It's all Greek to me

Shona Lessons

Mangwanani, mamuka sei? (Good morning, how are you?) Last week, we started Shona lessons. We found a Shona teacher at the local private elementary school who is willing to tutor us. We go 3 days per week, 2 hours per day. Yolanda already knows quite a bit, she just needs to remember it, as she hasn't used it consistently in awhile. I am obviously starting from scratch. We started with greetings and basic introductions. Then, we learned family names (grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, etc.). Then, I continued on with more basics, while our tutor helped Yolanda with more complex vocabulary and sentence structure. In our last lesson, we learned pronouns in which each tense (past, present, future) have different prefixes before the verb. Needless to say, Yolanda and I have both been studying a lot on the days we don't go to lessons.

I, (Yolanda) decided to add a little :-) We have been taking the opportunity to use our Shona as much as possible. Those people who we interact with regularly and have only very basic English skills, we try to practice our Shona with. Andrew intentionally tries to greet them in Shona and use a few more phrases that he has learned. Thankfully, I can understand them when they speak to me in Shona, but I'm still learning on how to best respond in Shona.

Along with the Shona lessons we are learning different cultural ways, due to the language. For example, many foreigners or non-Shona speaking Africans might consider Shona speakers to be very shallow in their greetings; however, just the opposite is true. The reason some may think that Shona speakers are shallow is because they always greet someone with, "How are you?" And before the person has even answered they might say, "Fine!" It seems as if they do not actually "care" about the person. However, our Shona lessons have made it clear that in Shona the greetings are plentiful and diverse in nature (greetings for different times of the day, greetings for different people, greetings for the same person if you are seeing them again etc.). And in Shona the, "how are you?" part is the standard greeting that is asked and the "I am fine," is the standard expected response, irrelevant for how you are truly doing. However, once this introduction has taken place, it opens the door to "real" conversation and that is when the person can respond with how they are "truly" doing. Of course in English this understanding is completely lost.

Shona lessons are also making is very clear that the Shona culture is one of respect. They highly respect their elders, people in higher positions, or titles. This is quite different to the American culture which prefers to place everyone on the same playing field.

At the elementary school where we meet for our Shona tutoring, we often see a few children walking around before their parents pick them up. Any time we pass a student they remove their hat (a required part of their uniform for how hot it is), pause for a moment and greet us, "Good-afternoon Ma'am, good-afternoon Sir." As they look at each of us with a slight bow of their head. I think Andrew is still getting use to the fact that children are VERY respectful to their elders in a schooling environment.   

Changing Seasons

The seasons are changing in Zim. It is heating up, and summer is coming. October is the hottest month, and the last thing we thought we would see when we entered the grocery store last weekend was a row of Christmas trees, already for sale. This one on the left even has fake snow on the branches, since that's the only kind of snow they will have :-) We have had temps in the upper 80's and lower 90's the last couple weeks. Because it is warming up and is very dry (there has been no rain since we've been here), everyone has been burning the high grasses around their properties, so that a fire doesn't spark later on when it gets really hot. These fires usually take place after dark, so it can be easily seen and controlled. We look out our windows in the evening to see the glow of various fires, one time, right next to our outer wall. This causes the small animals (mice, snakes) to disperse. More about that in a minute. The last couple weeks have been bad for electricity. Every day last week, we had power out. Three days in a row, it was out at least 12 hours, one day for 20 hours. When it is out, the house uses water that is stored in our big green tank. When the power comes back on, we must flip a switch to get water from the ground instead of the tank. One evening, the power came on, and I went outside to flip the switch. Yolanda stood just outside the kitchen door. Something caused her to look down, and there was a small snake (maybe a foot and a half long) next to her on the ground. Its head was in the air in striking position, and just as it lunged forward, she jumped back inside. This caught Yolanda completely off guard, as I had obviously walked right by it, but hadn't noticed it, since it was dark. Yolanda closed the bottom half of the kitchen door, so that it didn't get in the house, and I got a long 2 x 4 and was able to pin it against the wall. I had its mid-section, so the head was lashing out and striking as far as it could. Finally, I pulled back and crushed its head. We didn't think much of it at the time, but we looked it up, and found out that it was a poisonous snake, and are very thankful that neither of us were bitten.

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Holding the captured snake on the end of an African broom, which is made out of grasses and attached to a stick.

Thank you to the children of Albion Evangelical Free Church, outside of Minneapolis, who sent notes, bookmarks with verses, and drawn pictures. We are encouraged your thoughts and prayers!

Cooking dinner without electricity. The orange gas cylinder with a pan on the burner, between 2 candles.