Luke thinks he is going to hang it up in his college dorm room! I guess it would make an interesting thing to wake up to.

• Once again it is time to update course materials and get ready for classes. Some goals this semester:
• Combine the Grammar and Phonemics Textbook into one greyscale book for printing and one color PDF digital file for posting.
• Culture Class -Make more Dobu props and fine tune the mural painting
• We are one teacher short right now in the Culture department – Pray about getting everything done right and on time.
• Praise: Everything is changed over from APA phonetics to IPA phonetics 

Hey, it’s another project! This time I am working on a fake fire pit for our Dobu culture class. In the past we made fire pits by carrying heavy rocks up stairs and using messy charred sticks. So, I am hoping to make several new fire pits that are light weight, and easier to use. They will be placed in front of the big Dobu murals, and in some classrooms.

Well, I have made one fire pit, and will see from that if this particular process will work. I tried a few various things such as paper mache, before settling on this particular method.  The one thing that worries me is if the rocks will hold up since they only have a thin plaster coating on top. It is densite plaster, which is suppposedly harder, but is it hard enough?

What I did was to take styrofoam and cut it into a rock shape. Then I used plaster cloth, which is a netting that has embedded plaster, to cover the form. While it was still wet, I added the densite plaster and smoothed and shaped the edges as best I could to look like a real rock shape.

 After the plaster dried, I made some very diluted washes of raw umber, yellow ochre, raw sienna, burnt umber, and black. Then I started putting the watery paint on in layers, letting it dry between times.

Eventually the many layers began to darken the rocks, leaving a fairly natural rock color, and darkening in crevices like a natural rock. In the picture below, one of the rocks is real, and I used it to determine the correct color.

John BBQ’d some sticks for me in our grill! Because they were so messy when handled, I coated them with some clear matte sealer, and sprayed them with some scenic cement (used by model railroaders). It worked quite well, but does not work perfectly. If you try hard enough, you can still get black on your hands.

So, while a messy project, I liked how it turned out! If the plaster holds up well, I will be making more so each instructor can have one.

As we continue to change from APA phonetics to IPA phonetics, I am continually amazed at how many sounds and symbols are used in the thousands of languages around the world. Each language has its own unique set.

There is a great, exceptionally detailed book by David Crystal called “The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Languages.” This is a book filled with stats and facts and curious little interesting things about languages all over the world. For instance, in the book he says the language with the shortest alphabet is called Rotokas from the Solomon Island…and only contains 11 letters!  The longest alphabet is from the Kher language and has a whopping  74 letters. Meanwhile, the Chinese language has over 50,000 character symbols (Crystal calls it a logographic system) that represent parts of words instead of sounds. I can’t imagine trying to learn how to read and write that many symbols. Bryan is learning Chinese at college, and says about 3000 of these characters are used normally.

Other parts of Crystal’s book focuses on people he calls “children of the wild.” These children have come out of rare situations where they were raised in isolation from other humans, and so they have never learned to speak. Crystal says “none could speak at all, and most had no comprehension of speech. Most attempts to teach them to speak failed.” I guess because we have been involved in teaching language learning I find that fascinating. 

By the way, this book is big in size, and almost 500 pages long!

Graduation day is only a couple weeks away for these students! Our prayers are with them as they prepare to begin their ministries. I read a note from New Tribes Mission recently that says “nine more people groups heard the gospel in their own language in 2009! We rejoice that they can now understand the true meaning of Christmas. The goal of New Tribes Mission is to reach fifty more in the next five years.” Pray for these students as they work towards this goal.

We, as a family, would also like to say thanks FOR YOUR PART IN THIS GOAL! 

There is no way we could be involved in this goal and ministry without your help.

Mark 16:15And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.

A friend gave John and Luke a free round of golf and a fancy lunch at a very gorgeous golf course that sits on the top of the world! Of course they didn’t have the proper golf equipment or attire, so, as the pictures show, they made do! Even though they aren’t exactly dressed like golfers, they had a ton of fun. The course was amazing, new, and extremely beautiful.

When our NTM missionaries move into a tribal village some day, they will have to learn the language and culture of those people without the benefit of some sort of language school sitting there waiting to teach them.  They will need to know what to do to learn it on their own.  (If you were plopped down in a remote village in a far-away country, how would you go about learning to speak their language?)  Part of our pre-field orientation course is to teach missionary candidates how to do this.

For about 8 weeks, our students will study culture in this way.

There are a number of other classes we teach, all to help prepare students for learning another language and culture.  One of those that we’re getting ready for right now is our Grammar 101 class.  This is not a class in English grammar.  This is a class that seeks to introduce our students to things that happen in languages all around the world.  Our students discover that other languages are very different from our own.

Even languages that are relatively similar to English, like Spanish and Portuguese, still do things quite differently from what we are used to.  For example, if you wanted to say “these little boys” in Portuguese, it would come out like this:

est-e-s                       menin-o-s                    pequen-o-s

^{this-masculine-plural     kid-masculine-plural     little-masculine-plural}

Notice how in Portuguese they have to tack letters on to the ends of the words to show whether you’re talking about someone that is male or female, and to show if there’s more than one.  Also, notice that the descriptive word comes after the noun.  It would be kind of like saying “these boys littles” in English.

