Thursday September 27th
Every day as I push the bike up the hill to Boza I pass
families whose income is derived from providing aggregate for concrete. They get a collection of rocks and then sit
all day with a lump hammer breaking the rocks into small chunks that can be
mixed with sand and cement to form concrete.
This week I practised one of my newest phrases, which I type from memory
so excuse any spelling errors, - Tafadahli, nina weza kuwapiga picha. This
means – “Can I take your picture please” and earlier this week I stopped to
talk to one of the families and used my Swahili. It must have worked as they then posed and in
sign language we managed to agree that in payment I would give them a print out
of the picture.
Below you can see the end product of their labour and the
going rate is Tsh 1000 (40p) for a barrel full, and the barrels are big.
As I cycled past this afternoon one of woman who was busy
hammering called across – “Picha” and my Swahili didn’t let me down as I
shouted back “Jumatatu (Monday) and she happily returned to the job in hand.
Incidentally, learning new words has never been easy to me
so I use the picture method until they eventually drop into normal useage. To remember tafadahli (thank you), I imagined
a welsh painter; tuuta onana (see you later) was a NZ Featherstone Rovers rugby
player eating a piece of fruit; and even simple words like elfu (1,000) was my
mum who was known to some friends as ‘elfie’.
Daft I know but it works for me and it is a method that I have used
before. I won’t even begin to explain
how I remember asabuhi (morning).
Tanga again tomorrow to try to draw some badly needed funds
from the bank. I finally managed to
transfer money on line and my contact at the bank has emailed to say that it
has arrived. I’ve also got permission
from Gladness, the YMCA boss lady, to buy some chicken, so my diet of beef,
fish, beef, fish ……….could well be about to be broken. Apparently chicken is not available in
Pangani and she thought little of my suggestion that we got rid of one of the
three cockerels that roam the grounds, and reduced the noise of the pre-dawn
chorus.
Baadaye (later – and you don’t need to be clever to work out
how I learnt that one)
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