L is for Literacy

I [Lori] am studying Literacy this session at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics.  I needed an elective to fill out my semester and thought this would be the best one for me.  I was an elementary school teacher for over ten years and home-schooled my kids for almost seven years.  I thought this class would be fairly straight forward.  But literacy, I've learned, is much more than teaching a kid to read.

How is it different ?

Well, try to imagine living where no one in your community reads.  Your language is not even written down.  If there is a school, it is taught in the national language that you do not speak.

Is literacy recognizing letters?  Making the sounds?  Writing?  Comprehension?

Now imagine coming to a place like this where linguists are learning the language in hopes of translating the Bible so that people can hear and read God's word for the first time ever.  How do you choose what letters should be in an alphabet?  What should they look like?  Should tone be marked?  Should it be the same script as the national language to help transfer the skills to a second language some day?  What if this language uses different sounds than the national language?

How do you choose what lesson to teach first?  Do you need to teach that marks on the paper stand for words - words that will be the same every time they look at them?  Do they need to learn how to hold a pencil?  What method of teaching will work with this group?

How do you train teachers?  What sources of writing are there?  Do books need to be written in this language for new readers?

These are the kinds of things our professor, Dr. Pete Unseth, is teaching us.  He is amazing - one of the best teachers I have ever met.  He worked in Ethiopia until health issues brought him back to the US.  Ethiopia's loss is so many students' gain.  But he is still not well and needs our prayers...

Mock orthography conference, where we dressed in character and worked through selecting an alphabet for a hypothetical language group

Dinner at the Unseths' home.  Pete and our kids are using word magnets to explore language.

We are amazingly blessed with opportunities to learn and grow here!

K is for Kristin

Having a girl is much different that having boys.  And it is a gift.  Kristin is our soon to be nine-year-old daughter, the middle child in our family.  Actually, her first name isn't really Kristin.  Her full name is Marjorie Kristin Gassler.  Her first name came from Lori's grandmother, Marjorie Rundle.  But we've always called her Kristin.  Or Pookie.  Or Late for Dinner.

One of the things we like most about Kristin is that she has some gifts that are unique in our family.  Kristin has an acute sense of clothing style.  She has the ability to take her old clothing or hand-me-downs from her cousins and create all new outfits full of flair.  She also is much neater than the rest of us!  She makes friends easily and has a lot of artistic ability.  And she loves to make friends with adults that she looks up to.  Kristin is good buds with at least four ladies that are three times her age!  She also likes to care for younger children, showing a very "motherly" instinct.

Kristin with family friend Gabrielle Jones

Kristin, in spite of being a girly-girl, is very determined, competitive, and persevering in most things that she does.  Kristin started with ballet a few years ago.  This past year, we enjoyed seeing Kristin learn to play softball (often wearing a skirt in games and practice) as well as swimming competitively.  Her competitive nature keeps the boys on their toes as she is always trying to outdo them.  She has pushed them both academically and athletically in the past couple of years.

But most of all Kristin is a very loving person.  She has a very caring heart, gives hugs to anyone who needs one, and loves to take care of others.  She is quite generous and enjoys creating arts and crafts as gifts for friends and family.  We're very thankful for nine years of her laughs, hugs, and delightful personality.

Kristin with her cousin Mary

Kristin and her best friend Catherine

Hunting peanuts at the Sutton Family Reunion

J is for JAARS

Last week, on our way from Virginia to Texas, we stopped off in a rural area southeast of Charlotte, NC to visit our good friend Josh Mills and check out the JAARS Center.  It's peculiar name comes from its former identity as the Jungle Aviation And Radio Service.  JAARS is now much more than aviation and radios, but the goals are the same as they always have been: to provide logistical support to Bible translation and literacy projects across the globe.

Today, JAARS has a very large IT department that does all kinds of things supporting translation, from constructing websites to equipping fieldworkers with the software and hardware that they need.  Also at JAARS is a contingent of people developing solutions for fieldworkers that are in remote situations and need electric power for computers and communication.

Demonstration of compact solar panel for remote locations.  This portable array can power a laptop computer.

Another really interesting endeavor of JAARS is in vernacular media.  Given that many of the language projects that Wycliffe and other translation partners are active in are oral cultures, vernacular media is very important for sharing translated materials such as scripture.  Oral media also has a way of developing interest in literacy, another spoke in the wheel that is Bible translation.

Josh Mills hard at work in the JAARS auto shop.

JAARS also works with field workers in the area of transportation.  The land transportation department, where our friend Josh works, trains field workers in off-road vehicle operation among other things.  There is also maritime operations, and of course aviation.  JAARS pilots and aircraft are in several locations around the world transporting field workers, their families and supplies to some of the most remote locations on earth.  The pilots and mechanics are evaluated and train extensively at the JAARS center.  If you would like to read the blog of friends of ours in JAARS aviation, visit the Brewer Family.  Of particular interest might be the Brewers' entry for July 3, which has some video highlights from Mountain Week, the culmination of training for JAARS pilots.

Ben checking out a Pilatus PC-6 in the JAARS hangar.

