Itsara

One of my (Cindy’s) goals in this 2-week break is to post on Itsara. (Check!) So, here’s an update from me.

* Adam wants to get pregnant. I told him it’s better if I’m the one who gets pregnant. No news yet.
* I went to some free master dance classes a few weeks ago and met some other dancers. Now I’ve begun adult ballet lessons here. First time since 12 years ago. It hurts, but it’s so good.
* We are considering a trip to the US, although we fear leaving Nathan while he is still new.
* We are trying to figure out if we can adopt/get legal guardianship for Nathan and/or Lutiya. Please pray.
* Adam’s leaving us (Lutiya, Isaac, Nathan, and me) for 2 nights to visit Whytey in Bangkok. What am I going to do? Invite some teenage girls to sleep over, play games, dance, and be silly. Will I ever grow up?
* I’m going to start taking Thai classes again. I’m sick of misunderstanding people and being misunderstood.
* Nathan and Isaac fight a LOT. It drives me nuts.
* Nathan and Isaac are really loving and considerate with each other within seconds of fighting. It’s taught me a lot about forgiving and forgetting.
* Our house is so quiet with only 3 kids. (Well, it’s all relative.)
* I ate someone’s poop the other day.
* It’s not the same without the Abbotts here. We miss them.
* I am so thankful that Jamie brought real parmesan cheese from the US.
* I find a new white hair pretty often.
* I spent a lot of time this break doing Sandra’s math assignments.
* I ate my first peach yesterday in years. (It wasn’t good.)
* I do a great 3-second dog drawing.
* Adam and I are going on a 4-hour date in about 10 minutes. WOOHOO!

Posted with permission. Our 14 year-old friend, who’d prefer to go by the handle MorELen, gave us this mathematical proof about the nature of girls.

Girls take time and money:

g = t x m

Time is money, so:

g = m2

And money is the root of all evil:

m = √e

Therefore:

g = (√e)2
g = e

Girls are evil!

“What is rain, Dad?”
“Rain is God peeing.”
“Wow… that’s a lot of pee.”
“Well, he’s a big God.”

(True story in which two missionary kids (here named Alex and Jesse) are hanging out after school discussing their plans)

Alex: Hey, do you wanna go to the royal flower festival this weekend?
Jesse: Are you kidding? You know that’s a Buddhist thing, right? It’s all about Buddhism and spirits and everything. The whole thing is totally evil.
Alex: Oh, okay… So what are you doing tonight?
Jesse: Trick-or-treating.

The trick to speaking Thai clearly is not in the vowels or the consonants. I get consonants and vowels wrong all the time – I can hear it when I speak – but because I make sure to get the tones right, I am usually understood and Thais even comment on how clearly I speak. Proper pronunciation of vowels and consonants is important, but not as important as the tones.

Everybody, no matter what language they are speaking, uses tones when they speak. The difference between a tonal language like Thai and a non-tonal language like English is in how your tone changes what you say. In a non-tonal language, saying the same words with different tones will perhaps change the connotations of what you are saying (“I play guitar.” versus “I play guitar.”), but the basic meaning is still the same. In a tonal language, if you speak using the wrong tones it will change the meaning of what you are saying entirely. This is the biggest mistake I see other foreigners make when they try to speak Thai. I’ve had foreigners comment on just how much I pay attention to the tones. I want you to understand why.

With the wrong tones, you’ll say tiger instead of shirt, pot instead of doctor, ghost instead of older brother.

“I like to study” becomes “I like money.” A request, “I need a new car”, becomes an offer: “Do you need a car?” Instead of telling someone you have a cold, you’ll tell them you’re a temple. While trying to invite someone to a movie, you’ll say, “Would you like to watch people sit?”

Oh, but it gets worse. If you don’t pay attention to your tones, you may intend to ask for cooked rice but accidentally tell the cook that she is white and beautiful. You’ll ask for medicine, and the pharmacist will introduce you to his grandmother. Ask a woman if she’s selling tickets, and she slaps you in the face for calling her a prostitute. Or ask a little boy to point to the nearest shop, and instead he pees on a caterpillar.

