Stuart's house

Stuart ni miye tulienda ku nyumba ya Stuart hii asubui.

Yeah, I wrote that without looking. I'm actaully picking up quite a bit of Swahili and can begin to express myself with the language. I usually can't understand what people are saying at all, but I'm working on it. Usually when I say anything beyond "Jambo" the response is "Oh, you know Swahili. ksdnfengzlkgaointoiwengasildhgklabgalkhfionzadgqehgthnsg" and they start speaking like they are seeing a friend they haven't seen in 12 years and are only going to get to talk to them for 3 and a half minutes. I wanted to have a grasp of the Swahili language by the end of October, and since it's the end I was thinking about how I've been doing.

I'd say it's going pretty well. There was about a week and a half where my learning was pretty slow, but now it's taken off again. I made flash cards and have been taking 4-6 of them and looking at them throughout the day. If I'm reading, after every page I'll go over those 4. While getting ready in the morning, I'll glance at them all the time. That intensive studying is really working and I'm encouraged by my progress. Today I figured out how to make plurals of words after looking at two words I knew displaying the two main rules for plural making. Stuart was kind of impressed. It was a good day.

So what did I do today? Well, Stuart and I had my lesson at his house this morning (that's what the sentence at the top says) and that was really cool. We tlaked on the way there and it was a good opportunity to see a different part of Goma and was a great learning opportunity as we looked at things in his house and talked about them.

So we went from teh hospital and his house was only 10 minutes away or so. It was along a drainage ditch, so we were walking on top of the 1 meter deep pit and winding through the back parts of the city for about 2 minutes. We entered a small gate and a wooden fenced compound and there was a small courtyard of dirt/lava and a long townhouse on each side of the courtyard. Stuart lived in the back most appartment in the row, and his house was kind of cool. He is the only one living there and he is pretty educated and fairly well off, but the apartment was made of wood, and had a metal roof, and electricity (whenever the city had it) and it was a great experience. If I go back, maybe I'll ask to take some pictures, but I didn't feel comfortable doing that yet.

I also saw a chicken next to the building. It wasn't Stuarts, but it's so cool to me how developing countries just have food production all over. Every piece of dirt is used and there are goats and chickens all over too. We need more goats and chickens in the cities of the states. It would be so much cooler that way.