A Swahili Lexicon
Words & Stories from Tanzania
1998 - 2002
Between 1998 and 2002, Tricia and I worked in Tanzania with a Canadian NGO working with Tanzanian partners on community development projects.
As a church-based organization, we were asked to send back letters from “the field” to supporting congregations. But rather than writing a traditional “missionary letter”, I opted instead to write a lexicon of new words that I was learning in Swahili, with a short anecdote about each.
I posted these on my first website, www.smilingstickman.com (no longer live) in what we later came to call a “blog”.
I am not sure if my employer shared these updates widely with supporters — they were probably too raw and doubtful to help with fundraising — but I found that writing these every two months was a good way to reflect on what I was learning during what turned out to be an intense four years abroad.
Although I may no longer agree with everything I wrote then, I have decided to just post these in their original retro-Word-to-PDF format. Maybe that will be cool again…..In the meantime, I like to think of them as postcards from my younger self.