The JAARS center is also home to a couple of very cool museums.  One of them is the Museum of the Alphabet, a thorough triptych through the history of written language.  We look forward to visiting the other museum, the Mexico-Cardenas Museum, which contains exhibits detailing the cultures of Mexico and the early years of SIL International's work in translation and literacy in that country.

Noah, Kristin, and Ben operating a small replica of the first printing press.

We had a great time visiting JAARS and would encourage you to visit as well.  It's fun to be around a place where people are working really hard with very diverse gifts for the goal of seeing God glorified through Bible translation.

I is for Ishq

One of the great pleasures in the midst of a challenging Spring semester was playing music with the group Ishq.  Yes, it's a funny little word with an odd spelling.  It is a word of Arabic origin that means love, such as the love that a creature has for its creator.  It is also the name for a fun global worship ensemble that leads worship frequently around the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

Ishq has a large, dynamic repertoire of songs from dozens of cultures and has led worship at many venues around the DFW metroplex over the past few years.  It has been truly enjoyable to rehearse and perform with this group and to be taught many percussion instruments by Paul Neeley, one of the leaders of the group.  I like to joke that Paul has forgotten more about world percussion than I'll ever know!

Ishq leading worship for GIAL chapel in May, 2012

I look forward to the Fall and playing again with this group and learning to play more instruments and song styles from around the globe.  You can learn more about Ishq at Reverbnation.

H is for...

One of the things that we love most about being with Wycliffe Bible Translators is that our colleagues are a really interesting bunch of people.  And one of the most interesting things about them all is their occupations.  Within Wycliffe, we have made great friends with aviators, IT specialists, musicians, linguists, human resources managers, project managers, graphic artists, teachers, literacy specialists, librarians, theologians, doctors, nurses, anthropologists...even a crazed auto mechanic.

It is such a blast to see folks using their gifts and their passions for something much greater than themselves.  It's also fun to realize that a Bible translation is not just the product of a linguist doing their thing.  There is a host of people doing a myriad of jobs that God uses to make it all happen.  It's a lot like the picture of the Church as one body with many parts that's painted in I Corinthians 12:12-31.  In order to meet the goal of having translations begun in the 2000 remaining languages without scripture by the year 2025, Wycliffe and other organizations need people to fill lots of positions in lots of areas.  Here's a sampling of the positions needing to be filled.

As for ourselves, we are currently at about 66% of the monthly support that our family needs in order to head overseas in 2013.  If partnership is on your mind, see the link to the right.  Thanks!

G is for GIAL

Yes, it has been a very long time since our last post.  I had in mind to do a really neat video for this post, and being the perfectionist that I am on occasion, I kept waiting until I had the time to put it all together as I saw it in my mind.  But, alas, I haven't had the time, so I must plug on, even without the cool video.

This post is about the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, the place of our present matriculation.  GIAL is a place that does not wow with you with location, facilities, huge enrollment, or anything of that sort.  What is amazing about GIAL is the people that are here, both students and faculty.

Among my classmates are people from at least five different mission organizations.  My fellow students are preparing to serve all over the world on every continent.  I'd love to run down a list of where my classmates will be serving, but it turns out that most of them are headed for high-security locations that I shouldn't mention.  Also among my classmates are some people that have had interesting careers before deciding on cross-cultural ministry.  They include a pharmacist, a speech pathologist, an insurance adjuster, some teachers, a music minister, a film-maker, seminary graduates, a few military veterans, and the list could go on.

When it comes to faculty, that's where GIAL is most impressive.  I'm blown away not only by the credentials of these folks, but by what they have accomplished.  They all have served overseas in a long list of locations and have some fantastic stories as well as having been involved in many Bible translations.  One of the faculty spent more than 30 years in Papua-New Guinea and worked to translate the New Testament into four different languages.

And GIAL is now celebrating a new addition to its degree offerings.  A new MA in World Arts has recently been approved.  It is a unique program that has been years in the making and hopefully will be training many Arts Consultants to inspire worship expressions across the globe.

This is a great place to be and we are enjoying it very much.  It will be hard to leave here when the time comes!

F is for Fricatives...

And S is for sibilants, P is for plosives, G is for glottal stops, and B is for bilabial!

All of this jargon is from the phonetics portion of our Language Structures class that we just finished with.  It's pretty interesting stuff, but can be quite difficult to hear the differences in the tons of sounds that are possible in language.  It's also very interesting to note that there are a lot of possibilities of sound and English doesn't use nearly all of them.

So what in the world does phonetics, phonology, morphology, and grammar have to do with we will be doing in the arts?  Sometimes I ask that as well, but it does make sense.  We need to learn these basic linguistic elements so that we can learn a second language more easily and because principles of linguistics will mesh into what we are doing with the arts.  Sometimes we want to be in our artistic bubble, but it's not always that simple.

Check out the video clip of some fun with phonetics.  Thanks Dr. Allen for allowing us to film some your class.

Phonetics Fun!

As a postscript, some folks have asked exactly what a fricative is.  Fricatives are sounds in language in which the airstream is greatly but not completely impeded, creating a hissing or buzzing sound, somewhat like friction, hence the name fricative.  Common examples of a fricative in English are the letters f and v, among others.