After having a few days of mother tongue language classes during
Cross-Sector, my 3 friends (Jojo, Cass and Hannah) and I were impressed with
how much we learned. With confident attitudes, we decided to sign up for a
language immersion course to learn our local dialect, Kalenjin. Language
immersion is when Peace Corps sends a teacher to a volunteers site to learn
whatever Kenyan language they may need/want. Our teacher was Emily, the same
teacher that taught me Kiswahilil during training. She is a Kalenjin and lives
close to my village so we spent three days in Singorwet learning and speaking
our mother tongue.
In only 3 days we went from only being able to greet people,
to being able to say our jobs, where we live, what kind of food we like, and
many other important phrases. I’ve been so impressed by my ability to pick up
on languages here. It has been so important for me to be fully immersed in a
culture in order to speak the language. In high school I took Spanish, but to
this day all I can say is Hola and Adios. But I feel like Kiswahili will stick
with me and now hopefully I will begin to use Kalenjin more and more. People in
my village only speak Kalenjin so it’s hard to communicate with them past the
most basic sayings. I feel like after 3 days I have a firm grasp on how the
language works so it will just be memorizing vocabulary from here on out.
Language is so cool! I never liked learning before because
it felt so difficult, but I’m beginning to pick up on patterns easier. I hope
when I go back to America
to learn Spanish again and maybe travel within Spanish speaking countries so I
can improve.
