It seems odd to blog about the trip to Vietnam now, as it feels like it was so long ago. Good thing Jamie gave an update from the trip with lots of pictures. I’ll skip ahead to the Lawa trip. Two weeks after Vietnam I was away to a Lawa village here in Thailand, where we were gathering linguistic data for a field methods course I was taking. The key word there is was because I’m now finished with it, which is probably also why I was able to come back to the blog after so long. We had a good time in the village but had to come home and bury our heads in the data in order to write a description of their grammar, among other things. It was fun to interact with the people in their own language and to see the shock on the faces of some of the villagers when they heard a foreigner who could speak a little bit of their language.
Also on the trip some good relationships were built and our group was able to share some Bible stories with some of our language consultants. In one little experiment we told a Bible story to a guy who spoke English really well. He drew pictures to help him learn the story and then he retold it in Northern Thai. After that he taught the story to a group of Lawa hearers and with the help of the pictures (and after some discussion about the meaning of certain words and helping them understand the story) they were able to re-retell it in Lawa. There would be a lot more that would go into this if it were going to be used for outreach in the village, but it was exciting to see the story make it beyond language barriers so quickly.
Tomorrow morning I’m heading to China for a week. When I get back next Sunday we will have less than a week to move out of our house. Please pray for the stress levels during these next few weeks as we get ready to close out this chapter of our life.
