Long time no blog

Apologies to many. It has been a long time since I have updated my blog and now that I have a moment to write, I am in a place up in the mountains without wifi. So I might finish this blog this evening (Thursday), but I won't be able to post until Saturday.

Last Friday I finished my four weeks of immersion Spanish in Antigua and, of course, I thought I should have learned more. And of course, my teachers said I covered and learned more than just about any other student could learn in four weeks, and I should give myself a break and relax some. School ended at 3PM on Friday and Rodrigo and Eder were waiting outside the school to begin our trip to San Miguel Chicaj. This would be, without construction delays and traffic, about a four plus hour trip, so we overnighted in the capital and headed out the next morning. Saturday afternoon, we arrived in San Miguel Chicaj. I love San Miguel Chicaj, but more on that later. I was shown my room, and after the briefest bit of unpacking, I went to visit the Ixcopal's. The Ixcopal family is about a dozen or more depending how much of the extended family is living in San Miguel or in the capital. David and his entire family are so special to many of us at Desert Springs Church. In 2005, I was privileged to co-lead a trip to San Miguel to build a house for Pastor David and his family. So many people were blessed by that trip. David and his family were blessed, all of the youth in San Miguel and adults also that use the house for church and meetings continue to be blessed, even today. And those of us from Desert Springs Church that got to build that house Guatemalan style will not forget how we were used by God to further His kingdom work in San Miguel Chicaj. David speaks zero English, but with my primitive language skills, we were actually able to hold a good conversation. While I was with David and his family, it deluged for a while, and when there was a break in the rain, I walked back to the Barrera's.

That evening, another one of my favorite family's, Irma, Byron and Pamela and Carlie came by the Barrera's to say Hi to me. In our original trips to San Miguel, Irma was our trilingual translator. Irma spoke English, Spanish and her heart language, Rabinal Achi. And she has the sweetest spirit. Years later, she and Byron married and they have two little girls, Pamela 3 years old and Carlie 2 months old. And Pamela is learning English, Spanish and Achi. And she and I had fun playing games on my iPad.

Sunday morning, the Barrera's and I went to church, one of the biggest churches in San Miguel, but one with a very difficult history. In the afternoon, Hector called me up and told me to be at David Ixcopal's house at 5:30. Then he corrected himself and told me to be there at 6PM because he told all the youth to be there at 5:30 which meant they would not be there until around 6PM, cause that's how they roll in Guatemala. A bit before 6 (cause that's how I roll) I walked in to David's house ... And no Hector or Eder. I found out Eder was in San Geronimo and David did not know where Hector was. I called Hector and asked where he was. He told me he was at David's house. I said I was at David's house and he was not at the same house I was at. He replied, "Estoy en frente de casa de David" (I am in front of David's house). "Oh, estoy a dentro de casa de David. Una momenta voy a estar en frente de casa de David". (Oh, I am inside David's house, in a moment I will be in front of David's house). Moments later I was in front of the house and moments later about a dozen Achi youth and I were inside a microbus heading I did not know where. I asked Hector where we were going and he said, "Despues San Gabriel" (after San Gabriel). After San Gabriel, the road got very interesting (narrow, dirt, rocky; in the USA we would consider it to be a four wheeled drive road) and finally petered out in a stream. Some do of the guys got out of the microbus and headed different directions trying to see if anyone knew where the little church was that we were going to. By this time it was also dark and now we were hiking on a little knarly path and I was hoping not to trip. Note to myself: never go out again without my little flashlight or headlamp. We found the little church, and it was fantastic. Chickens, dogs, wonderful Achi ladies, young and old, all in the traditional long skirts. A sound system was set up, a campfire was started, we played some games around the fire, sang a lot of songs. Then I was asked to introduce myself, in Spanish, and I did to everyone's amusement. I tried to say I was married which is 'estoy casado' but I guess it sounded like I said 'estoy cansado' which is to say 'I am tired'. At least I did not say I was tired of being married. From now on I am just going to say, "tengo esposa" which is to say I have a wife. After my amusing introduction, Hector preached from Ephesians 6 on the armor of God. At the end of Hector's sermon, I was asked to pray in English. A closing prayer with Achi is a chorus of prayer. I started the prayer and then everyone starts praying simultaneously, and loudly ... for a long time, until it starts trailing off and closes. You have to experience it, it is powerful. Then we had coffee for everyone, and of course they graciously gave the gringo the largest cup of coffee, and of course I had to graciously accept it. This was to cause a couple of problems later on. The first problem was shortly to make itself known after we retraced our path down the knarly trail and found the microbus in the dark. I was about to get in a small microbus, and go up a bumpy road and I had not used the facilities for hours and now I had a bladder full of coffee. Fortunately, I saw about four other guys that had the same problem watering plants about twenty yards off to my right, so I went over and helped them with those plants, whew! I was able to enjoy the bumpy ride back home to San Miguel. That evening when I was reflecting on just how great the evening was, and it was a fantastic evening, being with these young leaders preaching the Word, and I was laying down trying to go to sleep, I was reminded why I never drink coffee in the evening. I have enough sensitivity to caffeine, that if I drink it in the evening, I will not sleep. And I had consumed the largest plastic glass of coffee that this village could find. I think I got maybe two hours of sleep that night/morning.

