February 2011 Video Update

Good to be Home

What a good feeling to be back home in Paraguay after fourteen months in the US, mostly traveling around. We flew back into Asunción on August 4th and got back to Escobar as soon as possible to find our house and our dog Oso wonderfully cared for by Antonio and Lida Guerrero.

Before we went back to Escobar I went to our cell phone provider to get a phone that I could use, as I was using our Motorola V3 before, to connect to the internet. The salesman talked me into buying a BlackBerry, saying not only could I get email and browse the web using the phone but I could also use the phone as a Bluetooth modem to connect my laptop to the internet as I had done with my other phone.

Lucas and Timmy are happy to be home

Well, salesmen are salesmen everywhere, I guess, and this guy somewhat exaggerated the capabilities of the BlackBerry which, though a good phone and very useful for brief emails and a little internet browsing, is not good at all as a Bluetooth modem. The upside of that is I've been wasting no time at all online. The downside is that some things I really need to do online--paying bills, for example, or updating my blog--I just can't do.

Part of the problem is a very variable cell phone signal at our house. This aspect of the problem I'm hoping to remedy with a dual band cell phone repeater. But there also seems to be a problem with the phone itself as a modem--even when I have a good signal it only connects a fraction of the times I try.

Our neighbor "Abuela" (Grandma) Asunción's house

That's the frustrating side of life. The exciting part of our life is helping missionaries with language learning, and I just finished this week a four-week refresher course with SIM missionaries Jeff and Amy McKissick, who have also just returned from the US. They are super committed to ongoing Guarani language learning and it's always a delight to work with them. Check out Amy's post on their language-learning experience.

Right now we have a couple of days in Asunción. We're celebrating Timmy's fourth birthday today, and tomorrow we'll go back to Escobar and take with us Lizet's mom who is here for a visit from Bolivia. We're staying at the mission guest house, where we have a wireless internet connection, so I'm trying to remember and catch up with all the things I need to do online.

I keep reminding myself that to get to live in such a wonderful place as Escobar, and be involved in the exciting ministry we get to have a part in, we have to make some sacrifices, and if one of them is a reliable internet connection, well, then, so be it! It's well worth it.

Caleb and Ben Cameron at the World Cup

The Paraguayan soccer team is getting ready for its first game of this World Cup on Monday against Italy. They are staying in the beautiful city of Pietermaritzburg in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal.

It happens that our friends, colleagues, and former students, SIM missionaries Greg and Vonni Cameron, have just returned to South Africa for furlough and are living in the city of Pietermaritzburg. They went to see the Paraguay team practice at the Harry Gwala stadium. The Camerons were sighted by reporters sitting in the stands with their Paraguayan jerseys on, drinking tereré and speaking in Guarani. They were asked down to the field and interviewed.

Since Greg and Vonnie speak Guarani but very little Spanish, they responded to Spanish questions in Guarani! They told the reporters they had studied the heart language of Paraguay in order to read the Bible in Guarani to people who speak Guarani but don't read it, and to serve the community. The interview was on national television in Paraguay and the photo of the boys turned up in the June 7th edition of the daily ABC Color.

Incarnation is Identification

I recently spoke with a man who had been a missionary in Brazil. While he was there he made a great effort to learn Portuguese well, taking as his models the Brazilian Portuguese speakers around him. His goal was to sound just like them them--or as much like them as possible--when he spoke.

To this day, twenty years after leaving Brazil, he speaks excellent, idiomatic Brazilian Portuguese. The hard work that he did many years ago continues to yield dividends in the way he speaks the language.

He told me about a time he traveled with a fellow missionary in Brazil. After an interaction with a Brazilian man, his colleague turned to him and asked in an annoyed way, "Why do you do that?"

"Do what?" my friend replied.

"Why do you try talk like the Brazilians, instead of like an American?"

"Because they talk right, and I want to talk right."

"Well," his friend concluded, "don't do it around me."

I thought about that story again a couple of weeks ago when I was listening to a radio program about language learning. The man being interviewed said something to the effect that the greatest compliment you can pay a language learner is to mistake him/her for a native speaker.

I realized that this was exactly what my friend's colleague had wanted to avoid. There was something in his self-identity that resisted identifying with Brazilians and he didn't want to risk ever being taken for anything but an American.

Now I realize that for most of us it is very unlikely that we would ever learn a language so well as an adult that we would be taken for a native speaker. But putting that aside for the moment, one of the reasons that my language students tend to be the most motivated language learners in the world is that they don't only want to communicate information with Paraguayans; they want to identify with them in the language that defines them as Paraguayans--Guarani. By learning Guarani, we affirm, value, and make part of us something that most Paraguayans hold in very high esteem--the language that is uniquely theirs.

