UVA Today

When UVA Today visited Rotich's classroom, Diomede was involved in a conversation with Daniella Nkere, a heritage speaker who works in UVA Health’s Digestive Health Center.

“We just learned that his parents and I come from Burundi,” Nkere said, referring to Diomede’s family. “We’ve been bonding over that.”

Nkere was helping Diomede speak Swahili more easily, too – filling in when he didn’t know the Swahili word he was looking for or correcting pronunciation.

The students give back, too. Volunteering to help Charlottesville’s Swahili community is a required part of the class, whether students are translating documents to help Swahili speakers get their driver’s licenses or working with the International Rescue Committee in Albemarle County. It’s one of the ways UVA is working toward President Jim Ryan’s goal of being a good neighbor to the Charlottesville area.

“Sometimes a school needs to send an announcement to parents, and the students will translate that, or they volunteer with the [Volunteers With International Students, Staff & Scholars] program,” which aims to foster cross-cultural connections between domestic and international members of the UVA community, Rotich said. 

After having some instructors teach Swahili part-time, UVA hired Rotich in a full-time position in 2015. Rotich has taught introductory and intermediate Swahili every semester since then, , and enrollment has grown every year.

“I did not imagine the program would become this big,” Rotich said.

Nkere has been visiting the Swahili classes for three years now, a relatively new tradition for her.

“Every time we have these sessions, they’re all different, but also beautiful in their own ways,” Nkere said. “It’s helped me feel closer to UVA.”

For Sierra Martin, the class was life-changing.

The fourth-year student started at UVA during the pandemic. She was alone in her bedroom when she learned her first words in Swahili – “hodi hodi,” which means “knock knock”; “karibu,” meaning “welcome”; and “hamjambo” and “hatujambo,” a call-and-response greeting.

Martin knew she wanted to take a less commonly taught language when she looked through the course catalog of languages offered at UVA. In high school, she remembered learning little about East Africa and thought it would be an exciting opportunity.

“I felt lost coming into UVA, and taking Swahili has opened my eyes and influenced my outlook,” Martin said.

She finished out the course sequence and became a teaching assistant for the Swahili classes. Now a global public health major, Martin hopes to use what she learned from Rotich and the local Swahili-speaking community when she starts her career.

Students in the course typically wind up volunteering because of the course, but Mackenzie Durham came to the course because she volunteered.

The third-year student worked at the IRC and started taking Swahili in her second year.

“A lot of the refugees that I work with speak some version of Swahili because they’re Congolese or Sudanese. They speak many languages, but Swahili seems to be the common thread,” Durham said.

With her new language skills, Durham can communicate more easily and connect more deeply with the community she serves.

For Rotich, the class is evidence of what is possible when people come together for a mutually beneficial engagement. 

“It’s hard work, but we’ve done a lot together,” she said.