I hope this helps you understand just how important tones are in the Thai language. Maybe next time I can tell you about the consonants Thai has that English doesn’t, and why you can easily call your aunt crazy if you’re not careful.

The first stage was good-natured laughter. The second stage, annoyance. After annoyance, it soon became a running gag. In the fourth stage, it stopped being funny and started being just plain eerie. Now I’m onto the fifth stage.

Resignation.

Two and a half years ago, as faithful readers will remember, I told you about the campaign to tell me that my name is really Matt. Like some kind of sick, cosmic joke, that campaign continues. I now have a Matt living in my house, and apparently we both sound exactly alike on the phone. It’s been months since I didn’t have a phone conversation that started like this:

*Ring ring*
Me: “Hello?”
Them: “Hi, Matt.”

I hope there isn’t a sixth stage, but I fear there is and that it has the word “breakdown” in it.

Tongue-tongue is sad because he has but one small tongue with which to taste the whole world.

I don’t know where he gets it…

I believe that going to the dentist is preparation for persecution. When China rules southeast Asia and arrests me for being a Christian, I’ll be that much more ready for interrogation.

A couple of unrelated things that made me laugh recently. The comic was done by the guys at Penny Arcade.

“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” — Ambrose Pierce (1842-1914)

We got to hang out with some of the Im Jai kids a bit this week. Dave and Shirley are the volunteer coordinators at Im Jai, and it turns out they live in the same neighborhood as we do. So we’ve been going to church with them at Chiangmai Fellowship Church (a Thai church with headphones for us farangs). On Sunday they had a handful of the Im Jai girls over at their house to watch Cinderella Story, and we got to hang out with them.

Also on Monday we went with them to “English camp”. Right now, the Thai schools are on vacation, so Im Jai is teaching them English and Bible stories in the mornings. It was a lot of fun hanging out with the kids, and I took some pictures. Afterwards, we went with Dave and Shirley and two of the Im Jai boys (Jack and Boy) to get some ice cream. Jack of course speaks Thai (and a little English) and Boy is deaf, so he only signs. I’m used to not being understood, but usually I can get by with the few Thai words I know plus some hand signals. With Boy I realized that I couldn’t speak with him at all, nor understand what he was saying. The only words I know in sign language are “relax”, “weird”, and a few Christian words (like “Jesus loves me”). It was an unexpected language barrier, but we had fun at least.

Our schedule for the near future looks like this. We have a friend from Hong Kong visiting us probably tomorrow, and Ray and Kaoru are coming up here sometime in the next few days. We should be starting language school next week (I’m anxious to get moving on this), and we’ll hopefully start working with Im Jai on a more scheduled basis when they get back to school around May 15th.

In the meantime, I’ve managed to memorize the Thai letters (44 consonants and 32 vowels, sheesh) and have discovered that I still can’t read because there are rules I don’t know about. That’s not even counting the rules for what tone each syllable is. Sean is in Burma with some missionary team he hooked up with and will hopefully be back tomorrow or Friday. Cindy’s been doing her own Thai studies and keeping in touch with folks back home (among other things).

God’s been doing stuff too. For me, I realized that everytime I’ve worshipped here, I’ve had an itch to take my guitar and go worship outside somewhere. I can’t go far with my guitar on my scooter, but I hope to do that around the neighborhood somewhere. You can pray for that. I also have an itch to study the Word again, and I have visions of studying it with random people we meet too. I don’t know how that will work, especially with the language, but pray for that too.

On a completely unrelated note, I read this from Dano’s blog this morning and I thought it was hilarious – definitely the loudest laugh for at least a week:

I feel that I need to hand people this disclaimer when I meet them:

The person you are about to meet wishes to be kind, respectful and courteous. Yet, he is terrible with names and has extreme difficulty recognizing individuals of Asian descent. Therefore, he will likely introduce himself to you at least three times and he accepts no responsibility for name or face recollection for conversations less than a minute in duration.

The only problem is there’d be a lot of people telling me that I already gave them one.