I Passed My Language Proficiency Exam!

To graduate with a Master's in Public Health in International Health and Development, all students are required to demonstrate level 2 proficiency in some language other than English. This may not seem like a very difficult task for most of my educated multi-lingual blog-readers out there, but this was the MPH requirement that had me most worried. The language proficiency required is:

"Level S-2: Limited Working Proficiency (Base Level) Able to satisfy routine social demands and limited work requirements. Can handle routine work-related interactions that are limited in scope. In more complex and sophisticated work-related tasks, language usage generally disturbs the native speaker. Can handle with confidence, but not with facility, most normal, high-frequency social conversational situations, including extensive, but casual conversations about current events, as well as work, family, and autobiographical information. The S-2 can get the gist of most everyday conversations but has some difficulty understanding native speakers in situations that require specialized or sophisticated knowledge. The S-2's utterances are minimally cohesive. Linguistic structure is usually not very elaborate and not thoroughly controlled; errors are frequent. Vocabulary use is appropriate for high-frequency utterances, but unusual or imprecise elsewhere."

Since I want to work in East Africa in the future, I decided that Swahili would be a useful language to know. I hoped that the 2 months of Swahili language school in Tanzania would be sufficient for the language exam. However, after the course was over I felt that I didn't have enough practice with the language to take the proficiency exam. In Northern Uganda very few people spoke Swahili as it was an Acholi/Luo area and therefore I forgot a large part of my Swahili. Therefore when I arrived in Kenya my first priority was to review and practice Swahili as much as possible. I would review my books for 2-3 hours a day and then practice speaking with the Kenyan cook or try to go shopping and speak in Swahili by myself. I was making good progress, but still nowhere near proficient. On the first day of the Kenya course I approached the instructor, who speaks excellent Swahili and can give the proficiency exam in Swahili to Tulane students, and asked her if I could make an appointment to take the proficiency exam the day after the course ended. Secretly, I was worried that my Swahili skills were going to deteriorate during the class because I would be surrounded by English speaking students.

The course ended up being really helpful for my Swahili skills because I acted as the informal translator for the other students. They would go to market or try to bargain for something and use me to tell them the general price range they should be shooting for and to translate into Swahili. I also practiced with the cook and other Swahili-speaking support staff during our course.

In Kakichuma village the whole class had a cooking lesson (translated into English) with a group of Bukusu grandmothers where we all learned how to cook one type of green slime. The next day another group of grandmothers unexpectedly came to give us another cooking lesson. Our professor said that the women were invited by accident and they had already brought all the materials needed for the lesson and she asked for a volunteer to learn how to cook other traditional dishes. The afternoon was supposed to be for working on our assignment, but I had already completed mine so I volunteered to learn how to cook from the women. There was no translator and the women only spoke Bukusu and Swahili, so we obviously spent the afternoon speaking Swahili since I don't know any Bukusu. The conversation was mostly, "now put this in", "now stir", "now cover the pot", "we use milk from a cow because oil is too expensive," "wow, there is a lot of smoke" (coming from the wood fire under the ugali pot), but it also we talked about how many children they had, whether or not they were the only wife, if their husbands were still living, how they grew the veggies, what they thought about the second president who was corrupt, etc. Our Tulane professor dropped by a couple of times to see how things were going and seemed to be pleased.

After the cooking lesson, I was sitting with the grandmothers eating the result of our cooking lesson: 3 different types of green slime with white ugali. I was covered in sweat, ash, smelled like smoke, and was still trying to maintain the animated Swahili conversation with the energetic grandmothers. My professor came by and asked me how it went. I told her that it went really well and jokingly told her this interesting cultural experience should count for my language proficiency exam. To my surprise she said, "I agree, I have been watching you and your level of language ability is more than we demand for the language proficiency certification. Congratulations! You pass!" I was, of course, very pleased and went off to sing and dance with my new Bukusu grandmother friends. This means I can graduate with my MPH in August!



Me with one of my Swahili proficiency examiners and cooking instructors.

List of things needed for my MPH Degree:

1) 45 graduate level public health semester credits. check (the Kenya course brought me up to 46).


2) A 'capstone' experience. check (The HIV/AIDS prevention working the IDP camps counts as my capstone. The resulting paper is being currently being finalized).


3) Proficiency in a language other than English. check (Thanks to language school in Tanzania and practice in Kenya, I was able to attain language proficiency in Swahili).





Other benefits/highlights of the trip:


1) I got to spend more time in Africa! Now I have spent 2 months in Malawi, 2 months in Tanzania, 2 months in Uganda and 2 months in Kenya.

2) I got to do something very different and exciting before the rigors of medical school. Med students kept telling me that I should do something really fun before starting med school medical. I got to spend 6 months in Africa!

3) I gained hands-on work experience in public health and medicine in Africa. Specifically learning how to educate people about HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment.

4) I made connections for work/volunteer in East Africa in the future. It turns out that a medical doctor who has a MPH in International Health and Development, who knows some Swahili and has 8 months of experience in Africa is quite employable in East Africa. Almost every place I stayed at was like, "After you become a doctor come back and work/volunteer with us!"

5) I got darn good at using a pit latrine. A skill set that most Americans are sorely lacking in.

6) Don't forget, I learned how to cook green slime!