Later, the next day, I learned some history of the little village of Las Minas that we visited. Apparently during the civil wars in the eighties, there was a valley that was going to be flooded and the people were told to leave the valley. A number refused to leave and troops came in and shot many of them and the rest fled. And many of them fled to this little remote village of Las Minas which thirty years ago was even more remote then. And of course, because they had troops shooting at them, many became guerrillas. Twenty years ago there were medical missions in the area and many of the medical issues that needed to be dealt with were related to bullet wounds or bullets that had not been removed because they did not trust going into a government hospital.

Fried Brain Confessions

In the past seven days of school I have been exposed to 240 verbs, most of them irregular and my brain is fried AND I cannot carry on a decent conversation with a six year old. If you are in a hurry, that just about sums it up, but if you have time I will continue to share my experience of my foreign language immersion experience.

I say I have been exposed to 240 new verbs in the past seven days of my Level 2 Spanish instruction which is not exactly the same as saying I have learned and memorized 240 new verbs (most of them irregular) in the following persons: I, familiar You, formal You/He/She/It, We, familiar plural You, and formal plural You/He/She/It. If a verb is regular and ends in 'ar', then the endings for the aforementioned six person types are o-as-a-amos-áis-an. Similar rules exist for regular verbs that end in 'er' and 'ir', but I won't bore you with those endings. And all of this is in the present tense. Level 1 dealt with mostly standard verbs and also the past tense and a bit of a trick to speak in the future tense using the verb 'to go' to say 'going to "action/verb"'. We might have had four irregular verbs in the eighty verbs we learned. I hope this is not too boring, stick with me and I will try to say something funny before I end this blog.

In my first seven days of Level 2, the 240 verbs that I have been taught (also not the same as learned and remembered) are organized in 8 groups. The first group is the regular "ar", "er", and "ir" verbs. The next 7 groups, each with subgroups, are the irregular verbs and if I was to explain what made every group and subgroup irregular, I would never finish this blog. I can proudly say that when the group is explained to me, I think I understand perfectly, until the next group is presented and it immediately pushes what was ever in my brain out through my ear and on to the floor. An example of a rule could be "when a verb ends in 'cer', the first person conjugation will end in 'zco' instead of 'co', unless a consonant immediately precedes the 'cer'; in those cases the first person conjugation will end in 'zo'". Right! 240 verbs and most of them irregular, with seven different sets and subsets of rules on how to conjugate them differently. One of the verbs I was exposed to today was " to ski". I looked at that verb and said to my teacher, "For heaven's sake! I am in Guatemala! Why are you trying to teach me the verb "to ski"? I refuse to learn it!" Of course, now that I made a big deal of it, the verb 'esquiar' is burned in my brain and is taking up space other more valuable verbs could be occupying.