Dr. Gailyn Van Rheenen, in his book Missions: Biblical Foundations and Contemporary Strategies, talks about this identification: "Such identification is not an external façade designed to create some kind of artificial congeniality; it is the heart of God incarnate in the missionary." (p. 66) The heart of God was demonstrated in Jesus, the Word who took on human form and had to learn words--human language--as a baby. His identification with us, his creation, sets the pattern for missionary identification.

That's why language learning for missionaries is not an onerous task to be endured so that the real missions work can begin. It is an indispensable step in the process of incarnation that every missionary must engage in completely in order to be effective ministers in the context they've been called to. For this reason, people who go to minister in contexts where they "don't need to learn the language" find themselves at a distinct disadvantage, because they lack one of the most fundamental tools of identification.

Learning Guarani Online

There don't seem to be a whole lot of good resources online to learn Guarani. Recently a colleague sent me a link to LearnGuarani.com, a site that's under development by Stephen. So far so good. I'm hoping this will develop into a useful resource for beginning Guarani learners.

If you want to learn Guarani not just as a linguistic exercise--that is, if you're interested in actually communicating with mother-tongue Paraguayan Guarani speakers--you need to keep a couple of issues in mind:

First, there's a movement to "purify" Guarani by removing as much Spanish vocabulary from it as possible. There is a sense in this movement that Guarani is somehow weakened, corrupted, or made less beautiful by the inclusion of loanwords. Whether that is true or not is a subject for another posting, but suffice it to say that if you want to use a Guarani that actually communicates, you should focus on "Guarani-Jopara," (mixed Guarani,) or Paraguayan Popular Guarani, which does include a lot of Spanish loanwords. The words that academics have either created to reference new concepts or revived from archaic sources will leave most Paraguayan speakers perplexed and instead of promoting relationship will tend to increase distance between you and your listener.

Second, if you are learning Guarani with a Paraguayan Guarani-speaker as a resource, generally speaking he or she will not be confident about writing in Guarani. Paraguayan children now learn to write in Guarani in school but this wasn't always the case. I do not mean to suggest that Paraguayans are illiterate but most adult Paraguayans feel much more confident reading and writing in Spanish than in Guarani, even if Guarani is their first language. Unless your Guarani resource person has studied Guarani, either he/she will be reluctant to tell you how to spell things in Guarani or he/she will spell it in a way that diverges from the accepted orthography.

For this reason you are likely to come across a number of different spellings for the same word, such as: jaé, jhaé, jha'e, or ha'e, (meaning he/she/it,) only the last of which is written in the currently accepted way. (Just look at any map of Paraguay and you'll see a dozen Guarani place names spelled in an orthography based on Spanish that is diferent from the current official orthography!) This can be confusing to the beginner but it's by no means insurmountable. You have to learn to hear the sounds and transcribe what you hear. With practice you'll do this with little difficulty.

If anyone comes across any good online resources for learning Guarani-Jopara, I'd be happy to know about them.

My students

The people I've helped to learn Guarani are now all over Paraguay doing a variety of different tasks. I thought it would be interesting to link to some of their pages and blogs so that you can see who they are.

My very first student, way back in 1995, when I began writing the Guarani text, was James Arritt. Though he's no longer in Paraguay, Paraguay is still in him, as evidenced by his website offering yerba mate for sale.

When the Guarani-Jopara Institute for Missionaries started up in 2000, the first students were Dan and Christie Reich who now live and work in the town of Yuty, about 140 km from where we live, as the crow flies. The same year we were joined by Lindsay Gilliam who had already been a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay so he knew some Guarani. Although he just moved to Loja, Ecuador, Guarani has turned out to be very important for him, because he married Eva, for whom it's a first language! Check out their video on YouTube. That's the first class above: L to R; Andy Bowen, Christie Reich, Dan Reich, Lindsay Gilliam, language helper Irene Ayala.

Subsequent students now working in rural Paraguay include Jeff and Amy McKissick, who operate a mobile medical clinic in the village of San Francisco; Tom and Kelly Stout, who also work in rural Paraguay, though they're currently in the U.S. (check out this exciting project that the McKissicks and the Stouts are involved in!); John Griffin, in Tobati, and Paul and Marla Fields, who direct the work of ABWE in Paraguay. Their daughter, Shellie Silva, studied with us in the same class--she's married to a Guarani speaker. Another ABWE missionary, Laura Fouser, is now located across the border in Campo Grande, Brazil, having learned Spanish, Guarani, and now Portuguese. A short-termer from the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Church named Tonya VanKampen has since married and lives with her husband Kris Dixon in the U.S., though by the looks of their blog they're still very involved in missions!

