Graduation

Wahoo, we graduated!  I now have a year of linguistics skills under my belt for ministry in Vanuatu.  I pray it is to the Lord's glory and the good of a people group in Vanuatu!  Please pray for the students from this year that God would enable us to use what we have learned to honor Him and that people would come to know Him as a result.

Newsletter Dec. 09 side b

New Address and newsletter side A

Please note to the right my new address for the remainder of the time I'll be in Australia.  Here's side 1 of my last newsletter.

Last class of the year

Thank you to all of you who prayed for stamina for us to finish out the year well.  We finished all of our Semester 2 classes up the 2nd week of November and then had just one class for the last week of school before graduation.  It was a great change of pace in that we were in a different area than the regular classroom, were able to spend most of our class time working on the assignment, and we had group presentations outside at a beautiful venue a bit of a drive away from the school.  The class was program planning/program design management so it was useful for our team to work together to plan out how we see things fitting into where we see God leading us in the next few years.

Great Ocean Road

The "Dodgy D Dorm" dames (single girls at the school) had a last hang-out, going for a drive to see the "12 Apostles" on the Great Ocean Road south-west of here.  It is a gorgeous drive and we had good quality time together.  Had it been warmer I would have jumped in the ocean but it was just a bit too nippy for me.  I'll get my fill of bathwater temperature ocean water in Vanuatu so I'm happy to save myself for that.  :)  Here are some pics from the trip.

Make a Smilebox photobook

Blue Tongue Lizard Visitor

Blue tongue lizards have been found by the kids around campus but I still didn't expect this one to come waddling into my room from where it had been wandering the HALLWAY of our dorm.  I'm really not sure how on earth this big guy (he was at least 12 inches) got into our dorm in the first place.  It made me pretty nervous about snakes after that.  I don't mind non-poisonous snakes, but they have some nasties here and our dorm has more than its fair share of tasty mice running around for them to come eat.  Anyway, I chased him out of my room but rather than heading him off toward the outside door, he managed to get in another girl's room.  I figured my dorm-mate wouldn't appreciate me telling her a big lizard was hanging out somewhere in her room.  So, I rushed to an Aussie student's room to ask if these guys bite and she helped me herd him out of the room and back into the great outdoors.  Apparently they bite but aren't poisonous.  I considered picking him up but decided to use cricket wickets to move him instead and save my hands.  Here's how he looked where he was supposed to be... in our front yard.  Sorry, he didn't give me any tongue to show off to you.  :)

Semester 2 language work

Rather than learn another language our last semester of school (like we did with the Tanna, Vanuatu language in Summer school), we learned how to document a language.  This is useful for especially endangered languages or just for getting a lot of language data that can be used by people from all disciplines.  I did language documentation with Farsi and my partner Elyse and I had a lovely Iranian language helper.  We went to her house one day to enjoy some Iranian food and had some very interesting food and got to meet her son and a friend.  The main dish was delicious and the sides yummy.  In desserts they use a lot of rosewater so I think that may be an acquired taste.  Here's some pics of our tasty treats!  Our langauge helper is off to Iran now for a visit but hopefully she'll keep working with Equip students in future years if we didn't scare her off too badly.  :)