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When you are able to see social situations that are special, like attending local funerals and weddings, it’s a great excuse to take a break from the normal language story time, and start expanding that situation, describing what you saw, and asking questions that fill in your understanding of the culture.

This past week we were asked to attend a funeral, a pretty amazing thing around here.

We spent most of our language time yesterday talking through what we saw, why things happened the way they did, about believers and non-believers in the cultural context, understanding the differences between men and women at a funeral, and also between how the funeral is handled in the northern and the southern regions of the country.

Participating in the Culture

Today we talked about it a bit more with our language helper Liza, to expand the story and get some more details about her parents’ funeral in the south of the country. It led into talking about what she remembered about their character, personality and how they showed love. You see, the words for pray and love are very similar sounding, so we were trying to clarify the way to say these words. Liza mentioned that they don’t really use the word for love, or say that they love someone here. Instead, they show it.

Sharing Life

My husband joked that this was a culture made just for me, because I am an “Acts of Service” kind of girl (from the book, The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman) while he is a “Words of Affirmation” kind of guy.

Liza asked us what that meant so we spent quite a bit of time explaining the concept of the book and how people show love differently. She was fascinated and immediately started applying it to herself, telling us about how she and her children, her parents, and siblings show love. You could see light bulbs going off for her in understanding her own family relationships. She was thoroughly interested in our explanation, all the while correcting our grammar mistakes.

Telling Stories

As we finished our lesson with her, realizing that we had gotten off track a bit, I ran through what we were going to cover tomorrow.  I mentioned her telling us the fairy tale, “Hansel and Gretel”.  She didn’t know the story, so I launched into telling it. At the end, both my husband and Liza said they understood the story, and it had seemed almost effortless on my part. I still needed a few words and Liza had to correct my word endings on multiple occasions, but she was able to understand.

What an amazing language time today! Thank you Father, for Your answers to prayer to make this language stick for us! It is still difficult, it is still work, but we continue to see so much growth.

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