I really do like my Level 2 teacher, she does make learning fun. She's energetic, jokes and we are probably the loudest teacher/student pair in the school right now (of course that might be because I am hard of hearing and I don't know how loud I am talking and she is talking loud so I can hear her). Last Friday she asked me to go to our white board and conjugate about 15 verbs in all six person present tense conjugations. I started doing the conjugations and after about two, I stopped and said, "Our 1:1 teaching time is valuable and it is a waste of time for me to conjugate while you just sit there. I don't mind doing it, but make it homework, not part of our 1:1 time". And I had to convey that all in Spanish. But she replied in Spanish, "OK, Marvin, our time is gold". At first I thought, "It's my money", but then I remembered more accurately that I am able to take this trip because others believed enough in me to support me financially. So I am being a good steward of our investment. My typical day is six hours of class and another three hours of homework, whew! My teacher is pretty impressed. Today she said that when I was young I must have been REALLY intelligent and now I was very intelligent. Actually she might have just said I was intelligent and left off the 'very'. I think that had to be the most positive insult I have ever received. Well, tonight's homework had the verb 'esquiar' in it and I crossed the question out and did not do it. We shall see what she has to say tomorrow.

The Christian Spanish Academy language school has been established for twenty years and most of the teachers have at least ten or more years teaching Spanish to non-Spanish speaking students from many different nations. Also if you choose to stay with a family, all of the families are vetted. The family I am staying with has been hosting students for at least ten years and it is expected that the families continue the teaching experience and not speak English to you. However, they understand English and when you say something incorrect or can't find a word, they will say the correct translation or give you the word if it does not come. All of this is to say in the cocoon, surrounded by people experienced in hearing their language mangled by students attempting to learn it, I can communicate some fairly complex conversations. However, my experiences in the wild are not yet that successful. I often just go sit in the central park and often someone will talk to me. If it is someone wanting to learn English, they attempt their English, I attempt my Spanish and we have an enjoyable time of learning together. Once I was talking to an older Japanese widow that lived near Antigua for four years but still spoke Japanese at home with her sons. Perhaps because Spanish was a learned language for her and she was not extremely proficient, we had a very successful discussion. BUT, if I find myself talking to someone that is not an experienced language instructor, has no experience or interest in English and Spanish is their heart language, we can reach the universally understood "huh?" fairly quickly, accompanied by the usual blank look on both of our faces. I am always at a disadvantage in that game because I am trying to play on what is clearly their home field.

Three more days of class and then it is on to San Miguel Chicaj where I hope to get more field experience. And for those of you that read my last blog, yes I did survive and I remain among the living. Monday I was still moving slow but today I feel pretty good.

It happen, Estoy Muy Enfermo

I have been in Guatemala for more than three weeks and I had not yet been sick. That is the longest I have ever been in country without getting sick. But like the other baseball players in the dugout never discuss the no-hitter their pitcher has going between innings, I guess I should never have thought about my string of healthy days. Admittedly for the past couple of days or more, I seem to have some sort of an intestinal bug that was creating some discomfort, but I thought with my pro-biotics and vitamins, I would kick it. Friday after class, Abdiel Lopez picked me up and I was spending the weekend with him and his family. He does not live near Antigua nor the capital, and we ended up at a little dirt road smaller than the dirt roads in San Miguel Chicaj. Then we pulled up at walled house with a huge steel gait. After the gait was slid open on its tracks, I found myself at the nicest house I have had the privilege to visit in Guatemala. Abdiel and one of his daughters started jamming and doing some Christian songs. I also remembered my goal of being smarter than a fifth grader in Spanish, and tried to talk to a six year old in my Spanish, very unsuccessfully. That was a bit disappointing. Abdiel is the regional director for Faith Comes By Hearing and his region includes 11 Central and South American countries and is really nice house also has a very strong wifi signal, so I was able to Skype with the family. The six year old girl was the birthday girl for the night so there was a party. Her family went to Abdiel's church (Abdiel is also a pastor) and the little girl wanted to have her party with Abdiel's family. After the party, Abdiel's brother-in-law told stories for hours and although he was also acting the stories out, he spoke so fast I was not getting very much. But everyone was laughing so hard during almost three hours of stories, that they had tears in their eyes.

