Florida training 10-11

In Florida in October, we did orientation with Wycliffe. We thoroughly enjoyed getting to know others who attended with us and hearing their stories of how God led them to be involved in missions! Two families are headed to Vanuatu, praise God! And we learned that Vanuatu is in the top 20 countries most needing Bible translation, so we can use you too; come on over!!

All the attendees.  Their largest group yet!

Presenting the ministry.

All those going to Vanuatu, Lord-willing!  

The Team

 Displays about Bible translation issues in what they call the Discovery Center.  

 Various words for "to carry" in a language.  They're all different based on what you're carrying and how - just imagine learning all of those!

 

 Displays of John 3:16 in various languages with translated New Testaments around the world.  You can see the verse in each language, hear it read by a native speaker, and see a model of a real person from the language group.

 All the languages of the world - the language tree.

 

The founder of Wycliffe.

Houghton's solar training

Gretchen made this smilebox with pics from Houghton's time in Colorado in Sept (while she and I were in N Carolina learning terrifying medical skills).  This stuff is so useful for us for sustaining ourselves in the 'bush' in Vanuatu.  So go Houghton for learning all this!  :)  Here's their pics that I stole, I mean borrowed, off their blog...

Canning

Today my mom taught us canning and we also tried out a nifty juice extractor to can some apple juice!  We did pretty much everything wrong with the pressure cooker canner (a new thing for all of us) but mistakes make the best teacher, right?  We'll try again next month maybe making soup or canning meat, but for now we have a few pints of green beans and apple juice, and a couple quarts of apple butter to eat.  Yum.

Missionary Medical Intensive

Gretchen and I just got back from a medical intensive designed for missionaries ministering in rural areas who may not have medical help accessible in an emergency.  We trained with a group in North Carolina in their program called Missionary Medical Intensive.  Click here to check out the organization  Originally it was meant for EMTs and nurses, but they've dumbed it down some for us laypeople.  :)  It was hands down the best training I've been to in a decade.  They were very God-focused, hands-on, practical, and had excellent, humble, relational teachers (doctors and nurses).  The other students were great to get to know as well.  I had a fantastic roommate, Erika, and our friend Christina who we met in Vanuatu came the same time so we were able to have some time with her as well!  Here are pics.

This free digital slideshow personalized with Smilebox

I also thank God for good health during the time!

Also, the 2nd week we were gone, Houghton was able to go to a solar/water/septic training as well to help fill in the gaps of understanding in those areas. We are so thankful for these opportunities to be better prepared for our long-term ministry in Vanuatu!

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.

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.

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.  :)

One Story

An opportunity presented itself on campus to attend a workshop called One Story (http://www.onestory.org/). The workshop was for a full weekend and was hands-on, super practical, and interesting. We learned how to tell a Bible story in an engaging, interesting way that can be remembered for the listeners to then be able to retell the story to their friends and family. We also learned how to lead a Bible study with Bible storytelling techniques. During the weekend we worked with partners to learn two stories. At the end of the weekend, we told our stories to an audience on campus. It was so fun to see how everyone in the course (including my teammate Tania and her daughter, Grace), grew over the course of just a weekend in confidence, in ability to learn in an oral way, and in storytelling skill. I hope to continue to practice what we learned and especially make use of it in the oral culture in Vanuatu.

Class, mice, and other random things

Five weeks of 1st semester flew by and we are now on our Easter/Fall break for two weeks. I was ready for a break but timing won't feel so nice when we start back and have 10 straight weeks until the end of the semester. Ah well. So far I've only gotten pictures in Grammar class but here are some fun examples of the kinds of crazy things we do in grammar: treeing out the order and structure and grammatical relations of various languages. Somehow I made it through elementary, junior high, high school, and college and never once learned any sort of grammar so this is all new to me. Those of you who diagrammed sentences growing up will recognize this but note that we are learning how to do this for languages whose word order is completely different from English. It's kinda fun really. :)

Just before break we celebrated Jesiah and Addy's birthdays. Jesiah was 4 just before Christmas, but we were so busy packing to come to Australia that we didn't really celebrate. One day a few weeks ago Gretchen said she was tired of something. Jesiah sighed and said "well I'm tired of not having a birthday." Whoops, that was a good reminder to have it! You don't always expect a 4 year old to remember those sorts of things! Addy had her 1st birthday the end of March so the baby is turning into a toddler, wow!

For the final bit of randomness here, I have to tell about our mouse friends. We've caught two and seen evidence of others. They are super cute little buggers but definitely make it hard to keep pasta, cereal, and crackers on hand... I'm realizing new things about how I'll have to keep my dry goods in Vanuatu. Multiple ziplock bags just don't do the trick.

