Back to Language School

While our Portuguese has been improving all the time and we can function in the culture, our speaking is still crude and basic. Our comprehension is decent both reading and listening, but we really speak poorly with regard to accent and sentence structure. As an example, I sat next to an English-speaker in church this morning and was able to translate the sermon into English for her, but in the midst of all that, the preacher decided to ask me point blank a question and in the midst of the translating, I realized he was asking me a question directly. Now somewhere in all of it, I missed a vital piece of information and pretty much missed the question and then he used a little different bit of language. The question was basically, can you work for two masters? But what I heard was can you do two different jobs at the same time. So I missed the intent of the question and didn't help him too much in his technique of seeking audience participation! It all worked out, but it is an example; I knew enough to translate the gist of the sermon, but got pinned on the matt with a question that was worded just a bit differently than I expected, and I missed the meaning.

In addition, there are a couple of tenses that Portuguese uses that we don't even have in English, so that kind of stretches the mind a little also. In the end, there is also just alot of plan memorization - no way around it.

We have been able to move things around sufficiently with our work here, that we think we can make time to once again enter into language school. Because of the unusual situations we found ourselves since arriving here, we have not been able to give language the time it truly deserves. So, last week, Ann set up an appointment with the Language Institute in Maputo. We went on Friday and were evaluated as to our proficiency (tested!). We talked the entire time in Portuguese but they were asking tricky questions and we didn't do as well as we would have liked - a lesson in humility! We signed a contract with the Institute and start classes on Tuesday. We will have to juggle some things around and it will limit our availability for other things, but it is really important to do this. We will go four days a week for the next three months - kind of intense, but so very important.

We also think this will be better than meeting in our home as those lessons in the past have drifted off point and became more of a time of fellowship as opposed to structure language learning - both approaches have their place and value, but we're ready for some disciplined study outside our home.

The sermon in church this morning was from Acts Chapter 2 - about Pentecost and where people were gathered from all over and as the disciples preached, everyone heard the message in their own language. In addition, it says the disciples were filled with the Spirit and speaking in other languages as the Spirit enabled them. It would have been great to have been just blessed with the inate ability to speak another language, like magic!, but in our case, it is going to take disciplined study, practice, and more study. That's perfectly ok but wouldn't that be nice!

We're looking forward to the class with a new instructor (his name is Junior) and pray that we can move quickly through the material we know and that our tired old brains will assimulate the new information quickly! I think I've forgotten enough other stuff I knew that their should be room in my brain now for new langauge words!! ;-) We're especially hoping that we'll get lots of help with our pronounciation; we speak with a horrible accent!

So I can add a picture today!, we did ship seven boxes of Bibles in various tribal dialects north today to our church planter / teachers in the north. Included in one of the boxes is the wedding dress that we loan out from time to time. The first place we stopped and have used in the past didn't have a bus going where we needed the boxes taken until Friday. That won't work because the wedding is Saturday. So, we went down the the crazy "Junta" where there is the chaos of busses parked in a dirt parking lot where you wander around trying to find your bus. It went well and they weighed and stuck our boxes on top of the bus; they should arrive on Tuesday. The system is that they load the bus and sell the tickets the day before it leaves - so this bus, headed to Nampula, will leave about four in the morning tomorrow, stopping to unload (we hope!) in Mocuba. It's almost become 'old hand' going into that place that scared us to death the first couple of times we would go there. So that is progress! The crazy Junta seems quite orderly to me now, now that I understand the way it works and that I can communicate now! After we visited with Mike Thiessen at the airport (he left today), we drove back by the Junta and saw our boxes still on top of the big bus - and the stack of cargo on top of the bus was easily about 12 feet high so far; I really should have taken a picture of that!

Blessings to you!

Dave & Ann

"Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language." Acts 2:5-6