MTC-Missionary Training Center- Wrap-up

I certainly haven’t written as many updates as I had planned to over the course of the last few weeks. We are now “wrapping” up the final week of our Culture/Language Acquisition course. The practical skills we have learned to help us in this process are a wonderful asset to ministry. Here is a recap of what we have been learning since our last blog. We took a few weeks to discuss kinship types and how to learn what a people groups kinship type is. A month ago I didn’t even know what that word meant, and I’m trying to think how to explain it without re-teaching everything we just learned. The best explanation I can give is every society has a way they classify who their family is, and how they organize their social relationships. An anthropologist named Lewis Henry Morgan, determined there were six

 different types of kinship patterns. We did an overview of each of these six systems so we could recognize what the Dobu system was. To give you a little idea of what I am referring to I will give you one example (using our (yours and mine) kinship terms). In Dobu culture I would call my mother, sinana, but I would also call any of my mother’s sister’s sinana as well. My father and his brothers would be called tamana, but my mother’s brothers would be called wana. They would make a distinction between what we would consider an uncle on both sides. Because the mother passes on her clan/family to her children, my father would not even be considered in my close family. As you can see it gets very complicated, very quickly especially when you are trying to explain the concepts of God the Father, God the Son, as well as other concepts. It has been very interesting to study and we are excited to get home and see how this applies in our situation.

We have also been studying other aspects of Dobu culture and how to use the CLAware (a software program for filing culture) to file this information. Our team has been given the topic of death, and Joel and I are specifically concentrating our efforts on the way they mourn. All of this learning is done very hands on through sessions with our Culture/Language helper. Our teacher does a great job of portraying “Inosi” and we often

feel like we are truly in another culture (see picture of team and Inosi). We also get to watch “culture events” which are skits put on by the teachers showing scenes of Dobu village life. This coming week will be spent writing up conclusions on what we have learned and looking for themes that run through out Dobu culture. We then head north to Michigan for a brief visit with our family and then it is back to Longview. We map-quested it today, and we have 2300 miles ahead of us! The good news is our car is running much much better than it has since we bought it. God provided various people/resources (like a place for Joel to work on the car) to get it running well. A few other bits of news from the last month are: we saw God work once again in providing a sitter for the girls the last two weeks of class. (our first sitter returned to Malaysia), we also had a great trip to Kansas to visit supporters/friends in the Whitewater area.

So thats a quick update on our last month. Thanks for reading along, leaving comments is always welcome, sometimes we get curious who all reads our ramblings. Hope this finds you 

well, you can pray for our week if God lays it on your heart to do so. We need to clean the apartment we are staying in, pack up our stuff, and finish class, which involves some papers. We hope to go to class Friday morning and be on the road by “noonish”. We are really thankful for the opportunity we had to attend this training, we have met some wonderful people and the girls have made some friends the can play outside with. It’s been a great eight weeks, but we are ready to be home!!

Amanda-For the Sewell’s