I recently participated with the church in a painting project. We painted the entry way and third floor of an elementary school that is one block from the church. This project began three years ago when a missionary working in Trieste at the time made friends with someone who worked at the school and some parents or children attending there. Since then the church has been able to help the school paint one level of the three level school each summer. This summer a nine person team from Illinois came to help paint the school so the work went really fast. Some parents came by with their kids to help paint as well. One dad, who came with his daughter a few times, actually brought us delicious cake.....twice.
I had the privilege of joining some of the church leaders in attending the Congresso Missione 16 with John Piper. The teaching of John Piper (alternately known as "The Pipe-bomb") was a major contributing factor into my decision to stay in Bible College and declare a missions focus. Listening to him speak while I was in the midst of my first missions endeavor abroad, was kind of a big deal for me. It reminded me, for the hundredth time, that my confidence to do do missions is not rooted in my ability, but in anticipation of God fulfilling His promise to Abraham back in Genesis that all the families of the earth would be blessed through him.
Being at the conference also gave me a lot of time to get to know the team and to watch them interact with their families and with each other. The registration fee included a spot in one of several nearby hotels and the hotels provided all the meals. We were all in the same hotel so we all ate together and spent our break times enjoying the beach together. The team in Trieste is pretty awesome. There are people on the team in all different stages of their ministry. Each one has their own strengths and each is going through their own challenges. Everyone on the team respects eachother and supports eachother. It's a really good environment to be in. Ambra and I rode with Andrea and McKenzie and their son Adrian to the conference and on the way we spent a night at an inn they are thinking of using for a coming event. In the back seat of the car, we played with a Velcro technology building toy. This involved a lot counting out pieces of a specific color according to a pattern. After an hour or two, this resulted in an owl, a tiger, half a monkey, and me being able to count to 12, with some degree of accuracy. The day I landed in Trieste, I was sitting in Elio's kitchen fighting jet leg when he taught me my first phrase in Italian, "imparare passo dopo passo," learning step by step. It's a phrase that's representative of my time here. I have also found it's a well received way to simultaneously show a valiant effort in language learning and excuse anything I may or may not say subsequently.
I was hoping I could absorb the language effortlessly like a sponge, but at least for me, it's not that easy. If I don't consciously listen, when people are speaksing Italian, my brain almost completely tunes it out. When I listen, this is how I hear: Somethings I don't know, something else, some more things, SCIVI, something and another thing, LIBRO, something I don't know.......I still don't know.......ummmm.........YouVersion app (ok, but that's just English, don't give yourself points for that), more things I don't understand...... BISCOTTI (that barely counts)...VUOI (of course I want cookies, what's with my priorities though, why is this all I understand) *me: 'Ci,grazie,' .......a lot more words I don't know.....5 more minutes of words....JENAE ( hey, that's my name!).....AMERICA (what are they saying about me *smilies awkwardly) ....some more time goes by......BAMBINI....words, words, words....SUCCO.... a lot of things I don't understand, some more things, (nope, that's a word you know in Japanese, don't know it in Italian), don't know that either, don't those words, ANDIAMO! (and that I learned at Johnny Carino's, well I guess we're leaving now). Yesterday, I more or less constructed a sentence. In response to the question, "Did you see Barbara?" I said in Italian, "yes, I (or it could have been "me") eat (no idea what tense I used) Barbara's (just like that because I have no idea how to make something possessive) lasagna (boom, that's free)." Then, I let out a deep breath, because that was hard. |
AuthorJenae Archives
April 2021
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