Jamba Blowing in the Wind

THIS AFTERNOON I WAS poking around on the Yale University Kamusi Project website, looking for Swahili terms that I could integrate into a children's story that I was preparing to tell at Vacation Bible School.

Jambo, as perhaps you know, means hello. Well, jambo is so close to jamba, and since I have a thing about Jamba Juice, and since I was already on the site, I decided to look up jamba in the Swahili dictionary.

Ah... I was surprised and more than mildly amused to learn that in Swahili jamba means "intestinal wind, to break wind loudly, fart."

Our number one son has worked at a couple of Jamba Juice stores and he says that during his orientation they told him that the word jamba is from West Africa -- derived from the word jama -- which reportedly means "celebration."

Maybe.

I think, though, that it is more likely that the word jamba means that there are some awfully rich people having a good laugh on us. And now I'm laughing with them, and every time I cruise in there to order a Mango-A-Go-Go ("Change out the pineapple sherbet with raspberry sherbet, please") I will have something to chuckle at while I sip my over-priced gourmet Slurpee.