Waiting for Rain

The rains are coming any day now. The air is heavy and sticky (though not in a lowlands kind of a way) and we're getting a daily build-up of cloud which isn't yet becoming heavy enough to produce rain but everyone's hoping that it's going to happen soon.

We've said it before but the rains are very important in this part of the world both for agriculture and for domestic water use and it'll make all of highland Eritrea very happy when they finally arrive – well possibly all of Eritrea given that a lot of the water runs off down to the lowlands eventually.

In the meantime we're getting on with our placements and daily Asmara life in which we meet many people and exchange the mandatory Tigrinya greetings with them (Kemay we'lkhum? Dehan do? Kemay kherneknum?... Tsebuq, Eghziabia Yemesgen, Dehan ina ... and so on). Which brings me to one of my slight disappointments with my time here – not having learned more of the local language.

Tigrinya, the language of the Eritrean highlands, is a member of the Semitic language group (which includes Arabic and Hebrew amongst others) and, only being spoken by about 7 million people as a first language (I got that number, well 6.7 million, from Wikipedia so it may not be reliable), there is not really a fully developed learning system so there's my first excuse and people in Asmara are keen to practice English and that's my second.

Now, I'm not too bad at languages (something I discovered long after school, just in case anybody remembers my dismal performance at the time of 'O' levels) and can hold my own in French and Spanish but only after attending organised night-school classes and now I'm (mainly) admitting defeat in Tigrinya having already admitted partial defeat in efforts to learn Japanese a few years ago.

Tigrinya and Japanese have both made me realise that learning another European language is relatively easy (“swimming in the shallows of language learning” to borrow a quote from the blog of another VSO volunteer). If only there were adult education language classes to take advantage of in Asmara, though. I think that learning Arabic at a later date may be a good compromise and we'll just have to continue with the basics during our stay here.

Boruk Me'alti or Boruk Mishet (depends on time of day).

P