Sunday, November 18, 2007

The everyday business...

So, you may ask, what do you actually do everyday?

Basically, we are storytellers. We tell people stories from the Book and teach brothers and sisters here how to tell these stories. We travel nearly every week to a neighboring city and do this with two different groups of women. Daily, we explore our city and neighborhood and try to meet people to build friendships with. We practice the language we are learning with the people, tell our story and tell His story. Our apartment complex is new so this has given us a great opportunity to meet people in it. Because we are all new here, we have many questions to ask. Everyone is very helpful and gives us tons of advice. We enjoy sharing tea with the people we meet.

Our little neighborhood has several supermarkets, a large fruit and vegetable market and a lot of fun shops. We've established a relationship with the man who makes chips, our security guard, several neighbors and lots of little girls that want to teach us the language. I think they especially like the fact that we are the only Americans in the area...and we have blonde hair and blue eyes! Most people are amazed that we are here to learn their language and about their lives. Everyone offers to be our language teachers.

For language learning, we will begin a home stay soon. We will live with a national family for two weeks (only during weekdays) and force them to only speak their language to us. No English! After that, our intention is to begin formal classes with a teacher weekly and have a tutor come to our home 2-3 days a week.

It's strange to think I actually live here. Sometimes I think to myself, "I'm really here. I am really doing this." It's almost like I realize it for the first time.