Today was our first day of classes! Our alarms all went off before it was even light out at the lovely hour of 6am. Since the light in our bathroom burned out we had to use the emergency light to get ready and we had to leave our apartments around 6:45 in order to get to our first class on time.
The walk to the AU center is about a half an hour along the dirt paths lining the road. We walk on the opposite side as the traffic (which is different from in the US where we walk with the traffic) so that we are always able see what is going on. This is really important in Nairobi where the traffic is always crazy and unpredictable. The walk is actually pretty pleasant and is a nice way to wake up. I know there are definitely going to be days, though, where I am less than excited to make the trek to class. But when I put it into perspective, and remember that there are so many children around the world who walk hours every day in order to go to school, it makes me realize how lucky we are. The half hour walk is nothing in comparison to what these kids do and sacrifice for their educations. It especially makes me realize how privileged we are in the US to have such good access to education so close to us. It also makes me laugh to think that we used to complain about getting up for our 8:55 classes at AU when our classes here are at 7:15 (plus the time it takes to walk).
Our first class today was Swahili. Our professor seems very cute and excited about teaching Swahili. While Swahili is one of his native languages he is now fluent in seven or so with knowledge in many more. We started with a history of the Swahili language, its dialects, and categorization within the Bantu class of languages. Swahili is one of the most widely spoken African languages with over 100 million speakers. We then learned and practiced greetings for the rest of the class, the most popular of which is habari? in which you respond nzuri. Swahili is such an interesting language and I am really excited to learn more!
Next we had our Institutional Strengthening in Kenya course. I am super excited for this class. The professor seemed really knowledgeable about the topic and the issues we are going to address are really relevant and interesting. At the end of the course we will also get to write a grant proposal for the organization we are interning with, which will also give us really practical skills. Today was more of an overview of international development as a whole and I was surprised at the amount of information I remembered from that class. Even though we were in this class for three hours it seemed to pass much more quickly.
We all took a break and headed to a restaurant down the street for lunch. After lunch we had our Social and Political History of Kenya course with Mwangi, our program director. Today we discussed historiographers and their role in “creating” African history.
Overall I’m really excited for all of my classes! Although it is a bit of a shock to suddenly plunge back into that school life - especially since we already have a seven page paper due Sunday for Institutional Strengthening. All the class sizes are amazing, with Swahili being my largest class (there are 16 of us) and a class with only me and one other girl. It should be a great chance to go really in depth on a lot of the things well be talking about, especially since each class in 3 hours long (eep!)
The walk to the AU center is about a half an hour along the dirt paths lining the road. We walk on the opposite side as the traffic (which is different from in the US where we walk with the traffic) so that we are always able see what is going on. This is really important in Nairobi where the traffic is always crazy and unpredictable. The walk is actually pretty pleasant and is a nice way to wake up. I know there are definitely going to be days, though, where I am less than excited to make the trek to class. But when I put it into perspective, and remember that there are so many children around the world who walk hours every day in order to go to school, it makes me realize how lucky we are. The half hour walk is nothing in comparison to what these kids do and sacrifice for their educations. It especially makes me realize how privileged we are in the US to have such good access to education so close to us. It also makes me laugh to think that we used to complain about getting up for our 8:55 classes at AU when our classes here are at 7:15 (plus the time it takes to walk).
Our first class today was Swahili. Our professor seems very cute and excited about teaching Swahili. While Swahili is one of his native languages he is now fluent in seven or so with knowledge in many more. We started with a history of the Swahili language, its dialects, and categorization within the Bantu class of languages. Swahili is one of the most widely spoken African languages with over 100 million speakers. We then learned and practiced greetings for the rest of the class, the most popular of which is habari? in which you respond nzuri. Swahili is such an interesting language and I am really excited to learn more!
Next we had our Institutional Strengthening in Kenya course. I am super excited for this class. The professor seemed really knowledgeable about the topic and the issues we are going to address are really relevant and interesting. At the end of the course we will also get to write a grant proposal for the organization we are interning with, which will also give us really practical skills. Today was more of an overview of international development as a whole and I was surprised at the amount of information I remembered from that class. Even though we were in this class for three hours it seemed to pass much more quickly.
We all took a break and headed to a restaurant down the street for lunch. After lunch we had our Social and Political History of Kenya course with Mwangi, our program director. Today we discussed historiographers and their role in “creating” African history.
Overall I’m really excited for all of my classes! Although it is a bit of a shock to suddenly plunge back into that school life - especially since we already have a seven page paper due Sunday for Institutional Strengthening. All the class sizes are amazing, with Swahili being my largest class (there are 16 of us) and a class with only me and one other girl. It should be a great chance to go really in depth on a lot of the things well be talking about, especially since each class in 3 hours long (eep!)