Babel Fish

I am so in love with Swahili... okay to be honest I am in love with myself and all the Swahili I have managed to pick up in my two and a half month in East Africa. I formerly thought I was hopeless at learning languages, but I think perhaps I shall revise that story. Certainly I am not fluent or anything like that, but I am fairly proud of my Swahili gains.

Learning a language, as it turns out, is a somewhat mind-bending process. I remember one day, back at the hospital, the nurses asked me, "Kelsey, unataka chapo?" My brain immediately took up the challenge and translated "unataka" from Swahili to English as "do you want". Then the language engine of my brain sputtered and choked and missed a gear - "chapo" which is sheng for chapati, a favorite tea time snake, my brain heard as chapeau and translated from French to English as "hat". My response to the simple question "do you want chapati?" was therefore "what hat?" Needless to say this was met with quite a bit of hysterical laughter.

Of course that was ages ago and I've improved heaps since then. While on Zanzibar I managed to bargain for a scarf almost entirely in Swahili. I even came up with this sentence on the spot, no phrasebook or anything: "Jana, bei ya kwanze, elfu saba, halafu leo, bei ya kwanze elfu dumi no mbili!" It means: "Yesterday the first price was 7000 now today the first price is 12000!" I have no idea if it is grammatically correct, in fact it may well be a linguistic bastardization, but the vendor laughed so hard and ended up giving in to my price (5000) without much of a fight. Then when I pulled my money out of a knot in the corner of my wrap skirt he laughed again and said "dada (sister) you are like a maasai mama!" It was quite an entertaining experience, for both of us I think.

Finally my last language encounter, of which I am most please because I always hear people talk of this but I have never actually experience it myself (being the sad monolingual specimen that I am). I had been speaking with the bar tender at our campsite in Swahili all evening as his English seemed about as good as my Swahili. He came by our group after we had finished dinner - he was looking for a cooking pot which, unbeknownst to us we had borrowed earlier. He couldn't find the words in English but when he saw me he quickly switched back to Swahili. Overwhelmed by his words I told him "pole sema" or "speak slowly". So he repeated himself slower and, I'm sure, simpler and I managed to grasp what he was saying. I turned back to the group and pronounced, "Anasema ni souforria mdogo..." but then I floundered because I couldn't remember how to conjugate the word for "theirs". It didn't matter anyway because everyone was laughing and shouting "Kelsey, English!" And suddenly I couldn't find the words in English either. It was like all my words had fallen off their shelves into a mad jumble - nothing was categorized neatly anymore. I just wanted to say that the small pot belong to him, but instead I ended up pointing weakly and saying "The souforria, the souforria" Finally I regrouped and sorted it all out. The group was quite impressed and all commented on how handy my Swahili was - but I didn't feel handy, I felt linguistically shipwrecked.
I dreamed silent dreams that night.

Yesterday I left Tanzania and with it, the Swahili I have come to so enjoy. Malawi is beautiful. I really miss the Swahili though.