Now take a language that’s really different from English, like this tribal language from South America where they use one long word for what seems like a whole sentence in our language.  To say “he suddenly smelled them” they say just one word “pjɪ̹dädäreno̹a̹deje̹re̹″ (This comes out of a story about a dog chasing an animal in the jungle.)  In case you were wondering how that breaks down…

pjɪ̹dä         -däre       -no̹         -a̹            -de    -je̹re̹

^{smelling     finished    quick    past perfect    he    them}

To quote the NTM missionary who sent this to us, “God did a bang up job at the tower of Babel.”

A new mural for culture class is almost done. I’ve been working on the painting for a month or so, but still have some detail work left. John and some of the other instructors have set up some hut fronts and porches to sit on while teaching culture class, and there is a false back behind the huts so we can do “culture event skits”, coming in and out of the “doors.”

If you’d like to see more pictures about the new mural, CLICK HERE.

Preacher, Farmer, Welder…and Trickster! That was my Grandpa.

Here’s a couple of Grandpa’s ingenious tricks:

Grandpa’s favorite trick on Grandma:

Many hot summer, dusty days in an old beat-up car with no air-conditioner, my sisters and I would tag along with Grandpa and Grandma on their way to town. Why? Because we knew if we went along, Grandpa would stop at Dairy Queen. Now you have to realize that Grandpa’s car had a lot of rust, and so inside…well…came a lot of thick, suffocating dust! Furthermore, Grandpa would look at us and wink, as we watched him turn the heater on. Yup, you read me right. He’d turn the heater on with a sly grin directed at us, and sit back and wait to see how long it took for Grandma to complain of how hot it was outside today! It’s no wonder I get carsick easily. Just writing this brings back the thick smell of heat and dust clogging the air in the back seat of Grandpa’s car. I guess we all suffered from that trick.

Wait, there’s more. Anyone remember his trick with the tape measure?

A lot of you reading this have probably experienced Grandpa Pony’s measuring tape. Grandpa was a farmer, and never without his handy measuring tape tucked in his overall’s pocket (he was definitely an overall wearer).  As the unsuspecting victim would sit watching TV, Grandpa would slowly and quietly feed his measuring tape out and over the head of the unsuspecting. I’m telling you, he became quite good at keeping that tape stiff to reach from where he sat to the top of a head some 10 or even more feet away! Then he’d tickle that poor soul’s head with the tape, quickly and quietly using the auto button to return the tape, and of course pretend to be doing something else, so that the unsuspecting, after scratching his head and looking around to see what had ruffled his hair, had no idea what had just attacked him. Of course we got used to it, and knew who the culprit was, but it became just as fun to watch him do it to some new victim.

Also a Man of God

My Grandpa was not saved until in his 40′s, my age now. And he was one of those who was on fire for God from that point on. Very outspoken, he used every occasion he could to tell others how God could change their lives, just like God had changed his. He pastored a small church, spoke at camps, did VBS’s, juvenile detention Bible studies, went to Alaska to help missionaries, and the list goes on until his passing away when he was in his 90′s.

One of his Favorite Object Lessons:

One of his favorite object lessons was to pull a bill from his wallet and hold it up in front of a bunch of kids and say, “If you want this come, and get it. It’s a free gift.” I watched him do this many times, and it always turned out the same…all the kids would look at each other, glance up at him to see if he meant it, and then after several moments, one brave kid would jump up and grab it, all the while looking around to see if there was some “string attached.” Then Grandpa would explain that it was truly a free gift from him, just like salvation is a free gift from God. The kid kept the money, and all the kids learned that God has a free gift, no strings attached, for those that accept it.

Some of his favorite sayings:

• Keep Looking Up – He’d say this, and write it on his letters
• Don’t miss heaven by a foot – meaning the difference between head knowledge and heart knowledge
• He’d talk about his chest falling down to his drawers – his “chest of drawers”
• He always had schwan’s ice cream bars to pass around…then when you’d eat one he’d look at you and say “Why you puttin that under your nose?”
• He’d ask if you’d “heard about the gospill” – used this in the hospital to the docters and nurses.
• In his later years, When asked “how do you feel” he’d always wiggle his fingers, meaning “so-so”

 

 

 

I learned alot from Grandpa

I still remember distinctly the day my Grandpa asked Reverend Moritz (AMF Missionary over several churches) if my sister and I could teach VBS for some of those churches that year. We were only 12. To make a long story short, my sis and I were quizzed for a good part of the afternoon by a somewhat skeptical Reverend Moritz, and ended up teaching VBS alongside Grandpa for the next 8 or 9 years! And we weren’t the only ones Grandpa would get involved, he would get lots of other family and friends involved, too. We enjoyed doing Bible studies, Nursing Homes, and Juvenile Detention centers with him. His example, and desire to see us involved in spreading the gospel was contagious, not only to us, but to anyone he met. I know his impact on my life played a part in me deciding to become a missionary.

For more pictures of Grandpa, click here!