Last Week of Language School

We're nearly finished with language school. This weekend we'll be saying goodbye to most of our friends and colleagues who have been learning Swahili with us. Viggo and I are going to be staying for an extra week, because we missed a week of language school a couple of weeks ago. We went to Dar to celebrate the Norwegian national holiday on the 17^th of May with other Norwegians at the residence of the Norwegian ambassador. We had planned to be gone just for the weekend, but as we were leaving town on Sunday morning our car broke down. It literally ground to a halt and would not go anymore. We were able to roll back down the hill and across the highway into a rather deserted gas station. From there we called friends in Dar, and ultimately our new Norwegian friends who were also in town for the holiday were able to come and tow us back into town.

It was about an hour through city traffic, and somehow we managed to break three steel towropes on the way, one in the middle of a major intersection. We arrived safely back at the guesthouse by the early afternoon, but had to wait until Tuesday for a reputable mechanic to look at the car and diagnose the problem. Initially he thought it would be easy to fix, but sadly he kept finding more things wrong with the car, so we ended up getting stuck in Dar for the full week. On the way back the next Sunday we stopped and visited the friends who towed us back and gave them a new towrope to compensate for the one we broke. We had met them one time before the weekend of May 17^th. I think I mentioned that in my last post. They are a nice Norwegian couple with two small children. They have also arrived just recently in Tanzania and are learning Swahili at a different language school right now. They will be living in a small town about an hour away from where we will be, so we'll practically be neighbors. We were happy for the chances to get to spend some time with them, and get to know them better, despite the fact that it was mostly due to our car breaking down. We also had the chance to meet with our supervisor in Dar and plan our activities for the first few weeks after language school. The car is still not entirely healthy, but we will have to wait until we leave language school here in Iringa to take it to a proper mechanic and have the less pressing problems taken care of. Hopefully after that we won't have to deal with any more repairs for a while. We knew it was an old enough car that it would be needing some repairs sooner or later, but we had been hoping it wouldn't happen quite this soon.