Amazing Grace and A Wretch Like Me

Habari za asubuhi. Good morning. Today marks our third full week away from home. The Kiswahili language continues to amaze and confound us. The structure jars with what our anglicized ears consider normal. Perhaps the biggest stumbling block we have encountered is the fact that this is a “noun class” language. While English verbs only change according to time (past, present, or future) and the singularity or plurality of the subject, Swahili verbs can change simply by what the noun is – if its a person, an animate or inanimate object, abstract idea, or place, the construction of the verb (and the adjectives on the noun) change.

When I first learned that Swahili was not a gendered language – in this way similar to English and unlike French – I thought this might make Swahili easy to learn. Not true. Instead of only worrying about which adjectives need an “E” to show off their Franco-femininity, Swahili requires you to remember a different set of linguistic rules for eight different classes of Nouns. For instance, the M-Wa class (‘m’ for singular and ‘wa’ for plural) consists of nouns which refer to people or living animals (dead animals are in a different class...the ‘n’ class). So when you use a noun from this class the adjective roots and verb roots will require the appropriate beginning. So a child is “mtoto” and falls into this class. So if I were to say the “mischievous child” I would say “mtoto msembufu” since “sembufu” is the adjective root. If I used another noun the same adjective could be (wasembufu, kisembufu, etc.). Confusing. But now throw a verb into the mix...such as Kupendeza (to love – ku is always the infinitive indicator) and you say Mtoto anapendeza, since “a” is the subject prefix, “na” indicates present tense, and “pendeza” is the verb root. Now I could say “alipendeza” for the past tense, and atapendeza for “future tense” not to mention the perfect and imperfect tenses. Now we are only on the 4th class of nouns and have four different rule systems to think through, but already our brains are drowning in a steaming pot of Swahili alphabet soup. Ok, now I have probably bored everyone out there, but bear with me, no more free Swahili lessons.

Our class has increased by one student this week. Ursula, the new student, is a Swiss-German in her late fifties who has signed onto a three year term to be Director of Care at the large Mwanzan hospital, Bugondo. She is hilarious simply because she is quickly enamoured and overwhelmed by the beauty that is Swahili, and even more quickly fed up with how “illogical dis all is. Ya, now zis is just stupit. Enough of dis already. Ven can ve go home!” Her frequent outbursts of annoyance are understandable since she has to translate all the Swahili into English and then into her native Swiss-German to make sense of it. Not to mention our teacher, Gaudence, possesses an inability – one common among Tanzanians apparently – to differentiate between the letter “R” and the letter “L”. We play and give plaise in church, and pray on the prayglound. A sign on our way to school actually reads “Site cleared for the construction of a new Raboritory” and Steve from CRWRC received a letter asking him to “Correct his Collections”. That alone has four possible meanings.

Jane, the receptionist at the language school, invited us to her church. We accepted to go and planned to meet her at 8 o clock at the Saba Saba market, about a 6 kilometer trip from our place. Bob drove us to the meeting point where Jane was waiting for us, we walked for another 10 minutes through the market and beyond to a small “church” that was more a living room with the couches and the chairs pushed against the wall, bright pink plastic flowers adorned a glass cube of a pulpit thrown into the center of the northern wall. Inside the glass pulpit was an arrangement of grasses and wildflowers. Immediately in front of the pulpit was a little table with a wicker collection basket draped in a doilie (unsure of spelling) (that is a lace-like covering for you non-Dutch readers). From the ceiling hung three large fold out ornaments in bright shiny tin-foil. The walls, near the ceiling, were decorated with pictures ranging from Christ on the cross to a picture of a girl and a cow wading in a rice paddy. Bumper stickers with slogans “God is All” and “Christ is King” are plastered in various places on the walls. The wall behind the pulpit is draped in large silk-looking sheets of purple, white, and pink. That is it. All the Christian kitsch you could handle rammed into one room that was stiflingly hot and scented with the liver and onions odour the human body tends to emit in such temperatures, provided the setting for what would be perhaps the strangest, and most definitely the longest worship service in my life to date.

Once inside, Jane invited us to sit on the couch directly opposite the pulpit. A position that would prove to be quite unfortunate since it was next to impossible to avert the gaze of the preacher, thus impossible to take a doze in the sauna like conditions of this church. Once assembled the church began its worship with a time for open prayer to God. At first there was a bit of mumbling as each member laid their petitions before God, but by the twentieth minute, these prayers had reached a frenzied pitch with women sobbing and wailing, wiping the tears from their eyes. Some of the younger men were pacing to and fro in a spiritual delirium while some of the younger girls rocked back and forth on the sofas. Vanessa and I exchanged looks (yes our eyes were open after about the 5th minute of this not-so-silent prayer) and wondered, not for the last time, how much longer would this go on. Turned out it would go on for almost 25 minutes. Next we sang. The singing was beautiful. The leader would sing out a tune and the congregation would chorus it back. Without books or sheet music they wove together an astonishing diversity of rhythms and voices into a pulsating harmony that transcended differences with its beauty and its truth.