After the stories, I retired to bed. At about 2AM, I woke up and my stomach was rumbling and there was also intestinal signs of a southern breakout. This was a terrible familiar feeling about all of this. I was glad I was in the nicest house I had ever been in, because the porcelain throne and were about to become friends for a while. The Spanish name for toilet (actual toilet, not bathroom which we all know as baño) is inodoro and it is masculine. The name of my toilet became Raul, because that is what I called him all night. I would hold my head over him and say, "Raul, Raul" from the bottom of my gut. I was purging from both ends and when morning rolled around, I was very, very weak from dehydration.

The family became aware of my situation in the morning and they felt terrible. I let them know it had started days ago and not at their place. One of the bad things, though, was I had left my ciprofloxin back in Antigua for times like this. But I showed the family 'ciprofloxin' on google and they called around and got some delivered an hour later.

Today I am hanging around, mostly in bed. I have been able to keep yogurt down and I have not had to have a close conversation with Raul since this morning. I was supposed to go to church with them tonight for a couples dinner and Abdiel had asked to just talk for a couple of minutes, which could have easily meant I was the keynote speaker. I am not going to be able to join them, though. I am going to spend the rest of the day and evening just getting well so I can go to Abdiel's church with his family. Life in Guatemala.

A Capital Thing to Do

I have had a run of several good days in a row. This past Friday, I passed my first level Spanish exam, and I did very well. It was a pretty comprehensive exam that took nearly three hours to complete. I was dreading the oral part where a story is read to me in Spanish, and then I have to remember what was read to me. Then the instructor (and it is a different instructor than the one that instructed me for the prior two weeks) asks me questions in Spanish about the story and I have to attempt to remember what was read to me and respond accurately in Spanish. I passed that part of the exam with an 80% score; I was thrilled. The balance of the test was written and it took me a bit over two hours to complete the written part. Whoopee! I passed it! But the bad thing about immersion and doing this alone is I had no one to celebrate with; how sad ("could y'all shed a big tear for me? Thanks, I feel better now").

The next day, two of my friends, the Barrera's from San Miguel Chicaj, joined me in Antigua for lunch. I say they are from San Miguel Chicaj, but actually Rodrigo is from Mexico and Carol is from the USA. They have been in San Miguel Chicaj for more than thirty years as a Wycliffe bible translation team and my church, Desert Springs Church in Albuquerque has been working with and supporting the Barrera's for just about eight years. They are both language experts, especially Carol, and they are trilingual in Spanish, English and Rabinal Achi. It was a real pleasure talking to both of them and Carol knew exactly what I was going through because she could still remember what it was like when she learned Spanish. So we had fun relating common, but different experiences. We had a nice lunch in Antigua and then I returned with them to their place in the capital, Guatemala City. That night we fellowshipped, shared stories, I did my Spanish review and they both kindly spoke English to me and did not make the week end a total teaching experience.

The next day, Rodrigo and I spent most of the day together while Carol stayed home and recharged her batteries. They were in the capital because Carol had been one of the principals in a two week language workshop for several people groups all over Guatemala and she was exhausted. Rodrigo and I headed out across the city for breakfast and then we went to church. The church was a great experience, but authentic and not bilingual. However, when the sermon started, a nice young lady gave me a headset and a receiver and said I could listen to the English translation of the sermon. After five minutes of fumbling with headset, trying to see if there was a way to change the channel on it and hearing nothing but static, a different nice young lady came by and told me there was no one translating today. Oh, well, so I listened to the rest of the sermon and caught about every fifth word ... not really enough to get all the meaning. I have not yet reached my goal of being 'smarter than a fifth grader'.

After church, Rodrigo and I were given directions on how to find the orphanage that the church supported. Rodrigo was pretty pessimistic about the directions. Two people gave us directions and they were almost the same directions. We made two big unsuccessful attempts to find the orphanage and drove through some very interesting parts of town that made me realize I definitely was not in Kansas. We actually even gave up and were driving back in to the capital when we saw one of the landmarks we were supposed to drive around. So we made a U turn, and I will not tell you what driving around the landmark encompassed, but we made it to the orphanage.

