what in the world are we doin' down here in Oklahoma??

I would imagine that many of you are confused by our schedule.  And for good reason!  We are in Michigan, then Indiana, then Missouri, then back to Indiana, then back to Missouri, then Indiana...etc etc etc.  And now...we are in Oklahoma?  Phew!  I feel bad for anyone who might be trying to keep track of us!

So I want to explain a bit more clearly (hopefully) what exactly we are doing in Oklahoma.

Most of you know that Nathan and I spent this past Spring semester at our Missionary Training Center in MO taking an intensive linguistics course.  That was in a classroom setting.  Well now, we are putting that whole semester of training into PRACTICE.  Here in Oklahoma, we are doing a Linguistics Practicum--on the Cherokee language!  

Basically, we are practicing what we will soon be doing for real.  When we move into an unreached people group in Papua New Guinea, we are going to learn their language--which has never ever ever been learned before, by any outsiders.  So we will have to learn it by living with them, doing countless sessions with language helpers...using all of our training to learn their language from scratch.  It will be no easy task!  But this practicum in Oklahoma will help us immensely!

Nathan and I are doing this practicum as a team.  We were assigned to a Cherokee language helper (a super sweet older lady--we are really enjoying getting to know her!)  Every day, we go to her house to do a two hour language session.  So far, we have been eliciting many words and phrases from her, writing them down phonetically, coming back to our "camp" and doing all kinds of processing with the data.  Things such as:  figuring out what sounds she is making, which vowels, whether or not the vowels are oral or nasal, lengthened or not--etc, etc.  Eventually we will also take all of our data that we get each day, and analyze the grammar and structure of the Cherokee language.  

We view this training as a privilege, one that we do NOT take lightly!  This will be such a help to us when we get to our tribe in PNG--and we want to put all that we can into it now.  Thank you for all of you who are praying for us, and thinking of us!

Nathan and our classmate/friend, Craig--listening intently to Cherokee words that Craig recorded from his language helper.

A very common sight late into the night.  Nathan listening to recordings from our language helper, entering them into the computer, and doing all kinds of stuff to the data that is super hard to explain :)

These late nights require big cups of coffee!!

We are so thankful and blessed to be able to do this training together.  The Linguistics training has turned us into true nerds--we can talk about Ling late into the night :)  And we know what each other is talking about!  Lol!  

We are also so thankful to have awesome friends/classmates who are helping us with our kids each day.  We don't take our kids to our language sessions (but today we actually did take them and it went really well!!)  But most days, we have classmates who babysit our kids, and we are so grateful.  We are all in this together!

During our time in Oklahoma we will attend the church that our language helper attends.  It is a Cherokee church--they do the service in English, but they do sing some Cherokee songs!  And many of the people who go there are Cherokee.  It is such a good experience for us and our kids!

I will have to do the next blogpost about how it is to live communally with 25 other people :)  We love our group!  But it is definitely a unique living situation!