My name is Gretchen Walch and I am a senior here at Smith College and I've
studied Swahili through the Five College Center for the Study of World Languages
for the past four years. During my first semester at Smith I was lucky enough to
have a professor Dr. Kim Dion in the Government department as my advisor and
also to serve as her research assistant on her book 'Doomed interventions' which
is about HIV/AIDS interventions and largely their failure in Africa. At the
time I came into Smith as a Kentucky kid interested in studying anthropology in
Africa despite having arrived at Smith only having ever had a singular
class about the continent and Kim was determined that I would take Swahili. She
knew how to sell me on the language she was quick to pull me from
considering French instead of Swahili when she said 'well you could learn the
language of the colonizers or you can learn Swahili.' Now I must say she was
also quick to emphasize the structure of the Swahili classes in the Five Colleges
the one-on-one conversation sessions with native speakers and tutorial
sessions with Dr. Agnes Kimokoti, an amazing educator, with a doctorate in
kiSwahili. If I recall correctly I was physically shaking with fear the first
time I walked into my class with my conversation partner who at the time was
Mara she was a Fulbright conversation partner
my first year here and her kindness went really far with a scared first-year
student. Though many Five College students often have other students
in their conversation session I was, depending on how you look at it, either
lucky or unlucky to have one-on-one conversation sessions with me and the
conversation partner alone for my first two years at Smith. So I never knew how
good or bad I was at KiSwahili because it was just me and my professor
in the classroom so I was definitely pale in comparison to their skills
However this also meant that I became creative and attempted
to have deeper conversations with my conversation partner and professors. I
lost count of how many confused looks I received from Agnes or Mara when I tried
to say something outside of my language level and it may be funny at this point
to mention that I'm actually a Biochemistry major and trying to explain
what I was learning in organic chemistry or cell biology was pretty difficult to
do with an elementary level of KiSwahili but it became quite entertaining.
However I also really welcomed those hours of laughter that I had in my
Swahili classes in contrast to my 8 a.m. cell bio lectures and my 3-hour labs
It was amazing to me how the conversation sessions eventually grew to
teach me about an amazing array of topics ranging from politics to medicine
to culture. As a student with a demanding schedule of sciences I was able to
engage in such an array of fields through my Swahili classes and there was
really no restriction to the topics that I can discuss in these classes. We talk
about my chemistry classes the book that my
professor was writing and sometimes the outdated Swahili culture that was
conveyed in my textbooks and even my involvement in Smith's student
organizations working for undocumented students rights. With the conversation
class structure I was able to discuss
nuanced connections between these different fields whether it was
biochemistry global health policies and immigration policies. So though I want to
emphasize I was not receiving a formal education in all of these specific
topics it was amazing to have a place where all
of these topics came together. After two years in this environment I was
encouraged by both Agnes and my adviser Kim to study Swahili at its birthplace
in Zanzibar at the State University of Zanzibar. While there I had an
individualized education again but did have at least one other student in my
class which was nice and again the conversations in our class
were able to cover topics that strayed from Swahili news in Zanzibar to
Zanzibar culture and local transportation. I remember one time for
example having this candid conversation with a professor in our class about
dress in Zanzibar which is a fairly conservative Muslim area so it was
surprising to learn that actually a lot of the Christian people living there and
still wore head scarfs and bui buis and it's something you might not pick up as
a tourist but was kind of candidly shared with us in this language class.
Our professor Marlene Omar was actually particularly interested in our English
grammar for example and how we would mix that with our Swahili grammar in the
learning process.Like in the five colleges it was this structure of my
Swahili classes that fostered this unique discussion forum. Both the
professors and the students were kind of free to show their opinions on all
these array of topics. When I thought about presenting here today I wanted to
emphasize this feature of language learning that kind of gets lost in
preference for discussions of cultural exchange and the fact that language
classrooms in my experience at least have been unique
spaces where in order to learn all these different aspects of a language all the
different topics that you can discuss, it can be from personal to political to
cultural these forums offer such a freedom of discussion and you kind of
have to cover all of them in order to really master the language and I would
have never really imagined that space anywhere else so I definitely want to
thank the Five College Center for the Study of World Languages for the amazing
dedication that they have to making this possible and also a special thank you to
Dr. Kimokoti who travels across the Five Colleges from early morning to late
evening giving individualized conversation sessions and tutorial
sessions catering to this environment. So moving on seeing all these
connections in language Agnes wanted me to mention that I'm hoping I'm still
waiting to hear back about a possible Fulbright in which I would be able to go
back to Kenya where I was last year to do some research on neglected tropical
diseases because the intersections between these topics of language and the
sciences I think sometimes don't get talked about and it's really important
and this summer I'll be with a few other Swahili students at the CLS program in
Arusha to continue studying so thank you.