I am now a Kiswahili teacher

That's right. They decided to promote (demote?) me from English teacher to Swahili teacher. OK, that's a slight perversion of the truth. But here at Emusoi Centre, my new school, they already have 2 teachers who teach all the arts and science subjects, including English, to the girls. So they didn't need me to teach English anymore. However, the problem is that there are about 8 girls who don't know how to read. DON'T KNOW HOW TO READ, even in Swahili. Three of them don't even know the sounds of the alphabet at all. I find it hard to believe that they've supposedly finished 7 years of primary school. They must have been at terrible schools where the teacher never showed up- or they were never able to show up due to sickness (one of the girls has TB) or to their family's lack of support for education. Maybe their father always said, "Go herd cows!" So my task is, teach literacy. And it seems to make the most sense to teach them to read in Swahili, which is a language that actually makes sense in that every word is pronounced according to a pattern. So, the girls are at different levels, but at the most basic, we're working on "a, e, i, o, u" and simple Swahili words that probably even YOU could read and understand- mama, baba, Tanzania. It's a tough job, easy to get frustrated. Hard to believe these girls will ever be able to make it in secondary school. But, that's not my job, to know the whole picture, just to be faithful in the small task given to me: teach these girls to read and write simple words. In Swahili.