Hamjambo?Hi. I am going to greet every time “Hamjambo?” Those who have traveled to Kenya may think we should say “Jampo” rather than “Hamjambo” as a greeting!
However, “jambo” means “big trouble” and “ham” means somehow “you(plural) don’t have”, so if a Swahili speaker meets some of his or her friends, he or she says “ Hamjambo?” rather than “Jambo!” meaning “Don’t you have any big trouble now?” We, who don’t know so much about the language, tend to say “Jambo!” , but if you say so, you are saying “Big trouble!”
My life in this training center is like a sort of life of the students living in a boarding school. We are provided one room, and eight people live in the same block with one common space and a small kitchen. We have to have every meal within 40 minutes in the canteen. Every morning, we have to gather outside or in the gym if it is rain, and we have a kind of an assembly. I will be sent to Tanzania, but other trainees in this center will sent to other countries mainly Africa and Asia, so every morning one of the national flags from those countries is hoisted with its national anthem. We have to sleep at eleven officially, and the internet cannot be used after eleven o’clock. The radio wave of the internet is cut at eleven o’clock.
My diary today seems like an excuse why I couldn’t renew my page…, but I hope you know more about my life as a trainee and some information of Kiswahili.
Tutaonana tena (See you again.)
The photo: Cherry blossoms seen in the training center. The center is located in the mountain in the national park. We could finally see the cherry blossoms which normally seen in early April.
