19/8: Newcomer

This morning another volunteer had arrived in the house. She’s only one because the other one has some problems with her kidney that the doctors need to figure out what is, before she can come here. For now she has moved her ticket until the 1^st of September. So Laura came here alone. She’s really sweet and it’s nice to have someone to talk to and be able to really speak Danish again. She’ll be here for some three months, two of them in the day care and the last one doing some medical volunteering and then she/they has/have planned three weeks of travel time at the end. I have actually planned a bit of travel myself. Because for every ten weeks that we work we can get two weeks of, I already have a Kilimanjaro week, but that doesn’t really count. Then I want to go to Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar and up along the coast for twelve days before going to Kenya. It actually wouldn’t have to cost very much, maybe half of what the Kilimanjaro trip will cost, if you live and eat cheaply. But of course it is still a lot of money to spent, but I still think it will all be worth it. Laura got here the same time of day that I did and the women who picked her up had said that they would get her at nine to do the induction, only four hours after she got here, so she did not get a lot of sleep. And then they didn’t even come for her! An hour and a half after they called to say that they would come the day after instead, she could have used that time to sleep. Laura had so much planned and so much stuff with her to give them all, I hardly had anything, so I’m sure she will be very popular amongst the children. She had even called Lego to ask for something to bring, we will only work together for two who days because there is also a dirty day this week so we won’t work in the day care then. Today I had Kiswahili again! I only had it for an hour, but I learned some 15 verbs and how to use them in the present, past and future time. Also the different between the pronouns, they have six: ‘mimi’ which means I/my/me, ‘wewe’ which means you in singular, ‘yeye’ which means him/he/she/her, ‘sisi’ which means we/us, ‘ninyi’ which is you in plural, ‘wao’ which is they/them. In Kiswahili they use double pronoun so before the verb they add two things, the second pronoun and the time, the second pronoun is in this order: ni/u/a/tu/m/wa. The present is ‘na’, past is ‘li’ and future is ‘ta’. So if you want to say “I am eating now”, eating being ‘kula’ and now being ‘sasa’, you would say: “mimi ninakula sasa”. Or if you want to say “we were eating yesterday”, yesterday being jana, you’d say: “sisi tulikula jana”.  Easy, right? Just imagine how much I could learn in my last 59 hours. Another lesson on Wednesday!