Only 26 short months left. Where does the time go?

Last Sunday I came into town to use the internet, but the Morogoro network was down. Fortunately, I bumped into Nathan, one of my good PCT buddies and we decided to go have a soda. We ran into some PCVs at our watering hole of choice, Mama Pierina's, and later went out for ice cream where we met an Australian man and Irish woman travalling together. Our now fairly large group ended up having quite an exciting afternoon. I ended up getting to do everything except what I set out to do. Such is life, especially in Africa.

The last two weeks have been very good. Each week is easier and going by faster than the week before. I'm making a lot of progress with the language and am to the point where I can get basic information across and understand simple things said to me. Teaching has started off great too. My first lesson was a little rough, but the second one went extremely well. I am becoming extremely confident about my ability to perform both in the school and in this culture. I know it's going to be far from easy, but at the same time I know I can do it.

I'm enjoying the Swahili. As I mentioned, it's really coming along, but it's also a great sounding language. The language uses a lot of prefixes for agreement between nouns and adjectives and subject prefixes for verbs. The cool thing about that is that it means Swahili often lends itself to a lot of fun alliteration. For example: "Watoto wetu wawili wafupi walikuwa wanifunzi wazuri." That sentence means, "Our two short children were good students." The stuff with the noun-adjective agreement is pretty complicated and to large extent it seems arbitrary why a noun is in this "class" or that one. The class of the noun is what tells you what prefixes you will need on adjectives, numbers, and even the Swahili word for "of." This aspect of the language is what I'm finding hardest to learn.

As exciting as linguistics are, I will move on to different things. I am definately getting comfortable at home. Communication is much easier and washing clothes by hand and bucket showers now seem pretty normal. Pretty soon our training schedule will get much more exciting. We're going into Week 5, and in Week 8 we will visit Dar es Salaam and shadow a volunteer in the field. The week after that is Thanksgiving and we have been invited, along with all PC staff and volunteers, to the US ambassador's residence for Thanksgiving dinner. We just found out about that this week. Needless to say it's a very nice surprise. Five days after Thanksgiving, we swear in, and then it's off to our site.

We still don't know our sites, but that's mainly because Peace Corps hasn't matched people to sites yet. We talked to them about what we want in a site, but I figure I'll most likely be ok with it no matter where it is. I did tell them I like mountains though. It would be really great to be in the southern or northern highlands, both because of the scenery and the weather. Time will tell, I'll find out in about a month.

Unfortunately, I'm running out of computer time. It's very hard to focus my thoughts so quickly. I may start writing the entry before I come and just type it in here. Things are still going well, and I appreciate the emails, letters, and comments posted here. Keep them coming. Bottom line of my situation is that while it's far from easy, I'm having a good time and I'm adapting well. Until next week, or perhaps the next.