Other former students who don't seem to have blogs include Dan and Sarah Hough, who live in Caazapá; Gil and Renita Rempel, in Campo 9; Erna Plett and Esther Goertzen, in Caaguazú (the Rempels, Erna, the Goertzens, and the Zachariases are all members of the Evangelical Mennonite Conference); and Steve and Marilyn Haines, who seem to be living in Loma Plata, in the Paraguayan Chaco. Their daughters Rachel and Rebecca studied with us too.

My current class has four students: Greg Cameron (his wife Vonnie studied last year), Travis and Rosey Zacharias, and my wife Lizet. Here's the current class: L to R; Travis, our language helper Norma, Greg, Lizet, and Rosey.

The best I can tell, I've had 28 missionaries study with me since the Guarani institute opened in 2000. I've invested in their lives and now they are investing in the lives of countless others using the resource of Guarani.

Foreigners Don't Learn Guarani!

"We were talking with some people who were visiting our neighbor Norma. They kept trying to talk to us in Spanish, and Norma had to tell them, 'They don't understand Spanish. Speak to them in Guarani!' We suddenly realized that Paraguayans are going to expect us to talk to them in Spanish, and we're going to have to convince them to speak Guarani with us."

In fact, I had told my students on several different occasions that it's unusual for outsiders in Paraguay to learn Guarani. But there's a difference, isn't there, from being told something and experiencing it for yourself.

Guarani is uniquely Paraguayan, and Paraguayans identify with it as theirs in a way they don't do with Spanish. But it's also considered a non-prestige language and it's unusual everywhere for people to voluntarily learn a language that's less prestigious when a more prestigious one is available.

Consider, for example, Latinos in the U.S. They are expected to learn English because in the U.S. that is the more prestigious language. It's far less common for an English speaker in the U.S. to accommodate to them by speaking Spanish.

Rural Paraguayans are generally much more comfortable with and competent in Guarani, although they may feel that they ought to speak Spanish. They feel this even more strongly when they're speaking to foreigners, instinctively assuming that the foreigner will expect this.

But Guarani is the language of relationship. "Igústo nendive, porque ikatu roñe'ê nendive guaraníme," said a friend of mine; "I feel good with you, because we can talk to you in Guarani."

By learning Guarani, my students send a strong message to rural Paraguayans: your world, your culture, your identity are important to me. I don't expect you to accommodate to me. I'll make an effort, I'll even look foolish, in order to have a relationship with you in your world, in your context. I'll identify with you so that I can be your friend.

Many here expect that their country, their values will be scorned by outsiders. Some consider themselves to be residents of a backwards country. Their relationship with Guarani reflects that--they think outsiders won't value it and will consider it a primitive language. An outsider who learns Guarani surprises Paraguayans by being interested in ore ñe'ê; our language. Instinctively the Paraguayan feels, "if he's interested in my language, perhaps he's interested in me."

So my students struggle through and feel ignorant some days and perplex people because they don't do what they're expected to. And on the way, they get into their neighbors' hearts, and their neighbors get into theirs.

Message from the Hill

As I sit at my desk I'm looking south at the plain where the Pirity winds to join the Tebicuary River. Twenty miles away the Acahay Hill rises from the valley. Most of what I see is dry and beginning to get brown, but the clouds moving in slowly from the west suggest that rain might not be far away.

The community of Mbocayaty is celebrating Easter weekend--Pascua. Family members who had gone to work in the city have returned home to be with the extended family. Mother makes chipa from home-ground manioc flour. Sopa paraguaya, with corn and onions and fat from the pig that was butcherred this morning, baked in the wood-fired tatacuá, comes out smelling of childhood. Visits to the cool chorro, where the water comes cascading over the rocks into the pool under the trees, with its sandy beach. Ice-cold tereré passed around from father to son to brother. Precious days in the "valle" of their childhood, but too short. The same economics that forced them to Asunción to find work will see them back on the bus tomorrow afternoon to clock in early on Monday morning at the grocery stores, laundries, and bottle factories that pay them a living wage.

But for now, this rural community and thousands like it across Paraguay are temporarily full of their children and grandchildren. The urbanization of a nation that still has its roots largely in the country is reversed for one long weekend.

Tomorrow families and communities will once more be fragmented. Social networks, tentatively reestablished for three or four days, will be retorn and the city life will resume. Young rural men with no grandmothers to scold them into conformity will live as they wish in the permissive city and reap the consequences with no comfort of home. Young women will struggle to keep dreams alive among the pressures of insecurity, inequality, and loneliness.

They'll continue to send money home, but most will be spent as higher wages accompany higher costs. And gradually the ties with the valle will grow weaker until one year they don't return and abuelita will mourn in gently lilting Guarani, "ndouvéima che memby, che nieto kuéra. Opytapáma Paraguaýre. Che añónte apyta." My children, my grandchildren no longer come. They all stay in Asunción. I alone remain.