Language Week

Greetings Friends,
We have just passed the one month mark since departing St. Louis. Time has flown by. First a little update on my last post. The little baby girl, whose name means “Success,” is doing much better. I have not been back to the village to see her due to my language course, but the couple on our team, Wayne and Joyce, paid her a visit and say she looks much better. Praise Jesus! I look forward to seeing her early next week and will plan to closely follow her status and growth. It is opportunities like this that I look forward to.
This week we have been diving deep into a language course called LAMP. It stands for Language Acquisition Made Practical. It was developed by a couple who traveled all over the world in missions and came up with this way to learn languages. It is not an intense Swahili course, but a course on the Biblical importance of learning the native language as a means for ministering and relating to local people and how to go about learning a language in a practical way. We learn things slowly and by lots of repetition. Each day we take the phrases we learn and go and practice it with at least 20 people with our language helpers as assistants. I like this style of learning as I just need to hear things over and over again and practice them over and over again. The course also teaches lots of games we can use with our language helpers in the village. Swahili will come and it requires of step of faith in trusting the Lord through this all. Often I get tired and just want to be done, but I must keep persevering. Colossians 3:23 says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.” We will each be meeting with our language helper for 5 hours a week for likely our entire time of service.
Next week is the big week as we begin our work, myself as a nurse and Sarah as a teacher. What we keep saying is that to walk on water, you must get out of the boat (Matthew 14). We will be living on our own, starting our work, and no longer have the crutch of a constant interpreter. Please lift us up in prayer. We are excited, but also nervous at this responsibility we have been given.
Hey kids! It’s Sarah now! Emily has done a great job of summing up our time so far and we have both learned a lot this week about the importance of language. Being a teacher I keep evaluating the program, and it’s really applicable and effective. The entire team has gone through this course, and they are fluent speakers, so that’s encouraging! We have slightly different goals since we have committed to being here one year, but I am eager to get the language process going. It is so important to use this as a tool to depend and rely on people in the village to help with this process too! Hiding and studying in our house is not an option. By going out into the village and embracing the humbling moments when we forget the meaning of a word or mispronounce something will actually show our neighbors and friends that we are trying. There is a Swahili proverb that says “Haba na haba hujaza ki baba.” It’s easy to read-just phonetically sound it out! It means you put a little bit in and a little more in and it fills the bucket. This is one of the phrases we’ve learned to share with people. As I like to say, “Slow and steady wins the race!” Hopefully the language-learning process will provide some humorous blog posts! In all seriousness though one thing this course has taught us is that language is ministry. Meeting people where they are at by communicating on their terms in their language will promote trusting relationships that allow us to serve them in real ways. Though it will be difficult, we are excited to apply the tools we’ve learned to grown in our language skills!
Any who-back to school! As Emily mentioned I start teaching on Monday! I even get to wear my snazzy uniform-a bright pink blouse with a grey skirt! I am eager to teach the kiddos and get to know them! I am also excited to get to know the teachers and support them. Thanks to generous donations from some teachers from my school in the US, I was able to bring 3 big bags of school supplies and resources to the school, and I am eager to organize them and plan how to implement new activities with the kiddos! It is important to be consistent with the current instructional methods, but I hope to blend in my style and incorporate some fun interactive games. The students range from 5 to 7 years old, so I get to play up my teaching! They are so precious, and I just want to love on them and get to really know them. We will definitely keep you posted on our first week!
Well, now back to Emily or Emmie as they call me here! Thought you might want to know a bit about what I am doing. My primary focus is caring for the children at the school and children who have disabilities in the community. I plan to do health assessments on all the school kids (they have height and weight measurements from the start of the year for me to track their progress). I will address health needs of children at the school as they come up. And I look forward to starting consistent exercises with a few toddlers who need to learn how to walk and sit up (one has cerebral palsy and another has Downs Syndrome). And I will expand my nursing practice as I can and as I feel led by the Lord. I am considering implementing a nutrition program (will expand on this later).
And I will leave you with a funny language story. I was saying goodbye to an older lady I had met. I thought I was saying, “Tutaonana” which means, “We will see each other,” a type of goodbye, but instead I said, “Tutaoana” which means, “We will marry each other.” So I proposed to a 60 year old woman with just the difference of one "N". Must keep a good sense of humor!
Mungu Akubariki (God Bless You),
Emily and Sarah