Just saying hello...

Hello everyone! We are having a great mid-semester break. True, much of our time is spent on assignments, but we have gotten out a little bit. Last week we spent a day in the Dandenongs with the Richards and Thulesens. It was nice to get away from the campus for a little while, very refreshing. Josh has been having fun playing 'pirates' with Jesiah and Zoe, and both Josh and Grace have been busy working on a 'clubhouse' with the other kids on the grounds.

Here are a few pics, and just for fun, we've posted the video of the kids' reaction after Jim shaved his beard off. He has had one for almost nine years! ...ever since he left the military.

Josh and Si on the way to Dandenong National Park. It was a great day in spite of our party getting separated along the way (we were in two cars). All of us were excited when we actually ran into each other again after a couple of hours apart!

Pirates Si, Josh, and Zoe

Who doesn't need a good tickle every now and then?

Here is the video of the kids' reaction...

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Dark Cloud With a Silver Lining

It was a dark and stormy day…the unwilling participants ventured into the dreaded lair of the GRAMMAR TEACHER. Little did they know, which was apparent by the test they were so fiendishly tricked into taking. Their only hope – that God would show mercy on them and their fellow captives in the linguistically diverse places they all would find themselves. Tragically, they all passed and would be forever relegated to developing formal generative grammars for peoples the world over, tortured by phrase structure rules, nightmares of verbal subcategories and plagued by cold sweats from fear of morphological infixes.(Sounds worse than Malaria or Dengue Fever!)

Totally just kidding… we love grammar – believe it or not.

Today we are officially starting a two-week mid-semester break. (yeeeeaaah!) The Richards' parents are coming for a visit during this time, and we are looking forward to seeing them. Familiar faces in unfamiliar places go a long way towards renewing one's spirit. There are a lot of activities in Melbourne, many of which are free with a student i.d. card, which we hope to take advantage of. Please keep sending the wonderful emails of encouragement and know that you are always in our prayers.

I am writing some very exciting articles which we will be getting to you soon - whether in print or blog format - so be looking for those over the next couple of weeks.

for His glory-
Jim


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Our new email address...

jim.n.tania@gmail.com

Be sure and make a note of it and add us to your 'approved senders' list!


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Australia Wildlife

I dont know the names of most of these things but they are interesting pictures anyway. These are from an afternoon at Australia's Dandenong National Park. I went for a walk there with a couple other girls last Friday after class.

this is a small kangaroo type thing about the size of a small dog. I have asked around but still dont know what it is called...

Austrailia's famous Kookaburra Bird...

the forest was full of tall straight trees and these big tree fern things...

this is a Liar Bird (about the size of a chicken), evidently they copy the sounds of other birds...

We also saw Black Cockatoos but they took off before I could get a picture. That will have to do for now. Must get to bed, morning comes early.

Love,
Tania


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What is Literacy?

As one of our first assignments we were asked to write up a personal belief statement answering the question - What is literacy? Does it necessarily have only to do with reading and writing? What about 'computer literacy'? There are no wrong answers, it is basically just a survey of the understanding of literacy.

So, what do YOU think... How would you define literacy?


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What We Learned in Summer School

This post doesn't have any photos,
but the previous one does...
scroll down to see it

We've been wanting to give you an update to let you in on what it is we learned during our first six weeks here. The summer course was hard work, but we learned so much. I don't know how interested you are in the details but in case you are, here goes...

The six week course mainly gave an introduction to linguistics and cross-cultural work with a focus on language learning. In 'Language Learning' we learned strategies and methods of learning any language but particularly helpful if the only resource you have is a language helper and nothing else, even if you and the language helper do not know the same language. It was actually a lot of fun. For our practice language we worked on 'Whitesands', one of the languages of Vanuatu. It was very interesting. At the end of six weeks (12 sessions) we were able to carry on a conversation talking about things we had learned and eliciting new material too. Can you believe it?! I would never have thought it was possible. This was also a great chance for us to get to know our language helper. We will be working with him in Vanuatu as he is the chairman of the Vanuatu Bible Translators (VBT).
Another of the courses was 'Language Awareness/Intro to Linguistics' (aka Grammar). Using languages from around the world we learned how to break down and analyze language data to figure out how the language is structured - clauses, phrases, words, morphemes, tense, mood, aspect, pronouns, noun classes, and so on... I don't know how they did it, but they made this class very interesting. By the end of the six weeks, we were taking what we learned from this class and eliciting material in 'Whitesands' to analyze. We found some very interesting stuff including either four or five noun classes, and a very complicated pronoun system.
Another of the classes was Phonetics. We learned the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It was like learning another language. We learned to read, write, and produce it. This was tied into our language learning in that we transcribed what we were learning in 'Whitesands' in IPA, and we were also assessed by transcribing some longer discourses. What we learned in Phonetics and Intro to linguistics was further applied in a research paper on our target language group. We each had to make a presentation about the language we would be working in. Because we don't know exactly which language we will go to yet, each of us on the team either picked one of the possible future languages, or a neighboring one.
So much of what we learned in the past six weeks are things we had never even thought about before.
So there are the highlights. Of course there was more to it than what is here. We also had a course in Anthropology. As part of the course we had two field trips to make cultural observations. We visited a Coptic Orthodox Church for the Epiphany service, and we also visited a Mosque to observe prayer and interview people. The focus of this course was to help us know about aspects of culture that we should keep in mind in cross-cultural ministry.
We definitely feel like we have a much better awareness of the complexities of language than what we came here with. We also feel like this course is practically equipping us for the work to be done. It isn't just head knowledge, but practical skills.

