Time

It’s February half term (midterm) here for LVCA, but the secondary school doesn’t have one. No time at the Kindergarten this week apart from the free English lessons that Arne and I do on a Wed and Fri afternoon. It varies from having 7 people to 2 and their English speaking levels of all of the people who have turned up are different.

Cultural values: Time vs event, as ‘westerners’ we are time orientated, for example most of us are punctual and we like to schedule our time or have our time scheduled for us. Whereas Africans are event orientated, a ‘come what may’ and not really tied up to a schedule. If I haven’t told you already, they say ‘you have the watches but we have the time’. My example: I turn up for my first Kiswahili lesson this week, turns out it’s the annual school meeting, everyone has to be there including my language teacher, then to my third lesson and he’s not around at all, I head into the centre and I bump into him on the way. When I first got here that was hard to get used to, and now it’s one of the reasons I go to him for my lessons, so I don’t wait for him to come to me. However now though I know that’s the way this culture works and I’d like to think I can cope and live with that.

On Sunday afternoons at about 2pm a passenger ferry comes to Kahunda, it has an amazingly loud horn. Well I was there when it ‘docked’ (pulls up to the bank). There were a fair few secondary students watching on which was why I was there in the first place. One student had a camera with him (the one with the film and something else you have to do manually before each photo). Inevitably I got asked to be in a picture which turned into fair amount of pictures or (picha – that’s how they pronounce it and said lightening quick). They were really eager to be in a photo with a muzungu.