Language

Today we had a family of volunteers from Cape Town, SA come and join us at Beautiful Gate. They will be doing some gardening and helping out at the preschool this week. They have two children, Faith 12 and Luke 11, as of today. Our kids were thrilled to meet another girl named Faith as we have met a few Elijah's in the states but not a Faith that is a kid. It will be a fun week of yelling Faith and having both of them answer ( I am pretty sure that we will not ever have that with another Mercy as we have never heard of another kid with that name).

The reason I am really sharing about our new volunteers was just to share a simple story which showed me a glimpse of how important learning different languages is becoming to our family. Today is Luke's 11th birthday so Laury (our suite mate) made him a cake and when it was time for him to blow out the candles, we all decided to sing happy birthday in our native languages. We sang it in English, Dutch, and Afrikaans. It was so much fun, but I was worried he would not have an candles left by the time we got through the 3 songs. I decided I need to learn to sing it is Sesotho so we can add another language ( I know how to sing it in Spanish, but don't think that would be too helpful in this part of Africa) next time there is a birthday. Uh oh, that only gives me 15 days as Elijah and Mercy will be celebrating their 8th and 4th birthdays on the 25th of July!!!

I am so impressed by all the volunteers and many of the local Basotho people because most speak 2-3 languages. I am ashamed that all I know is a little Spanish and am currently trying to learn Sesotho, but feel like I have a bad lisp. There are some very very unnatural sounds that our tutor wants me to make and I just can't seem to do it. Bryan rocks in this area and will be speaking it in no time. I am proud of him! I think though that I will work very hard to make sure my kids learn a lot of the language because it means a lot to people when you try to speak to them in their language. I was ready to quit last week with my tutoring because it is frustrating and I am really bad at it, but hearing those songs in different languages re-energized me to try harder. I want to speak to the kids and staff here in their own language and I want to help my kids learn it too while their little brains are better at picking it up than my slow brain :)