Yuko Otake is a JICA nurse who works in the closet town, Masasi; I had trouble remembering what her name was at first until she told me it meant “tall bamboo pole.” But after Erina left I got in touch with as many of her friends as I could, and ended up with her number; we ate lunch together today.
And what a lunch it was. As a program, JICA’s biggest weakness is lack of language, and Yuko knows neither English or Kiswahili. If I didn’t know this beforehand I figured out over our phone messages, when we couldn’t figure out what time to meet – I tried some Japanese but that only made her more confused. When I arrived we walked around buying flour and juice, when I found out we were going to eat lunch with a bunch of her friends at a (Japanese) civil engineer’s house. None of them know English or Swahili that well either but Yuko’s was worse, she couldn’t translate conversations for me. At one point, after not understanding their conversation for some two hours, the host asked my age. I’m at least three years younger than everyone else in the room. The meal ended when I had to run off to catch the last bus and had to ride standing and crammed between some thirty other passengers.
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