Kenya - Mutara

During visit to Nairobi, Kenya, my best friend and architect Natalie Waters and I had the opportunity to visit the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust Centre located in Nairobi National Park.  This is the “Nursery” where both orphaned baby elephants and Rhinos are taken after they are rescued.  At the Centre they are looked after 24 hours a day and raised by a group of keepers which go to the extent of taking turns sleeping with the orphans in their pens. The emotionally and physically rehabilitated elephants and Rhinos are ultimately re-introduced into the wild in Tsavo East National Park. 

The visit inspired me to learn more about elephants and as it turns out, they have an interesting way of communicating.    Elephants have an instinctive body language and telepathic abilities.  They also communicate with a spoken language that they learn from other elephants, some sounds of which are audible to human hearing, but also communicating over distance with low frequency infrasound hidden to human ears.  Additionally, they can detect and interpret seismic sound through their sensitive trunks & feet, a phenomenon which was confirmed when in Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami disaster in Asia, trained elephants in Thailand became agitated and fled to higher ground before the devastating wave struck, thus saving their own lives and those of the tourists riding on their backs.

JAM Language Ltd. is the proud sponsor of MUTARA, an orphaned elephant who arrived at The David Sheldrick Wildlife Centre, July 20th, 2009 as a week old baby and a victim of poaching.

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Kenya - Mombasa & Swahili

Mombasa is Kenya’s vibrant coastal city on the Indian Ocean. Home to the Swahili tribe in Kenya, one can visually see the influences left behind by more than twelve centuries of contact with Arab traders;  the mosques, the calling sound to player and the parade of Kaftans and Hijabs.

Swahili comes from the plural sawāḥil (سواحل) of the Arabic word sāḥil (ساحل), meaning "boundary" or "coast".  Swahili is a language adapted from Bantu and enriched with vocabulary from the Arabic (35%), Portuguese and Hindi Languages.  Swahili is the national language of both Kenya and Tanzania and is also spoken widely across other Eastern and Central African countries. From the Comoros islands, Zanzibar, Burundi, Rwanda, northern Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, and southern coastal Somalia.

The Swahili tribe are coastal people with very rich historical and cultural heritage.  Some of the earliest inhabitants of the East African coast were their ancestors, Cushitic herdsmen. The Cushitic people were joined by Bantu speaking tribes.  Other groups later migrated to this coastline, including Arab, Hindi, Portuguese, and Indonesian traders. They, too, intermarried with the indigenous people, giving rise to a new culture, people and language.

The Arabic culture though has had the greatest influence in shaping Swahili traditions. One major legacy of the Arab culture is the prevalence of the Islamic religion among the Swahili people. Swahili children, for example, must attend Madrassa - religious classes in which they study the Koran and learn the Arabic language -from an early age.

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JAM English Flashcards: Fruit & Vegetables