Language learning

Oh my… language what more can be said. Learning a new language is always hard and a little bit frustrating. Our primary way of learning will be barefoot. This basically means that we (my teammate and I) will be going out to the village and learning the language from the people and not a classroom. However, our supervisor set up an opportunity for us to meet twice with someone to learn our basic greetings for village life. You see if you do not greet people then you are considered evil, so greeting is very very important!

Our language teacher was very patient the other day. He taught us the basic greetings such as good morning, good afternoon, good day, and good night. We met with him for 2 hours to go over the basic greetings, it was a long time. Once we got home I started going through my notes and realized I am really dumb. We like barely went over any language… really, but I guess we are going to learn things in little pieces.

Today I woke up and listened to my recording. My teammate and I were also taught by other teammates how to go out and do language lessons in the village. As part of completing the teaching we were assigned to go out and to learn the body parts… well not really learn them, but find an African to record them on our recorders. We went to our oh so wonderful tailor. Our tailor is so sweet and loves to help us learn language. Along the way we were able to greet many people. I loved it because we could actually understand some of the things that the people were saying. We would always say hello and ask how people were. In return they would do the same. Many of the people asked us what our names were. We were both really excited because we could tell them our African names. The people always love that we have African names.

We finally made it to our tailor’s and completed our assignment. He was very helpful, but I could tell he wanted us out of there because he had much work to be done. He was very sweet and told us that he liked the water packet we gave him a few days before. He had asked me what Lipton (it is a tea) I was drinking. I told him it was not lipton, and asked if he wanted me to pour some in a cup. He said he was fasting though (yes he is muslim). I then pulled one of the packets out of my purse and his face lit up. He said that He would accept it because it was a gift from us. So the day we went back for language he made sure and commented how much he liked it. At the end of our conversation he blessed us. I was so excited because our language teacher had taught us blessings. I blessed him in saying, “May God increase your peace at night.” He thought it was so great. I am not quite sure if it translated into that though because our language teacher is teaching us one language, but it is very similar to the language in the capital. I don’t really care though, I am just happy that I was able to say a blessing. It really is the same things that count here.

As you come to the end of this blog I ask all of you to be lifting up our tailor’s name. He is a muslim, but many have come and shared the gospel with him. May you pry that God give him a new heart and pour out his righteousness on this man. Also lift my teammate and I up as we continue to learn this language. Pry that Gd would give us ears the understand the language and tongues that speak the language. Also we will be looking for a language teacher in the village, may Gd have pity on us and provide us with a woman in the village who wants to spend time with us and teach us the language.