New Season

The rains are definitely here. The past few days it has rained constantly, especially at night, which I love. It always makes me think of my momma and grandmother, hearing the rain hit so hard on our roof—they always enjoyed listening to rainstorms under a tin sheet porch. Who knew that one day that would be what my roof is made of.

Here are some pictures showing some of the perks of the rainy season. Since the ground is still really tough, we will wait until the end of the month to plant and garden, so I don’t have pictures of flowers just yet. These will have to do.

Growing mangos in our yard

Language learning has been a constant struggle for me. I love and hate it all at the same time. Regardless of how I feel, the key to the heart is language. The people out here light up when they hear you speak their language. It is also much easier to understand their culture and ideas when you are hearing it straight from their mouth without interpretation. Much gets lost in translation. I can understand a lot more than I can say at this point, but it is so exciting when you can understand the main idea of a conversation in kikaonde. I have approached numerous methods to learning the Kaonde language out here, but by far my favorite is learning from my friend out in her village, at her home. She is in the process of learning English. This makes it much more fun to learn from her because she is experiencing the same frustrations and joys that I am at the same time. We are learning from each other, sentence by sentence. Today, I sat out in her village for about two hours. She would write down a sentence in kikaonde, and I would write it in English. We both know enough of each other’s language to get by working together and helping each other. Her English is really progressing so she is able to put together simple sentences and verbs for me to practice. We laugh at each other a lot and continue to repeat the word “shupa” every couple of minutes. “Shupa” is a funny Kaonde word meaning stubborn or really difficult.

I was able to start back with Erin doing our usual Tuesday afternoon girls Bible study, after being gone for two weeks. In the beginning we had six girls, ages 12-16, coming, and occasionally we will have a week where all of them show up, but more than half of the time there are only two girls-but every week it is the same two. They never miss a Bible study, and we are seeing them grow and develop into beautiful young women. I pray that their faith continues to grow, and I hope they don’t give up the fire they have to learn. I love these sweet girls- Katherine and Rwidness. Even though our study is small right now, one of the other village girls who is about 17, really wants to be a part of it, but she has a baby and chores to do everyday so she can’t manage to meet in the middle of the day. She always has to decline the invitation to come, and I thought she just wasn’t interested. However, she showed up at my house a couple of days ago explaining why she can never come and asking for a different time to meet. We will start meeting with her once a week around 4 pm after she is done with her chores. Since a baby came in to her life, she can no longer attend school. I am excited about this new opportunity!

Whitney