Thursday, August 20, 2009

We're Graduates!


Finally, after almost 4 months, we are totally fluent in Swahili.  We now know all the words.  Ok, so maybe not so much.   But we can communicate well enough to not sound like complete idiots and we are officially done with language school.  Yea!  Brett and I really enjoyed our time at school and will actually miss being there a lot.  We'll especially miss our teachers.  

If you finish the course, they force you to have a graduation.  Now, we really didn't want to have this graduation, but there really was no way around it.  They had us give speeches (in Swahili) and made all the other students give us a blessing or share a memory or something along those lines.  This is actually quite entertaining as some of the other students have only been there 1 week.  They gave us diplomas and made us a cake.  No one played the graduation song, but I felt it in my heart.  

This is Brett with Tunku, one of our favorite teachers.  Brett is also Tunku's favorite student, which we know by how much he makes fun of Brett.  Also highly entertaining.  
This is me with some of the teachers after I so excitedly received my diploma, given to me by Peter, the Danish guy at language school.  I'm not sure why Peter was involved in this process, but hey, when have you ever gotten a diploma from a Danish guy?
This is me with our friends, Carley and Kate, Americans who are teaching in Dar at the Christian School.  They're much fun, and I'm sad they live so far away.  They ended school the same day as we did, but were only able to stay for a month total, so they didn't have the joy of getting diplomas from Peter, though they were still forced to make speeches.  The kids made us our lovely laurel crowns as a graduation present.  So beautiful. 

I know we still have a lot to learn, but the language school was great, so if any of you are wanting to learn Swahili, I highly recommend it. 

2 comments:

  1. Congrats on your graduation! That's great!

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  2. Milestones are to be commerated, so glad you had a fun one. Bet the speeches were outstanding....

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