The Village

Yabelewa nanimama anya namale.

Five points for anyone who can correctly guess what that says. I'm guessing you won't be able to...unless you have been to New Tribes Wayumi program or you can speak the Malaumanda tribal language of Papua New Guinea. I learned this sentence today when I went into what they call "the village." Sounds intimidating, huh? Well....it kind of is. Let me set the scene for you.

You walk through two double doors into a dark, smoky room. Lots of high-pitched noises come from all around you, all words that you do not understand. You're in some sort of a grass hut and there's a tribal man in traditional headdress and facepaint sitting on the floor sharpening his machete. Is it safe to sit? If you do, you're sitting close to this tribal man who, mind you, is SHARPENING his machete (cannibal???) and the only place to sit is close to the fire on the floor. Not really typical American greeting. The only phrase you know is "How are you?" and that won't really get you too far learning the language or building a relationship with this unusual fellow sitting by his fire. He looks up, sees you, and mumbles something in a language you don't understand. You sit down and he goes about his business as if you weren't even there. How do you build a relationship? How do you learn his language? How do you learn his culture? What are you supposed to do?

Thankfully we were given the phrase "What is it" so we could correctly elicit a list of words from this man. But today when we went to visit the village, we had to elicit sentences. The tribal man played pretend for a bit and actually understood some of our english for a bit, and so we were able to write down some sentences (mind you, this is all phontetically....so they looked like this "Yah-bey-leh-wah nahn-bah-mah ahnya no-wah-ley"). After we had sentences, we then were given the correct spelling of the sentences (so no longer phonetic) and then we set to the task of breaking apart the sentences, identifying words, phrases, tenses, pronouns, question markers, and other parts of speech. This is something I found out I LOVE! I love being able to break apart language and find patterns. I love figuring it out. It's really enjoyable for me. Challenging, but enjoyable. Phonetics and linguistics is really a cool thing. God constantly amazes me the more I learn about different cultures and different people. The fact that we are all so different and that we all speak such different, complex languages is totally a sign of God to me. How incredible is the God we serve!!