mmm-BELLY-may Days

Back

I am back.  Back in the States, back in the blogosphere, back.  I'm going to try to catch up with all the posts I wrote in my head in mmmBELLYmay land.  Good to get those out of there and make some room for something else. 

If I don't catch up on all of those old posts, all I'll blather on about are the two cutest nieces in the world, who are also exceptionally smart and talented.  I've been spending most of my time since I've been back taking pictures of the nieces.  And getting specimens to bring to the doctor.  But you really don't want me to blog about that.

World Malaria Day

"Even what may appear as a benign intervention on the surface can have damning consequences. Say there is a mosquito-net maker in small-town Africa. Say he employs 10 people who together manufacture 500 nets a week. Typically, these 10 employees support upward of 15 relatives each. A Western government-inspired program generously supplies the affected region with 100,000 free mosquito nets. This promptly puts the mosquito net manufacturer out of business, and now his 10 employees can no longer support their 150 dependents. In a couple of years, most of the donated nets will be torn and useless, but now there is no mosquito net maker to go to. They'll have to get more aid." Wall Street Journal

Pictures, pictures!

New pictures!  Hot off the press!  Or the memory card, or whatever.  Anyway, click on the photo album to the left called mmmBELLYmay readers to see pictures of people reading and learning to read here.

Me, speak?

So, I'm reading BooMama's blog and I find out about this conference, She Speaks. 

Do you hunger for the Word of God and long to teach it with authority and excellence?
Is your heart burdened for hurting women?
Is God calling you to a teaching/speaking ministry?
Have you been teaching for years but need a time of renewal and replenishment?

When I read that, I thought, that's me!  Especially the bit about renewal and replenishment.  So I read a little further and found out that I could sign up for a "speaker evaluation group."  And I thought, no way.  My speaking is just fine, even pretty good   My whole job here is helping people tell God's story!  I certainly don't need any evaluation to rattle me.  Maybe I'll just try to go as a blogger.  Yeah, that's it.  A blogger.  That's me, the storytelling blogger!

But the thought of those evaluation sessions stuck in my head.  So did the thought that I might be just a tad proud of my yakking, but I might just have some room to grow.  Which I do, of course.

So, even if I don't get to this conference while I'm home from mmm-BELLY-may Land this summer, I think I'll be paying attention to how I can be a better storyteller.

Want to go to the conference?  There's a contest going on for a scholarship, click here for the details.   Hurry, the deadline is March 27th.

Single in mmm-BELLY-may Land

This is my little friend Bridget after she ate a mango a while back.  I also look like this after I eat an early mango.  They're stringy and juicy and impossible to eat politely.  I call them mango floss. 

Being able to eat mangoes with no shame is one of the benefits of being single here.  Another one is that I don't have to have my fan oscillate.  It points right at me all the time.  No sharing.  Bliss.

Now, mangoes and fans may not seem like a big deal, but when it's 105 degrees and humid, they are pretty picking important.

I've been thinking about blogging about this for a while, Dennis' post about embracing your season finally got me to do it. 

But, I needed to find something just a smidge deeper than food and cool moving air to talk about.  And thinking about that was a good thing for me to do, especially lately.

Being single in mmm-BELLY-may Land forces me to really depend on mmmBELLYmay speakers to get my job done.  And since my job is helping them tell God's story in their language, that's not a bad thing at all.

Anyone want a mango?

Dog blog?

Certain bloggers are always making fun of "chick blogs" that have flowers and cats and pretty stuff on them.  Not wanting to be accused of this, I decided to get another enormous dog and put a picture of him on my blog.

Well, not really, but Charger the Rhodesian Ridgeback needed a home, and Buddy the German Shepherd Dog needed a friend.  So, meet my new dog Charger.  It was really hard to get a picture of him and Buddy together standing still, they just want to play all the time.

I didn't think to get a good picture of Charger's crazy hairdo, the ridgeback his breed is named for.  Coming soon.
Charger's a little mangy right now, but we've got a great vet here who's taking care of that.  I guess mange isn't fatal anymore-all I knew about it was from reading James Herriott books, but I guess those were written before antibiotics and other wonderful modern drugs.

