ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, May 6, 1996 TAG: 9605070073
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALMENA HUGHES STAFF WRITER
Saari's "safari" - Swahili for journey - includes travels to Russia and Kenya. On the home front, she won a state award for outstanding foreign language teaching, an outstanding faculty award from former Gov. Douglas Wilder, and last year, Ferrum College's Cheatham Fellowship for Scholarly and Teaching Endeavors.
Her linguistic souvenirs include "smidgens" of Chinese; Greek; Shona, a Zimbabwean language; and Luo, a Kenyan tongue, picked up from friends and associates.
These are the rewards of indulging a passion for travel. Saari likes to "at least know how to greet natives in their own words."
"We, as Americans, make a huge mistake when we don't bother to learn languages of other places, when we expect them to learn our language," Saari, Southwest Virginia's only college-level Swahili instructor, said recently. She teaches the African language and Russian at Ferrum College and Russian at Roanoke College in Salem.
"Even if you end up negotiating in English, the fact that you go with good faith to say 'I care about your culture, I will deal with you on your terms' typical verve.
Saari's love of language was born while she was a student at Jefferson High. She had already signed up for Latin and Spanish when, in the same year that the Sputnik satellite was launched, the school decided to offer Virginia's first ever class in Russian.
"When Natasha Petersen, my first teacher, walked in the room with her big, dangling earrings and those Slavic cheekbones, I'd never seen anything like it. I was enchanted by her stories and the language; I was irrevocably hooked," Saari recalled.
Following graduation from Hollins College, where she double-majored in English and Russian Area Studies, Saari landed one of 20 positions (out of about 500 applications) with a United States Information Agency cultural exchange program that sent her to Russia. At the height of the Cold War, she was earning a living in Moscow, narrating traveling exhibits about American life and culture to more than 18,000 visitors per day.
She briefly worked with the agency's Russian branch of Voice of America, in Washington, then joined the United States Peace Corps. In 1966, she was assigned to teach English in Kenya.
"We trained intensively at Columbia University in New York," Saari said of her first four-month lesson in Swahili, taught by Peace Corps staffers and African instructors. "When they say the Peace Corps is the hardest job you'll ever love, it's the truth."
She spent two years at a girls' Roman Catholic secondary boarding school in Kenya teaching English language and literature and sharpening her Swahili. The language is spoken by almost 50 million people and is rapidly becoming one of the most important languages of the world, according to Berlitz International Publishing, which recently released a Swahili learning tape.
Saari returned to the United States, earned a master's degree in Russian literature from New York University, taught high-school Russian for eight years in New Jersey, then joined Ferrum's faculty as a part-time English teacher in 1978.
Anyone who's ever cleared customs knows that on a journey, you need a passport, patience and persistence. Saari laughed, saying she used the latter two to wear down Jim Davis, Ferrum's former dean, so he'd let her teach a class in Russian. By literally plucking students from registration lines, she initiated a program in 1979 and now heads it as an associate professor of Russian. She also coordinates the college's foreign language exchange program with Pskov, Russia.
In 1984, she wore down another dean in order to teach conversational Swahili after some foreign language and cultural studies students had expressed interest. She has taught Swahili as interest demanded. Enrollments have reached up to 25 students. She plans to teach another class this fall.
"She starts you out like you're in kindergarten, learning ABCs and playing kids' games," said Bettye Buckingham, program coordinator for continuing education at the University of Virginia and a former co-worker and student of Saari's at Ferrum College.
"Sasha is so creative and has so much energy, you merge yourself into the language."
Saari's beginning students also sing, recite poems and do other exercises to develop an ear for the new sounds, to overcome fear of them and to repeat them.
"People naturally learn that way, so I try to encourage it, at least at the first level. That's not to say that it doesn't get hard, because it does," Saari explained.
To keep from losing her skill, she speaks the language as often as possible, sometimes swapping Swahili with co-worker Joshua Rubongoya, an assistant professor of political science at Roanoke College.
Rubongoya is from Uganda; his native tongue is Rutoro. He said Swahili had a stigma attached to it in his home country because it was the language "most commonly spoken by the hated military."
His statement illustrates the kind of cultural tidbits that need to accompany learning a new tongue, Saari said.
Here's another: In many African societies, Saari said, it is improper and even insulting to touch someone with your left hand because that is the hand traditionally used for the toilet. Your average interactive audio tape simply isn't going to tell you things like that.
Saari said she has never used interactive tapes to try to learn a language, but she has used recordings to supplement learning and found them effective.
"But I think that a teacher or another body is hard to replace," she said. "Body language goes along with it - what people do, and it isn't always just words; it's expressions.
"Language is a living thing. It can't be restricted to textbooks. Language and people are so intertwined."
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