MozamWeek

Jakob was very happy to finally receive his birthday present from America. He is now 7 years old and one month... he has lost 3 teeth within days of his birthday. Isn't he handsome? What a big smile! He was just as happy with the present from Sweden that came on his birthday, but my camara battery was dead... oops!

We have had a relaxing few days off in Malawi. Very nice to stay with friends and explore the lake. We have done what we wanted to do and now it is time to get back. Our plan was to leave on Wednesday, but we would be getting back in the afternoon... and Thursday is a holiday in Mozambique, so... Why not stay another night and get back for work on Friday anyway? Mikael squeezed in a haircut and the kids were invited to take part in a music class with friends. We are so thankful for a chance to visit and relax in relative luxury from what we have been living in Tete for the past months. Thanks, Christina! Thanks supporters! Thank you Jesus for giving us friends who care!

After Lilongwe, where we stocked up on things that are less than ncessary for life, we headed to the Lake for a couple of days of R&R. We are staying at the Wheelhouse Marina at the suggestion of a friend who grew up on vacations at Lake Malawi. Driving onto the property we were reminded of Kenya's Lake Naivasha... where Mikael and I started our "Safari" training course for Wycliffe missionaries in Africa. A canopy of African trees shading a patchy lawn that slopes down to the lakeshore. The difference is that at Naivasha you tent-camp with hippos munching grass all night... here we sleep in a thatched "chalet" on beds with a bathroom to ourselves. Having spent my youth in Florida, I'm not very into swimming in lakes... The water is cristal clear and Lake Malawi has a high concentration of tropical fish to see, but shallow and waveless beaches with golden sand and black silt fall short when compared to the white sugar sands of the Gulf of Mexico. On the ...

Hi. Been awhile, hasn't it? Glad you didn't give up on me completely! The second seminar/workshop went as well as the first. Actually, they each had unique challenges and benefits, but the outcomes were equally well-received. From May 26 to June 5 we were involved in writing the Nyungwe Primer in Tete. A Primer is a book that teaches reading and writing... the alphabet, grammar points, etc. This one was for adults, but I have a feeling it will end up being used for kids as well. 60 lessons in 1o days. We invited writers from the first seminar, but didn't get much participation from outside the churches. Apparently we don't pay well enough. BUT the ones who did help us seemed to enjoy it in the end and I think they learned something. They also see that the simplest writing needs the most thought and preparation. It is a real stretch of the mind and immagination to write a comprehensible story with 5 vowels and the letter "n". We could only include taught letter...

One down and one to go: the seminar marathon continues for another week! We finished the Discover Your Language course well. All the participants worked hard until the final day. We put the rough draft of the 3 short grammar outlines into booklets and printed them for each of the participants. So, I think the seminar was a success. At least now several leaders in the Tete community know what we do in SIL . They have expressed interest in continuing the cooperation with us through the revision of the grammar notes. Seminar 2 is halfway over. We finished the first 20 lessons of the Nyungwe Primer and teacher's manual in the first week. There were hiccups and a slow start, but we are doing it. We have gotten into a rhythm and it seems like things will be easier from now on. Imagine writing a paragraph with only vowels and the letter "n". That is how we started! Second lesson we could add "t". Third lesson we added "m" and so on. We are now using about...

Today we started the second week of the Discover Your Language seminar in Tete. It has been really interesting, encouraging, and eye-opening. First of all, we have 15 people showing up to study the grammatical structure of their own languages every day! From 8am to 3:30 pm every day, we are learning to describe how Nyungwe, Nyanja, and Tawara are put together... how they use nouns, verbs, prefixes, and particles to make sense of their world and communicate. Sound exciting? Well, they are into it! The first day, I had to go and remind people that we were counting on them for this workshop. The department of Education complained that our timing was bad: they were sending Nyungwe and Nyanja advisers out to the districts to distribute materials. They didn't have anyone to send to our seminar... until the cars broke down. On Tuesday morning, their transportation fell through. "You must be praying. We can't leave town so we will come to see what you guys are doing." Every ...

In 1995 I studied in Portugal for almost a year. While at the University in Lisbon I met a Mozambican who was there studying Linguistics. We met weekly and discussed the languages of his part of Mozambique: Tete Province. We studied the map for language areas and the dialect chains in the region south of the Zambezi River. We sent questions to our SIL contact in Maputo at the time. In 1996 I arrived in Mozambique and met that contact person... Mikael was working on the survey of Mozambican languages. He was planning a trip to Tete Province... and my Lisbon linguist, Sostenes, was coming to Mozambique to do research for his thesis. I put the two together for the survey trip... Mikael worked on logistics and questionaires and wordlists; Sostenes gathered data and interpreted for the trip. Thirteen years later I'm living in Tete with Mikael and planning seminars for the next month on those same languages. In my contacts with the department of education, I speak to Teresa, the Nyungwe ...