Kenyan English, and other random observations

Kenyan English is very interesting, I’ve found. English is one of the two official languages here, along with Kiswahili. Perhaps some of the idiosyncrasies come from translating Kiswahili, I don’t know. But here are some of them that I’ve found interesting.

“Isn’t it”. This phrase is used in Kenya for just about any sentence that needs confirmation. Uses include some that are like ours (e.g. This ball is red, isn’t it?), and most that are not. They’ll say things like: “We have just talked about malnutrition, isn’t it?” Weird.
Odd word usage. Some things are expected, but sometimes it isn’t clear why they use a complicated word when it doesn’t even mean (in my English) what they want. For example, “precise”. They use this word to mean “brief”. This is decidedly odd to me. Something like “Thank you for making your speech precise”. Strange.
Any time the temperature here falls under 25 Celsius, they complain that it’s cold, and start bundling up. They come to work in sweaters when it’s 25 degrees. Clearly they have very different heat capacities than me. Or something.
Rain. The rain here is something. Actually, so is the mud. But first the rain. It’s the wet season, so it rains here in Nyanzaa province daily, mostly in the afternoon and evening. There is no gentle rain here. The clouds build up over the afternoon, and then open up, with amazing lightning and thunderstorms and driving rain. The lightning here is amazing – it can light up the sky for ten, fifteen seconds at a time. Too bad my camera can’t capture that.
Then, the rain generates mud. There is one road through Mbita and Sindo, and it’s a dirt road. Where it crests a hill, it’s mostly OK. But as soon as it gets a bit lower, the water and mud start to build up. There end up being two tire tracks through the mud, with walls of mud on either side maybe 50 cm high. Sometimes a car is stuck in the tracks, and our Land Cruiser goes around it. So that entails climbing that wall of mud, sliding around in the trackless road for a while, and then climbing back into the tracks. Really, you shouldn’t have anything but a Land Cruiser here. Or bare feet. I think those are the only two choices that make any sense.
Kenyan women have large hands. Like, enough for me to remark on it. And Kenyans all have quite small ears.
Buses here are crazy. They stack stuff on top, and tie it down with rope, and then as the bus goes toward its destination (in this case, Kisumu), it stops all the time to load and unload passengers, and Kenyans working on the bus go up and down a ladder on the outside of the bus, taking things up and bringing them down. This makes for a long and entertaining ride. Also, Kenyan buses are generally run privately (some guy owns a bus), and then they name it some crazy name like “The Rasta Rocket” and blast some music or Kenyan TV show at you all the way.