Change of Plans

On Wednesday night I went to teach at the woodcarvers again, and this time we taught a real lesson. We were teaching the different between either/or and neither/nor, when one of the carvers made the sentence "I don't know either I can go or not." We corrected him and said it should be "whether I can go or not," but when asked why, neither Mary nor I could explain it. You never realized how much you don't know about the English language and how weird it is until you get stuck with questions like that...

Because this was our last week of intensive Kiswahili, we had an oral exam yesterday and a written final exam today. Both parts were kind of terrible. First, they didn't tell us about the oral exam until the morning of so we had no time to prepare or study for it at all. Then, it wasn't even with our professor or our TA's, it was each of us alone with three other Kiswahili professors who we have never met before. Not to mention that these professors don't teach beginner Kiswahili, they teach our equivalent of English major classes (i.e. Kiswahili literature and other such classes). They asked questions so quickly and with vocab that we hadn't really learned so it was a challenge to even understand what they were asking, let alone answer the questions. I studied a lot an figured the written exam today would be a lot easier, but it turned out to almost be worse. I am not sure why they decided to put on it what they did since it didn't represent what we have learned at all, but oh well.

Just like I had predicted, it turns out that our classes and professors are not yet fully organized to start classes on Monday, so we will have a week off before our classes start (supposedly now on the 23rd). We already have a group trip to Zanzibar with Professor Senkoro planned for next weekend, so we only have until Thursday to do some travelling on our own. A few of us decided we want to go do some hiking in the Usambara Mountains (the really gorgeous mountain range that I saw from the Dar-Moshi bus ride), so we are going to leave Sunday morning to go to Lushoto, the central city of the Usambara Mts, and play it by ear once we get there. I even ran up and down the 8 flights of stairs in my dorm bunch of times last night to get my hiking boots worn in and ready... I can't wait!

Love,
Lisa