Our one week break before the first semester starts is just about over. First semester will include Introduction to Literacy, Phonology, Grammar/Structure of Languages, Ethnology, Sociolinguistics, and Orthography. We are told it isn't as treacherous as the six week course because it is spread out over more time. They tell we will actually have weekends and evenings free, but we will see.

Thank you for your prayers and support that make it possible for us to be here.


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Summer School Memories

Well, summer school has come to an end and we have a bunch of pictures and videos to share with you. So come along while I give you the tour...

First of all, welcome to our abode...


We live in 'B' lodge with two other families...

You know the Jones family - (L-R) Piper, Amber, Zoe, and Brad
they are our teammates from Michigan

and

meet Brad & Elyse...

they are from Sydney and are lots of fun.
This is a picture of them with Josh on his birthday (plus Zoe).

Our little pad doesn't have a kitchen so we share the kitchen and lounge area with Brad & Elyse.

This is where we do our laundry...

The picture is a little fuzzy but you get the idea. Grace is hanging laundry out on the line. we've never done laundry on the line before but I actually like it. I find it quite relaxing, and truthfully, it gets done a lot faster when you don't have to wait for the dryer.
I hope when it comes time to settle in Vanuatu Jim will set up an area like this one for us. There is plenty of line space, but the best part is that it is covered. I cant tell you how many times in Vanuatu we had to race out to rescue the laundry from getting soaked in the rain. It was not uncommon to hang the same load three times before it was dry! We don't have to worry about that any more =).

Okay, moving on...

From where we live, we walk maybe 500 meters to the offices/classes/dinning room.

Here is Jim and Houghton on their way to dinner, or 'Tea' which is what Aussie's call the evening meal...

Speaking of Aussie names for meals, here is a little bit of culture for you...

Breakfast
Morning Tea
Lunch
Afternoon Tea
Tea (evening meal)
Supper (cookies before bed)
hmm....

Here is Laura and our friend Sophia at morning tea. Sophia was able to join us for the summer course but is now back in Vanuatu continuing work on a commentary for the Bislama Bible.

During summer school, all of our meals were prepared by these fine men John and Chris (plus Anita, but she wasn't around for the picture)...

These guys were wonderful.
They also hooked up school lunches for Grace and Josh - and spoiled them!
I don't know how we would have survived without them. We barely were able to fit in time to sleep, I don't know what we would have done if we would have had to cook.
Now that summer school is over, we are on our own. Supposedly (depending on who we talk to) the rest of the year isn't supposed to be quite as intense - still intense, just not as bad.

Meet a couple of the lovely ladies at the EQUIP office...

Robin & Lyn

(there are more but unfortunately I didn't catch them for pictures)

And this is Mary from the Wycliffe office (pronounced 'Meery' like a real Aussie.)

All the ladies have done an awesome job at helping us settle in and making us feel welcome.

This is where we spent most of our time, in class...

Here we are in 'Phonetics' class...

and Anthro...


Language Learning - As part of the course Peter taught a bunch of us some of his local language 'Whitesands' from the island of Tanna. Some of the other groups learned 'Indonesian', 'Urdu', or 'Karen'

We made a couple of field trips. One was to an Islamic Mosque to observe their formal prayers. Us girls were required to wear the customary dress for women...


As the course wrapped up there were a lot of tests.
Here we are waiting for our turn at production assessments...


If you have been keeping your eye on the blog, you know we have had some serious fires around here. It got really smoky, and scary at times.

It was also VERY hot...

Grace and Josh's school had a family picnic to raise funds for some of those that were affected by the fires. I took the chance to get a few pictures.

This is what the kids see as they ride their bikes to school every morning...

looks sort of like Eastern Montana...

until you see a kangaroo...


Josh's uniform -

the hat is part of it, but the stick is not =)

we got to meet the kids' teachers

and eat some traditional Aussie food - grilled sausages and onions on a slice of bread with BBQ sauce or tomato sauce (aka ketchup)

More pictures from around campus...

Brad P. & Brad J.

Jim with Peter
He was here just for the summer course, and is now back home in Vanuatu and will be working on a Whitesands Bible translation project.

It wasn't all work...

One the last night before 'graduation' we got a chance to let our hair down, so to speak, and just have some fun. Here area couple of videos we thought you would like...

This is an Australian Bush Dance - sort of like square dancing with out the funny clothes

Here is a video one of our phonetics tutors made for us. After an intense six weeks of learning, we thought this was just hilarious. It could be that we could finally just take a break and laugh, or more that we actually understood what the video was all about - I don't know what it was, but it made us laugh so hard we cried...

Well, that is it. Hope you enjoyed the 'tour' =)

Love,
Tania for the crew


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