to get my computer I had to talk to someone else, and to get a computer log-in I had to talk to yet another person, etc. etc. and everything has to be done in a particular order (i.e. before you get your computer you have to get a log-in), but no one really tells you what you need to do, who you need to talk to in order to do it, or where those people are, and if you do manage to find their office, they probably aren’t there anyway. Some other interns arrived before I did so they helped me through the process, but I still spent a few days without an assignment, then with an assignment but with no computer, then with a computer but it didn’t work, and even now sometimes I don’t have all of the programs I need and everything is more or less 2 small steps forward and one big step back. The comforting part is that everyone is in more or less the same boat so we try to have a sense of humour about it. One girl I work with quipped that EDP, which is the UN tech department, stands for “Everything Doesn’t Perform” and another, noting that the elevator doors are the doors of death and are always shutting abruptly on people, said “They are the only thing that works fast here.” And one day the fire alarm went off, but rather than being alarmed we were all giggling uncontrollably because no one was really surprised that the ICTR would, with all of its other malfunctions, catch on fire. (Turns out it was just a fire drill and that we need to reduce our exit time from 12 to 3 minutes). To be honest, I shouldn’t complain because I was more or less set up in three or four days, whereas some of the interns who came later than me were waiting weeks for a computer.

All of this, however, has made me realize that just the enormity of the UN is probably the main reason that it hasn’t always (ok, usually) been successful at solving the world’s problems. Being down at the bottom of the enormous UN totem pole (unpaid interns don’t rank very high), I now have a much better grasp of just how hard it is when something goes wrong to pinpoint who exactly is responsible or, at the very least, who to complain to. I did consider calling up Ban Ki Moon if my internship goes awry, but somehow I don’t think this would be effective as I’m sure he has more important things to deal with, like civil wars, AIDS, denouncing Israel, etc.