The most significant thing about our break is that my parents are here to visit though, yay! Check out my other post for pictures from them being here. They've helped out a ton in babysitting and we've loved being able to hang out. If anyone else wants to come check out Australia, we'd love to have you come!! :)

March-April newsletter

Click on the image to enlarge.

So, what about life in Australia?

Yeah, I'm slowly unburying myself after 6 weeks of insanity. Some super fun things have happened during the craziness that I made a video of. Don't get the wrong idea that I've been just playing though! :) Many of my pictures are sadly altered here because quite a few of my new missionary friends work in sensitive countries. They can't have their pictures floating online in connection with Christianity or missions so I had to block their faces out. Just know they are lovely, lovely people and I wish I could share them with you but when you notice their missing faces, pray for them and the ministry the Lord has called them to! The music you'll hear is songs from Australia Bush dances, which I thought fitting considering our location and also the fact that I have ton of pics from a Bush dance we had! Enjoy!

Videos of class

For summer school we had 4 classes,which were Language Learning, Phonetics, Language Awareness/Intro to Linguistics (Grammar), and Anthropology. Phonetics class had lots of crazy fun things that went with it to make it interesting, aside from the fact that we were learning weird things like how to make funny sounds with our mouths. Here are some videos from class and practice sessions.

Intonation and reading this story out loud makes it fairly understandable. Isn't English a beautiful thing! :) See if you can figure out the story. Cathy read it in class our last day:

This was the story of "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut." If you thought that was horrible, better not visit this site for more: http://members.tripod.com/~RBHcognitions/anguish/anguish.htm

And a silly video about "Everyday IPA" or the International Phonetic Alphabet that we learned for transcribing sounds in languages we learn is last:

January Newsletter

January newsletter - click to enlarge.

So...when am I leaving and what about Australia??

I've talked to many of you and hinted around since Gretch and I went to a conference with Wycliffe in Portland in January about Bible translation training in Australia. Here is the down-low on all of that now that our team has gotten an answer back about our applications. As of February, our entire Vanuatu Bush Team has been accepted to be trained by Wycliffe/SIL at their school in Australia, called Equip (http://www.equip.edu.au/). We have been awaiting this acceptance to determine our timeline more adequately for heading out for Vanuatu. Our tentative timeline at this point now is the following:

Aug. - Dec. 08 Port Vila, Vanuatu

What we'll be doing: learning language and culture, building relationships and contacts with Ni-Vanuatu people and others living in the capital city. The Richards and I will fly out from LA on August 3, Lord-willing and have tentative housing with SIL for a few weeks. The rest of our team will join us a week or 2 into September. They don't have living visas like us so can only be in-country up to 4 months.

Jan. - Nov. 09 Kangaroo Ground, Australia - near Melbourne on the southeast coast, 4 hour flight from Port Vila

What we'll be doing: being trained as Bible translators, linguists, and literacy specialists

From this point, we may return to Vila for a few months then return to the US or come straight back to the States for a short time. When we return to the States, we'll pack up our containers with all our long-term supplies (transportation, solar panels, generator, office and ministry supplies, as well as all remaining living needs such a furnishings, clothes, etc.). We will also reconnect with supporting churches briefly to update supporters. Then we will ship our container out and move to Vanuatu long-term. We will most likely still go back to the capital city, Port Vila, for another year or so to continue language and culture acquisition and acclimatize ourselves, as well as t0 finish survey work to determine which people group in the bush we will be working with. When we have an invitation in to a bush village, we will seek the Lord's guidance and ask for prayer and input from Homefront Team Vanuatu to make the final decision about which tribal group to begin the ministry of church planting and Bible translation with. Following that decision, we will make the slow and gradual move into the tribe.

Why is the translation training so long? Well, Bible translation isn't something one can just "wing." It is a huge work to translate in a culturally accurate way that is true to the original Greek and Hebrew meanings. Following is the listing of our classes at Equip. We will split off and focus in different areas (as a team, taking different tracks) so I'm not sure if I'll focus on translation or literacy, but I will be taking the graduate diploma program. This list includes electives:

Phonetics (Summer School) ,Language Learning (Summer Sch.), Language Awareness (Summer Sch.), Anthropology (Summer School)
Ethnography, Introduction to Phonology, Introduction to Grammar, Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Field Methods for Linguistic Data Collection, Field Methods for Literacy, Phonological Analysis, Grammatical Analysis, Training Across Cultures, Language Programme Design & Management, Word Processing for Linguistic Papers, Introduction to Literacy, Semantics, Translation of Sacred Texts, Literacy Education, Literacy Materials, Community Based Orthography Design, Field Methods for Research, Research Project, Seminar Topics, Special Topic 1, Special Topic 2

Please pray for the Lord's continued provision, not only for my monthly support, but also for monthly prayer partners. This program costs about $6,400 in tuition, books and fees so as people give one-time gifts, I am asking that anyone led to do so give toward my "lifelong learning" project, which is a tax-free and administrative fee-free account I can use directly to pay my tuition toward this training. Please also pray for wisdom for the moms on the team about how much of this training to take as we are told it is very intensive and will leave us very little free time. If you have any questions, please contact me! I'm very excited about this opportunity and have great interest in literacy and translation work so it will be awesome to be able to not only see a reproducible, sustainable tribal church planted to the praise of His glory, but to also be able to give the tribal people (who don't currently have written language) a Bible in their own heart language along with the new ability to read it. Praise God for the opportunity!

