Lost in Translation

Often on Sunday afternoons, depending on the tides, I’ll head out to the beach to snorkel a little bit. There’s a decent reef a few hundred yards off of the beach, though you have to walk through a minefield of sea urchins and stonefish during low tide to get out there. The Beach Boys use these prickly creatures to their advantage. Whenever they see a mzungu walking out to the reef alone, they shout, “very dangerous! Stonefish! If they sting you will be a man without a future!”. They then hurry over to the startled tourist and “escort” them to the reef, and then demand payment for their services. En route, they often regale the foreigner with tales of woe to increase their payment, when in reality, they’re just 20 year old men who don’t want to get a job. Several have asked us for gifts, medicine or told us that we’re lying when we say we’re volunteers. While we have sympathy for the poor of Kenya, these guys are not the poor, they’re the lazy.

If they can’t get you to buy something using friendly tactics, they generally try to annoy you enough that you pay them something to just go away. Sadly, countless tourists have fallen for this trap making this a lucrative job since you do nothing but run your mouth all day long.

Anyways, as you may have gathered, we’re pretty over the Beach Boys, so we tend to talk to them a little in Swahili, act slightly cold-shouldered, and they generally get the point pretty quickly that we’re not giving them anything.

This past Sunday, I went out and a guy of course began warning me of the stonefish and offered to take me out. I responded with, “rafiki, tafadhali, ninataka kutembea pa moja”. (Friend, please, I want to walk alone.). He continued walking a few steps behind me, but I was definitely giving him the cold shoulder. I then told him in English, “ I don’t want or need your help, please leave me alone!”. Still a few steps back. I tried the Swahili again, and he continued to follow. Finally, we arrived at the snorkel spot and he asked for “kitu kidogo” (something small). I told him that I wasn’t going to pay him and he can’t just demand money from people who don’t want his help. I dove in and he walked dejectedly back to shore.

After my dive, I told E the story and she commiserated in the Beach Boys being really annoying. Then she asked me how I told him I wanted to walk alone.

Me: “Ninataka kutembea pa moja”.
E: “M, ‘pa moja’ means ‘together’, ‘pekee yangu’ means ‘alone’”
Me: [Facepalm] “Well now I just feel bad.”

The poor Beach Boy much have been so confused. I coldly told him “I want to walk together to the reef”, and then a few minutes later told him to leave, and then with increasing anger said that I wanted to walk together. I guess I need to hit the books a little more.

Pole Pole

In Swahili, “pole” means both “sorry” and “slowly”. This is not a coincidence. Everything in Kenya happens pole pole and people constantly say it. They actually even translate it into English. An actual conversation we had with Mzee Mungai the first week:
M: Mzee, how was your day?
Mungai: Fine, fine.
M: What did you do today? (it was a Saturday)
Mungai: I did some work in my room slowly slowly.

Life in Kenya is much less structured and everything is always late. They are thoroughly amused at the American custom of arriving on time to anything much less EARLY. School is supposed to start at 8 and we never start before 8:30. Church is supposed to end at 12:30 and never ends before 12:55.

There are some reasons for this: transportation is much less reliable [matatus break down a lot], travel times are extremely varied [matatus will stop constantly to pick up more people if there is a single square inch free in the vehicle], and people lack a lot of the “instant” technologies that we take for granted in the US [a lack of microwaves, refrigerators, etc. all extend meal times for example since prep is virtually from scratch].

The hilarious thing is that even though everyone knows in advance that things will be pole pole, no one ever seems to take steps to mitigate this. For example, the other day I watched the “Baby Class” (ages 2-3) at school while one of the teachers ran into Mombasa. She left early and said she would be back at school by 11. The previous day I asked her what work she wanted the children to complete in her absence and she left me about one hour worth of work total. I thought this was strange because I had at least 2.5 hours from 8:30 to 11 to kill but figured it would be fine.

Now, I didn’t expect her to be back at 11. I expected her to be back pole pole at around 1 – even with this guess I was off by almost 2 hours when she showed up at 2:45 which is basically the end of school. I’m not at all surprised by this incident but I was surprised that she didn’t leave me with more work. If you know that you’ll likely be delayed by several hours, wouldn’t it be smart to leave me with extra work, not minimal work? The end result was me sitting with 15 3-year-olds for over 4 hours singing every nursery rhyme and playing every clapping game I could think of. I think the kids thought I was insane although that’s commonplace here. M and I call these moments “crazy wazungu moments” because you can tell that’s what people are thinking.

Pretty much any description of activities includes pole pole. When asking what the itinerary would be for a safari, we were told that the first day would include “a game drive slowly slowly”. I have to admit that it’s sort of nice that no one expects you to be anywhere at a specific time although I can imagine it’s rather frustrating if you’re trying to accomplish something which is time sensitive. Luckily we aren’t particularly pressed for time so we’re adapting to life slowly slowly.

I just wish that mail weren’t delivered pole pole. We’re on day 17 of waiting for a package to get through Kenyan customs. I contacted someone and finally they informed that I have to go to Mombasa to retrieve it even though it was sent to Msambweni. Not sure how I was supposed to know that or when we would have been informed if I didn't ask. So, we’re going to Mombasa today to see if we can “finesse” it out of customs so we’ll update you on what is sure to be an interesting adventure.

Swahili Lesson: Mzungu

Mzungu is the Swahili word for "person of European descent" but it literally translates to "one who wanders around aimlessly" which actually fits quite well into our goals for our trip. The word was originally coined because of the white explorers, missionaries, and slave traders who wandered around in previous centuries generally mucking up things in the region (yes, I know it was more complicated than that but that's where we'll leave that). Interestingly, based on our guidebooks, mzungu does not mean "white" but anyone of European descent because people of Central and East Africa don't categorize people by colors and even if they did, they would think of our skin as pink or red, not "white".

While we're not foolish enough to think that we could blend in (especially in less than a year), we are hoping to learn a significant amount of Swahili. Almost all Kenyans speak their own ethnic language (there are 9 main ethnic groups in Kenya that split into 42 tribes) as well as Swahili and English which are the official national languages and the languages of educational instruction. Attempts to speak Swahili are generally received very positively so we are hopeful that we'll pick up quite a bit. We've already gotten greetings down and the verbs "to be" and "to have" though it's difficult to learn from only phrasebooks so we're going to look for some textbooks this weekend.

Swahili is a language of prefixes. So, for example, the root word is -zungu and mzungu means "person of European descent" and wazungu means "people of European descent". This is why the top of the blog says "wazungu". Also, PETA would be thrilled because people and animals use the same prefixes [m-/wa-] while objects get different prefixes [n-/j-]. There are actually 7+ classes of prefixes but you can make yourself understood with just those two so right now we're sticking with those.

Kwaheri for now! (Goodbye)