Kiswahili is the language class that I am taking here and it is very difficult. We have class everyday for four hours in sets of two hours at time. The teachers are very nice and they communicate in English well. We started our classes in the town called Stonetown, which is our base of the program. But in the second week we traveled across the small, populated island to a town called Paje. Here we stayed at a sort of bed and breakfast on the beach, it was very nice and gave us the illusion that we would be staying in resorts the whole time and studying along the beach. We were wrong. After three days of staying in paradise, we made our way to our homestays. We were assigned a family where we will stay the next two weeks. These houses are middle to upper class for this town, but still some of us don’t have toilets or showers. They have to use buckets and holes. They don’t use silverware here and I feel weird using utensils but I still do. The town is full of wrong turns and you get lose very easily. We aren’t allowed to be out on the town past 8 because people get stabbed and robbed. Things are very different here and it is very hard to find Wi-Fi. We aren’t allowed to wear pants because of the Muslim religion, which consists of over 99% of the island. Sure by the end of this I will have more complaints, but things are getting a little better… oh besides the spiders the size of a dinner plate!
