Hip hop Australia

When we checked out Melbourne one weekend, we happened upon a hip hop gang that was performing on the sidewalk. They were pretty good - check it out:

Fire

Keep praying for rain for Victoria state here in Australia (where I live). There has been a drought here for many years but this year they've only gotten 2 mm of water TOTAL so far. If you've seen any of my pictures of this area, you've seen how brown and dry everything is. Fires continue to blaze all around us and more than 5,000 have lost homes in this area, some towns have burnt, and several hundred have died. We've had numerous fire ban days here and tomorrow is another. All public schools have been closed for tomorrow so that should evacuations need to occur, parents won't have to be in mad panics to get kids out of school. We have evacuation plans and are to have bags packed to leave at any time. Right now the closest fire to us is 30km away but new fires are starting every day. Please pray for the protection of Australia and it's bushland, for protection of the Equip campus, and for rain to wash this land! Here's a website showing all the fires here and updates. We are just NE of Melbourne, near where N Warrendyte if you zoom in one time in the Melbourne area. http://www.google.com.au/landing/victorianbushfires/ You can get other bushfire news at:

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/indepth/0,,5018723,00.html

Beatbox and didgeridoo

Check out Joel putting his phonetics to practice in vitally important, everyday applications! Or really, it's just fun. :) First one is beatboxing and 2nd is human didgeridoo. To compare, the last video is an actual didgeridoo, an Australian Aboriginal instrument, played by John and accompanied by Paul.

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!

Masta Ki

Language Learning class had lecture components as well as practical classes 3 days a week with an LRP (Language Resource Person). All the Summer School students were split up into groups of 4 students each to learn and immediately apply language learning techniques and skills. All of our team was able to learn from Pastor Peter. Peter is a pastor on Tanna island in Vanuatu in the WhiteSands language area. He is also the head of the VBT (Vanuatu Bible Translators) and we met with him in some SIL meetings before we came to Australia. It was great to be able to get to know him better over these 6 weeks as well as learn some very very basics from his language group. Hopefully learning some things like pronoun systems (where there are pronouns for dual like us 2 and you 2 and they 2 as well as trial like us 3 and you 3 and they 3 before you even get to plural like we, you, and they) will help us when we start learning a tribal language in Vanuatu wherever the Lord leads us. Peter wrote a song called Masta Ki about Jesus being the master key, the only true Christ so we sang it for a song night at Equip.

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:

Surprisingly for me, Grammar was my 2nd favorite class. It was nice to have it be something measurable and achievable. The teachers were great about presenting the material in a way that was down-to-earth, practical, and even hands-on with lots of practice. Here are a few things we did in the class. The first is specifically formulas for phrases and the 2nd is a morphology exercise. All of this will be hugely useful for learning a language in Vanuatu and determining the language structure and functions.