1st day of class

Today was the 1st day of class and chapel. Chapel is student lead, so i played guitar for worship today and our program director Reg spoke. He is outrageously smart and a biblical scholar in his own right and he had some really great things to say about the kingdom of God and our role in it, which was a really great message for the start of this trip since that's what so many of us are doing. All the people on this trip seem to be searching for their calcutta/their role in the kingdom work so it was a great direction to start the semester in, thinking about that role and understanding our responsibility as citizens of heaven to respond to it by responding to the needs of those around us. After chapel i hung out with the other kids taking the 8 units of Zulu on the lawn because we have night classes so we pretty much have mornings and afternoons off to do whatever we want. We are planning hikes and other activities to keep busy so we don't end up napping or on facebook all day. While i was packing up my stuff to go to class before lunch someone left the door open to our chalet and we had our 1st monkey visitor! He ran in and saw me looking at him and promptly ran back out the door so any possible crisis was averted. After lunch we had our 1st Intercultural Communication lecture and then went to Intro to Zulu. Inter Com should be really interesting- it's kind of a combination of sociology and com and anthro and it counts toward my major, so it is a win all around. Intro to Zulu is not the 8 unit course, it is the one that everyone takes- the "Zulu-light" if you will, but we jumped in with both feet today in our hour and a half. Our teacher is white but grew up with the Zulu people on a game reserve (her parents ran the reserve) so she is pretty much a native speaker and has been teaching it her whole life so she knows what's going on. We learned all the vowel sounds which are pretty similar to english and then we learned all three clicks which are not at all similar to english. They all sound different because they are made in different parts of the mouth and are notated by the consonants "c", "q", or "x". Some combinations of vowel and click or consonant and click and vowel are pretty difficult, but once you work through it slowly and hear it a few times it isn't that hard to catch on. After we learned the sounds we worked through a basic greeting/short conversation so now i can respond to the cleaning guys whenever they ask me how i am doing which will be great. They will love laughing at me. Tomorrow we will visit our service sites that we will work on once our school segment of the semester is done and i will have my 1st real Zulu class which will be an adventure.