Dear friends,
Good news! Heather and I have found a “home worship place” for our time here in Antsirabe. It has been such a blessing to us. There is one Australian family and everyone else is Malagasy. At worship yesterday morning our Australian friend found a chameleon and teased the kids with it. His wife was like "Hey, do those things have teeth?" And he said, "Nope, they just spit acid." HA HA HA! Oh my my my...
Amazingly enough, we are over halfway through language school! Huzzah! We have two weeks left in intense classroom time and then our teacher said for the last three weeks we can take lots of field trips to really help us learn to talk with people! :) One of the difficult things about the Malagasy language is that all but four of their verbs start with the letter M! So that can easily lead to confusion. Check this out:
Mandefa – to send
Mandeha – to go
Mandena – to wet
Mandeta – to cut the neck
Not exactly the words you want to mess up! :P
We are taking a trip to the rain forest THIS WEEKEND – woohoo! I am SO incredibly excited to finally get to see where we will be living and meet people from the Tanala people group! Please pray that God uses this time to fill us with love for the Tanala people, give us a vision for what He would specifically have us to do there (because the possibilities are endless), and have a wonderful time of fellowship with our friends.
You can also lift up Safidisoa, a malnourished baby God placed in our path who is now receiving rehydration, nutrition, and treatment for her infection at the hospital. She had swollen feet, a swollen belly, and was rather listless when we first met her. She entered the hospital this weekend weighing only 14lbs at 13 months old. Praise the Lord she is doing better and He has already received glory for this healing! Pray also for her mother who has to stay with her almost continuously at the hospital even though she has four other children!
Our language tutor has helped us translate a short presentations into Malagasy, so I believe that will really help us with the vocabulary. Pray that I will memorize it by the end of our time in Zambia!
Let me bookend this letter with animal stories - after mentioning to my language teacher that he had unknowingly brought a little friend into our house, he looked down at his shirt and flung the bug off. "Quick - where did it go? I have to kill it because it is dangerous!" he said a little frantically. I laughed and said, “Are you telling me there are NO poisonous snakes in Madagascar, but I should look out for the CATERPILLERS?! Ha ha ha...oh Africa.
Hoy Kara ilay tia anao!
(Malagasy way of ending a letter that literally means “says Cara, the one who loves you”)
I John 4:7-11
2 comments:
Wow. There's critters everywhere! Praying for the baby and the mother.
I think your Australian friend and I would get along great! What chameleon? You mean the one attacking that kid? YEAH, THAT'S NO PROBLEM! They're just having fun :)
Glad to hear you're doing well... lifting you!
Post a Comment