Visiting the orphanage was a delight. It was pretty large, with spacious grounds and the young girls were on one side of the orphanage and the young boys on the other, with the common eating areas and classrooms in the middle. It was clean everywhere we looked and they did not know we were coming. The kids were happy and the youngest ones climbed all over us. Towards the end of our San Miguel Chicaj mission, I would love to bring the team from Desert Springs and Rabinal Achi young adult team and do a cross cultural combined mission for the orphanage.

After the orphanage visit, Rodrigo and I returned to the capital and picked up Carol; and we returned to Antigua to have another wonderful dinner together. There are a number of wonderful places to have dinner in Antigua, if you have not figured that out. After dinner they returned to the capital to prepare to drive back to San Miguel Chicaj and I remained in Antigua for my next two weeks of language school.

Time to Confess

This story probably begins with an incident that happened during the Vietnam conflict in 1968. At that time, I was enjoying the tropical climate and environs of Vietnam in my green pickle suit, on assignment, as an employee of the USA. I was one of Uncle Sam's Misguided Children (USMC). Yes, I was a marine stationed in Danang, Vietnam. Most of my duty was in Danang and it was there, one evening that I found myself too close, way too close, to more than one F4 Phantom jet while they were launching on missions at full power take off. The details of this incident will remain a story with limited circulation.

So, what does this have to do with my Guatemala trip? Let me continue. At about the age of 35, I started developing tinnitus. By way of explanation, tinnitus is the perception of sound within the human ear in the absence of corresponding external sound. Now, almost thirty years later, I have full fledged ringing in my ears 7x24. I have not experienced true silence in probably twenty years. So one accommodates and gets used to the constant ringing and it is not a big deal. But in addition, about five years ago, I found I was saying, "Huh?" more than normal, so I had my hearing tested. And I found that in addition I was having significant hearing loss, especially in my left ear. I went to an audiologist and she seemed astounded that I could carry on a conversation without hearing aids. And I found out some very interesting things about my hearing and communication process.

This is probably not a surprise to many that know me, but I actually don't hear much of what is said to me. But apparently I hear enough, and if I see the lips moving, my brain automatically, with the words that I actually hear, fills in the missing sounds/words I did not hear and my brain receives a complete thought and I respond in context. And this process is usually accurate, most of the time. But even considering the usual accuracy of this process, I knew my hearing was deteriorating, so I made the decision to get hearing aids. The details of that process, the many different options don't add much to this story so I won't go into the details. Except to say, I did buy a pair of very nice hearing aids. And I even wore them ... for a while. My hearing aids did improve matters, but I could not wear them while I was riding my bike, changing the batteries and charging the controller was a small issue, they sometimes itched, and of course, I was wearing hearing aids. Oh no! How far off was the walker? So, because the improvement was just above the just noticeable detection limit, after a while I stopped wearing my hearing aids and returned to letting my brain do its compensation process.

So what does this have to do with Guatemala? Well now I am in the process of learning a new language and my brain no longer recognizes the landmarks that existed when I was back home. Now it hears, "blah, blah 'pero', blah (nothing), blah, blah, 'entonces', blah". No familiar landmarks, very few known words, or understood context. I now have hundreds of vocabulary words that I should know, not yet a hundred verbs that I can now conjugate in the past, present and future. I am writing and reading better each day but when the conversation starts, my brain immediately gridlocks.

I anticipated this could become a problem and I also knew that my hearing might not be up to the task completely. So I actually packed my 'aids' and brought them with me. My left ear is clearly my worst ear, so to begin, I only wore my left aid today, and I think it made a difference. I was catching words better and our oral discussions were better today. I was not completely gridlocked and my responses were coming out, albeit very slowly. But today I could understand the questions with less repeating, and I was responding with answers and questions, in Spanish for a change, not in English.

Tomorrow is my exam for the completion of Level A (the first of four levels) and another instructor other than mine will conduct the exam. The exam will consist of me writing all my verb conjugations in simple future, present and past tenses. This will include a number reflexive verbs that give me trouble. The exam will include me describing in Spanish what I see in some photographs that will be shown to me. I believe I will do well in these parts of the test. And then stories will be read to me and I will be asked questions about the story, and I will have to respond in Spanish, accurately based on what I heard, understood and remembered about the story. For me, this will be the most difficult part of the exam.

In my next blog, I hope to tell you I passed with flying colors.