I am Alexander.

Sorry, I haven't been able to get online since Feb. 18th, and even then I was only online for an hour because I left my power cord at home two hours away and now I've been online for almost four hours and I've spent 1/4 of that time updating my antivirus thingy and I've been answering work emails not blogging and now it's almost 11pm and I'm starving but there are no restaurants open this late so I'm going to go eat pretzels and cookies and drink warm water in my hotel room because the internet only really starts working after 8 pm and I don't want to drive in the dark might hit another goat so I have to spend the night in town which isn't so bad because the only room available at the hotel is one with hot water and a/c, which is great when the power is on which it is right now and I sure hope it is all night but if not I have my battery operated fan which I just spent a ridiculous $12 buying D cell batteries for but it's like 95 and humid here so what am I going to do and none of my French speaking friends have helped me with my last post so I'm stuck having my students act out sawing and something that isn't polite to type about because that's the only pair of words I could come up with in my bronchitis fuddled heat melted brain

I think I'll move to Australia.

Actually, this day hasn't been all that bad, my excuses just started sounding like Alexander.

But Australia would still be nice.

Free variation day

This morning I was teaching French by giving commands for my students to follow.

Me:  "Sentez l'orange !"  (Smell the orange!)

Students:  Pause, puzzled.  Finally, one starts swaying a little bit and kind of chanting "L'orange, l'orange, l'orange."  The others join in.

Me:  Very confused.

Then I realized what was going on.  mmmBELLYmay doesn't make a difference between "s" and "sh" in words, they just alternate freely.

So, my students heard "Chantez l'orange !"  And so they did.  They sang "the orange" very nicely actually.  Relevance Theory at work, my friends, powerfully at work. 

This has come up before when we've told stories about Jesus chasing demons out of people.  "Chasser" becomes "sachet", and I guess we have Jesus putting demons in plastic bags.  Hmmm.

So, my dear francophone friends, I need your help.  I'm going to tackle s/sh confusion, and to do that I need sets of words in French that differ only in those two sounds.  (Like sin/shin in English, in case any non Francophone/nonlinguist cares.)  Minimal or near minimal pairs as it were, O fellow linguists, preferably nice concrete nouns or verbs we can act out.

Of snow and snakes

Dear Abe, Isaac, Lexi, Jake, Lauren, Olivia, and Zach,

Thanks for your good questions about snow and snakes!  I'll answer your other questions too, in other blog posts.

Even though this looks like snow, it's actually cotton that's been harvested and piled up, waiting to be weighed.  It rarely gets below 60 degrees farenheit here, and in the hot season, which is coming up in March and April, it gets up to 120 degrees.  Our mountains aren't high enough to get snow, too bad, huh?  It would be nice to be able to go up into the mountains and cool off by going sledding when it gets hot!

Even though this snake came to visit my yard, I haven't ever been bitten by a snake, and I'm really glad!  I don't have anything about snakes in general, but there are some pretty poisonous ones that live here. One of the reasons I don't have any grass in my yard is so that snakes don't have anywhere to hide.  The other reason is that water is pretty scarce here, and there just isn't enough to use for watering grass.

Thanks for all of your letters!  Ryan, Courtney, Madison, Nicole, Taylor, Jared, Eean, Brock, Caleb, and Andrew, I'll be answering yours soon!

Love,
Miss Nora

Dear Abe

Hi Abe!  (Your name isn't really Abe, I'm giving you a pseudonym.  Ask Mrs. D what a pseudonym is!)

Thanks for your letter with all the nice compliments and good questions!

When I need to have clothes made, I go to a seamstress and I show her a picture of what I want my dress to look like.  She measures me, and then she makes it for me.  It's really nice to have clothes that fit perfectly!  Here's a picture of me at the seamstress' shop:

I don't know if it has a name, but one song that they sing here is a lullaby I call Yoo Yoo Yoo.  Click here to see a video of a woman singing it.  I like to sing it to crying babies because the babies stop crying and all the adults around start laughing because it's funny to hear me sing it.  And, when I forget the words, I can just sing yoo yoo over and over again until someone jumps in and helps me remember them!

Thanks for praying and for writing!

Love,
Miss Nora