A note on Swahili

In Swahili, many foreign words are adopted by adding an "i" to the end. "Hotel" is "hoteli," "change" (monetary change) is "chenji," "bank" is "benki." An American here in Tanzania named Bob told of the time he was in a shop and asked for a receipt using the Swahili dictionary term.

"What?" said the shop owner. "We haven't used that since Nyerere (first Tanzanian president). It's 'receipti.'"

Bob explained that after eating at a restaurant, one asks for the "billi." Another American named Mabel said the best one she'd heard was from a pastor who began a prayer with "Dear Godi."

At the Uhuru Lutheran Hotel, Moshi, Tanzania

Since I arrived here at the hotel at night, I had no clue who my neighbors were until the middle of the night when dogs barked and goats bleated. I was even more puzzled at 2:00 a.m. when a trumpet blasted out a reveille nearby and later a capella singing of men. When I got up in the morning, I saw signs of a farm just beyond the hedge that surrounds the hotel grounds. Outbuildings of wooden planks and rusty tin roofs housed chickens and goats, and a shepherd whistled to the herd of cows, goats, and ducks, urging them across the pasture, but I saw no sign of singing men in uniform. Later I learned that there's a police academy just beyond the farm, and occasionally I see two or three men in uniform march down beaten dusty paths through the farm.

Besides the bleating of goats, lowing of cows, and crowing of roosters, the Muslim imam adds to the evening chorus when the sun goes down. The imam wails out a mournful call to prayer at sunrise, noon, and sundown over a loudspeaker. The call I hear is the evening one. Just when all is quiet on the farm, the imam does his thing, and then the dogs begin to howl. As suddenly as he starts, the imam stops, and fortunately so do the dogs.

The days have been cloudy, and I realized one evening that Mount Kilimanjaro hovered beyond the farm, slipping through the clouds at the end of the day calmly and quietly, a striking contrast to the goats, dogs, trumpets and imams.

Where is the toilet?

I leave for Tanzania in a week, and at the moment, I’m envisioning some “what ifs” that take on bizarre dimensions the more I imagine. What if I arrive at the Kilimanjaro Airport and need to use the restroom before I find my Tanzanian host? Although many people in Tanzania speak English, not everyone does. My Swahili dictionary says “toilet” is choo. I suppose I could tap someone on the arm, and say “choo choo.” Even better, I could say “choo choo” while I cross my legs and wince. Somehow this lacks dignity.
Even if I manage to get across my question with or without my dignity in tact, will I be able to understand the answer? In Teach Yourself Swahili, the taxi driver (teksi dereva) in chapter two conveniently gives three directions: left, right, and straight ahead. But what if the choo is around the corner, through the alley by the Kwik Shop after two traffic lights, and don’t mind the chickens in the road? How do I communicate to someone that they have only three choices for an answer? Multiple choice works on paper, but in an airport when I have to go to the bathroom? So on the airplane, I’ll write kulia, kushoto, and moja kwa moja and then I can point to each term, raise my eyebrows after I point, and move on to the next term.
That should do it.
Now I’ll have to figure out how to get back to the airport, having passed the two traffic lights, the Kwik Shop, and the chickens in the road.

Adding a gardener to Tanzania

As a child of Lutheran missionaries, I can remember watching my father demonstrate to rapt American congregations how the Malays took a bath by way of a roadside spigot. With a sarong hoisted up and held between gritted teeth, he explained that the dirty sarong served as shower curtain while the bather took a bucket of water and dumped it over him or her. Then the clean sarong was shimmied up the dried bather under the old sarong and deftly secured. After amazing or amusing congregations with this bathing demonstration, my parents would’ve sung “Jesus Loves Me” in Chinese and showed slides of Chinese babies in baptismal gowns and Indian brides in dazzling saris. In this way, my parents, Rev. Robert and Shirley Kocher(pictured above with me), kept Nebraskan congregations connected to the sights and sounds of Malaysia where they served from 1958 to 1972.
This was an era when neither Internet nor 24-hour TV news brought the world to the average American household. My parents and many other missionaries served as a live connection between foreign lands with roadside bathers to the U.S. congregations who would’ve been stunned to find that one Lutheran family in Malaysia consisted of an Indian household with two women married to the same man and 16 children between the two of them. This connection was absolutely vital in sustaining U.S. support. More importantly, this connection was vital in helping American congregations realize their neighbors lived in Tanzania, Singapore, Thailand, India, Taiwan, Argentina, Malaysia, and so on.
By the early 1980s, that connection weakened as missionary furloughs were reduced from one or two years to two months. And then that connection ended altogether.
Enter Bishop Richard Jessen after a newly merged Church who sought to build a new kind of connection. As a part of Bishop Jessen’s Global Missions Committee, my parents helped to establish two overseas companion synods, one in Argentina and one in Tanzania. Instead of sending missionaries into the field, the companion relationship set up exchanges­—pastor exchanges and teacher exchanges. Instead of meeting others through slide shows and amusing bathing demonstrations, members of Nebraska congregations now go to Tanzania and Argentina themselves.
When I asked Pastor Martin Russell in the fall of 2008 if anyone in Tanzania would be interested in having me teach English for a year, I had no idea I was tapping into the fruits of a garden long cultivated by my parents and countless others. As of August 2009, I will be teaching Communication Skills in the English Language at Stefano Memorial College University in Moshi for six different programs. I also hope to connect my new students in Tanzania through email to students at Midland Lutheran College where I currently teach writing. In doing so, it becomes clear to me that the beauty of this new garden, tilled and cultivated by the wisdom of many, invites many more gardeners into the garden.