Sunday school was led for the whole congregation by an angry-looking woman of formidable size. She was a preacher (distinguished from pastors... only men are considered pastors apparently) who must have assumed the spirit of Jonathan Edwards somehow, because in her presence I just felt like a sinner in the hands of an angry God. She would yell and scream and whisper and cry; she ran the entire gamut of emotions within this Sunday school message that ran the better part of 45 minutes. Ok, that was obviously the sermon, now what?
I like to think that what followed was some type of religious dance party. Two boys started hammering out beats on the bongo drums which worked the small group into a frenzy. The size of the group made it, unfortunately, hard for Vanessa and I to obtain the anonymity we so desperately sought. But in a 10 X 12 room where you are the only two White skinned people with burnt noses, anonymity was not an option. Now I know Self-knowledge/self-awareness are a vital part of any honest student’s life (I think Dooyeweerd even said “Know thyself” should be written on the doorposts of philosophy). I agree. And I’ll concede I’m pretty stiff even for a white guy. I’m not the first one out on the dance floor and I’m usually the first one off. Now after some awkward clapping and shoe shuffling I thought to myself, “Okay, you’re not doing so bad. If you can maintain this semblance of rhythm for another five minutes, I’m sure this will end and if they don’t give me an A for effort, at least I’ll get some sympathetic nods.” Now Vanessa was not helping me out here too much, in fact, she had a sweet position on my right hand side near the corner. As far as staying anonymous goes, she had me beat. Well, five minutes rolled by. I stopped clapping. Another five and I stopped shuffling my feet. Another five (and all this time the beat is getting faster, the drums are getting louder, and the room is ripe with the salty smell of moist skin) and I even start to stop the natural swaying your body does when it senses a beat. Okay, what time is it? I wondered. By the way, I’m wearing black dress pants and a long sleeved dress shirt, so I’m pretty sure I was contributing to that liver-and-onions aroma wafting into my nostrils. Sour Irony.

The dancing provided a spectacle, I’ll admit, neither of us were bored, despite this lasting the better part of an hour. There was jumping, war-cry-like shrieking, clapping, jazz hands, and intermittent shouts of hallelujah! and Amen! Before the end I was roped in by a woman twice my age shouting something in Swahili that got the members to laugh. “Hapanah, Pole. Asante Hapanah” (Trans. No, Sorry. Thank you, NO!) I tried to say, but was taken into the middle of this Soul train. What to do??? The lawnmower was not appropriate, the worm even less, the twist... well that wouldn’t be so bad, but no. To my relief, my dancing partner saw the deer-in-the-headlights look in my eyes and proceeded to escort me back to the edge of the circle where I could observe from a relatively safe distance.

Now we have been going for over two hours. It’s ten O’clock. I’m hungry, tired, and unbearably sweaty. But now it is time for the real sermon. The Sunday school was for the children (just a note: there were two children present) and this was for the adults. The same women spoke but there was a different translator who raced to match her speed and her fire. She really laid into us and I’ll be honest, when she began her sermon with a blood curdling scream I was pretty freaked out. She proceeded to examine the passage of Christ’s transfiguration, but from what I gathered, her message basically reiterated the story about six times. Plus the time spent by the translator reiterating the same story into English, I think that the whole sermon could have been shaved down by about 10 times. Nevertheless, this was another hour long ordeal. So now it is eleven o’clock. Worship is an endurance sport out here, honestly.

Well I’d love to go on in detailed descriptions about the next hour and a half, but you get the gist of it. There were a few more songs, an offering, a time to meet everyone, and then another time of communal praying. When all was said and done it was around 12:30 and began just after eight. I’ll admit, I felt somewhat inferior to these people who could worship so long without tiring; in fact, the church which neighbours with Steve and Jan (they told us this when we visited them later this afternoon) had been worshipping for about 24 hours in a row. It’s almost cliché now, but the African Church is truly on fire for God.

And then I got to thinking. Despite all my negative interpretations and sceptical evaluations, this service in a stuffy one room home in the impoverished countryside outside Mwanza was the closest to a heavenly experience one can get on this side of glory.

________
When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise,
Then when we first begun.
_________