Portland, Wycliffe, and Australia

Gretchen (my sister) and I spent New Year's week in Portland at a Wycliffe conference called TOTAL it Up, TOTAL standing for "Taste Of Translation And Linguistics." We ended up driving because flights were ridiculously priced, but it was a wicked long drive! Despite some crazy times (5 hours to go 200 miles on Hwy 12 and spinning some interesting cookies in the snow, we came back a different way to avoid this insane highway), it was a fun trip and we were able to have some great talks and read quite a bit of a book called "Cavorting with Cannibals" about Vanuatu. If you'd like some serious culture shock into Vanuatu, I'd highly recommend the book, by the way. We attended the conference because back in November through a number of things, the Lord graciously made it evident to us that not only is it a 90-some% chance that we'll need to do Bible translation as part of our church planting ministry, no one on our team has any kind of training, knowledge, or experience in that kind of work. Thankful that He made us aware of this now rather than later floundering in Vanuatu wishing we knew what we were doing, we started researching our options. Wycliffe Bible Translators/SIL definitely has the corner on the market for translation training, and they aren't exclusive about who can take their training so we are seriously pursuing getting 11 months of training in Australia as a team Jan. 09-Nov. 09, Lord-willing. To get a jump start on what that training might look like, Gretch and I went off to get a little "taste" while Houghton bravely volunteered to stay with the kids for a week. :)

There were lots of wonderful things that resulted from our time spent with Wycliffe. Many of our teachers are translators in Papua New Guinea, which is a Melanesian people group like in Vanuatu. We learned a ton from them and have some great lifelong consultants now! One huge impact to us during the time is the certainty we saw that this kind of work is not something to be done on the fly or learned from a book, but necessitates intensive training. It was nice to solidify that our time really will be best spent getting this training on the front-end of our ministry so the overall ministry isn't impeded or slowed down or ineffective. Instead, being well equipped should make language learning easier and the church plant more effective. Another benefit was the building of new friendships with other attendees. We met some great new friends and hope to have continued fellowship with them as God leads in their lives. Finally, we really did get a taste of what we need to become proficient in in order to effectively translate. We had daily classes in grammar (I'm going to need to do some serious study to be ready for Australia classes in this area - whew!), language acquisition, phonetics (the anatomy of making human speech sounds and the international symbols associated with the sounds), phonology (the study of and system for sounds and breaking them down), translation and semantics (meaning of words). For language acquisition, I got to learn from a Japanese native speaker, Hiroko, who taught us all kinds of great ways to remember Japanese words. We had lots of fun in her group. (We sang "head, shoulders, knees and toes..." in Japanese for the rest of the group and did some fun actions for numbers 1-10 too.) My sister learned a bit of Indonesian from an Indonesian man, and there was a group learning Russian and another learning an African tribal language. Very fun, but very practical stuff. Our days were packed with classes and our nights with homework and field reports given by the missionaries who were teaching our classes. It was amazing to hear of how God is using the translation of His word into the heart languages of people who have never had it to change lives and let every "tongue and tribe and nation" glorify Him. There is much work to be done, some 2,000 more languages without translations, and we hope to have at least one more done in whatever tribal group the Lord leads us to in Vanuatu. Here I am with Yohana, a Papua New Guinea translator/literacy specialist. What a blessing she was to fellowship with!

We are so thankful for the time and provision to be able to check out this awesome resource available to us. Also, it was an awesome blessing to be able to stay at a friend's house on the way to and from Portland. Thanks Josh!! Please pray with us as we begin the application process for the SIL/Wycliffe program in Australia (called Equip). I'll write more later about our timeline and this program. (On the left are Gretchen, me, and Michaela working on our translation "Zack and Jesus: a story for toddlers" about Zaccheus; our choice for a homework assignment to make a new English translation for a specific people group.)

The Richards and I leave tomorrow for Lindsey's house in Bozeman, then Friday AM for Boise. God has faithfully provided a place to stay, a toddler mattress to borrow, a 2nd car to get around in, and a start on help with babysitting for the kids when we are making presentations. He is also slowly filling in our schedule with groups and churches to share with about His work in Vanuatu. Praise Him!