Hamjambo, marafiki!
Well look at that, I just greeted you in a formal manner! Hooray!
Today was the first day of my internship at Heshima. It was cool besides the part where it basically kicked my ass.
The girls have very limited English proficiency and speak almost exclusively Somali with a little Swahili. Hilariously, Osop, the teacher there, asked me to help teach math. An overwhelming feeling of ineptitude and uselessness abounded as I realized that I was attempting to explain my worst subject in a language the students don’t understand. Hoorah! I spent the majority of the lesson thinking that there must be someone more qualified than me to do this.
I had a bad moment when Osop was reading one of the English compositions out loud. She was looking for grammar, especially for capitalization, because apparently the upper level girls keep using capital letters in the middle of sentences.
So casually, Osop's reading, “I don’t know if my parents are alive or dead…that ‘t’ doesn’t need to be capitalized.”
There was also a funtastic hour where Osop just talked with the girls in Somali where I sat there confused. What fun!
Apparently you have to be a hard-ass with the girls; they beat each other up in the safe house sometimes and are all obviously traumatized.
It’s going to be a rough externship, but I think it’ll be good for me in the long run. Osop says that I’ll figure out how to better communicate with them, and Talyn (the founder) is working out some human rights education and leadership kind of stuff for me to do. It was only the first day and I'm excited to go back, but I just felt sort of useless.
Nairobi's intense and I'm tuckered out!Peace,
Dana
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