Pat and Passel

VOICE!  This is what Tanzanians shout at someone making a speech in English if they are speaking too quietly.  Like everywhere else in the non-English-speaking world, knowledge of English is seen here as the Open Sesame to wealth and happiness, so I give an increasing number of informal lessons in my spare time. I'm not a very good English teacher (I barely scraped a pass in my CELTA (Tefl)course) so I don't charge anything. The idea of doing something for nothing is considered pretty strange here. Much more popular is the idea of doing nothing for something. Anyway, at first I firmly corrected such usages as Voice!  and idiosyncratic pronunciations such as cloth-es. Now I don't. I have decided that what my pupils need to know is Tanzanian English (Tanglish?); the chances of them getting to Britain or the US and chatting away with the natives being sadly, but realistically, zero. So now I happily respond to such greetings as "How is your condition?" with the expected "Fine", even though it sounds as if a not-very-close colleague wants to know about the embarrassing itching. Another slightly unnerving morning greeting is "How was the night?" How much detail do they want? Don't panic. "Fine" or "peaceful" is enough. Tanglish is certainly not one of those "Him fella belong Mrs Queen" pidgin dialects. The grammar is fairly standard but some of the vocab is strange or quaint. Some Tanglish phrases are so popular that they pop up in a stream of Swahili. When parliament is sitting I eat my dinner to a TV background of MP's debating in Swahili, their speeches peppered with "...part and parcel..." and "...doing his level best..." One of my little classes: Ramadhani and Modestus, studying Financial Management at St John's University and Wu Sheng Nan who is from China and works as a guard at possibly a construction company near the Dear Mama Hotel. We meet once a week at the Hope Corner Bar.

All three want to focus on fluency in spoken English. The two students are hampered by their limited vocabulary and slow sentence construction but their pronunciation isn't too bad, apart from the usual Tanzanian short("shot") vowels and staccato delivery. Mr Wu, on the other hand, has a large vocab and his grammar is pretty good too. But. We can never understand what he is trying to say. Most of the lesson consists of a game of Give us a Clue/Charades with the three of us trying to guess the phrase. I had Mr Wu down as a religious nutter when he first approached me because told me he was God...... Dear Mama God. It's all a far cry from my CELTA course in Covent Garden where we were teaching topics like "Leisure time interests" or "Where I go for my holidays" to assorted Europeans. But at least I don't have to grapple with my Nemesis, the interactive whiteboard. The only technical hitches at the Hope Corner are being plunged into darkness by a power cut. And it's nice to be appreciated. This text from Ramadhani: "Thanks for your kindly heart to help people. God bless you. Gud night"