Summer Adventure: Day 6
by Doug Darfus
Training. What are we doing? The answer is we are busy with many activities to help us to be affective on our mission field.
Today’s agenda:
We started the day with family worship.
We then had a discussion and demonstration of how the push and pull of various expectations can affect our emotions. (We have been talking about how to live with both the good and the bad simultaneously. We call them the pair of ducks [paradox] Yay duck and Yuck duck.)
We have been shown methods to pick up a new language which is quite easy to retain. It has been demonstrated by using a dialect of Vietnamese. I’m amazed at how the instructor can tell me to do something in this language and I know what to do!
We had a lesson on what makes a vowel and what makes a consonant. (Something I’m not certain I learned in school.)
We have had phonetic drills to get us out of the 44 sounds we usually make and into many other sounds other languages make. It has been very interesting, exciting, and overwhelming. Today we had an opportunity to express our emotions with learning phonetics and talk about how these same emotions might appear as we learn a new culture.
We are given time to do an introspection of our current story and our relationship with God. It is an amazing time every day.
We are placed in small groups where we have time to open up, be real and vulnerable, and discuss important questions with others in our same situations.
Becky and I were also given a time slot today to meet with one of the directors and talk about our marriage and family. It was very good conversation with someone who has knowledge of how couples are affected by the mission field.
There was more, but my blog is getting too long.
Some people ask how learning phonetics will help us as we go to the Native American field where most of the young people we will work with speak English. Learning to be observant of these sounds and how they contrast with other sounds teaches us to be observant in our new culture and how it contrasts from our own.
Overall, so far this has been a very positive experience for each of us. The friendships we are building and the resources we are collecting are valuable to us now and in the future.
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