"Language Blunder"

(Joel is writing this), Yesterday while driving in the car with a good friend at Eden Valley, we were talking about a birthday party that he and his wife had thrown the day before for my wife’s birthday. He had asked if my wife “had enjoyed the party”. I told him that she had, to which I then said (in Stoney) “Mia wîya wastîno”. He started laughing (at this point I had realized that I had something wrong). He said to me, do you know what you just said? I said No.. He said “You just said, your a good woman”. We both got a good laugh, in which he then corrected me and said “Gichîminga owîya wastîno”. (My wife is a good woman). God uses stuff like this to humble us, make us learners and build relationship (and maybe a pile of other things that I don’t know). Praise the Lord!

Time To Catch Up

Wow! I can't believe I haven’t blogged in over three months and not at all in 2010. I apologize to all you faithful readers out there. I know it’s boring to not have any new material to look at! If I was to bring you up to date on every thing that has happen, it would be to much for you and for me, so I’m going for a just a few stories of life in the last three months!

December was full of all the stuff December is full of.....we were blessed with a visit from family during the holidays, which added a bit of festivity to it all. My parents (Amanda) and a sister and her family spent just under a week with us. The best part was seeing my girls and my niece play together and really enjoy their grandparents. We did lots of fun stuff, mostly just enjoying the time together!

We rang in the New Year Stoney Style, which meant fireworks at midnight, and a feast after the fireworks....our girls enjoyed staying up so much later than normal and we were thankful for the chance to be a part of the community. We kicked off 2010 with a resolve to keep digging in. We have so much to learn and understand, at least some point almost everyday, the enormity of it can be overwhelming. In His graciousness God continues to open doors of comprehension in our minds, and bring much encouragement to our hearts. He is so good, and we long for our lives to reflect Him. We didn’t have a lot on the schedule in the last two months, which was a real blessing b/c it allowed for the focus to stay on language learning and find some continuity. I still wonder where all my time goes, but I think that is true for any mother of young children. The girls are both getting so “grown up” they fill our house with their stories and their laughter (and sometimes their arguing, lol).

We have been much better about our “school” this semester. Abigail is learning to blend letters and Ruth is mastering colors and numbers and she loves to cut and paste and color. The rest of the time they are usually playing “mommy”. Abigail currently has 11 children with one on the way. Ruth is sometimes a mom, and sometimes she turns into one of Abigail’s babies. Just yesterday I kept hearing her say “momma,” when I tried to answer she said, “no, my Abigail momma.” It is such a privilege to be their mommy...I can’t believe the Lord entrusted me (and Joel) with such precious, amazing children.

I am in the process of trying to “up” my time involved in CLA, I feel like I have been able to get some things set in place around the house, (like a menu, etc.) which is allowing me more time. I want to make the most of each minute, keeping in mind what my Creator says is really important. Joel is continuing to do an amazing job of learning language. I am in awe of what he understands and how well he speaks. He balances CLA and our family time very well, and I’m thankful to work alongside a man like Joel. So finally a few thoughts from our corner of the world. We have had a very mild winter...the strangest phenomenon has been fog. We have had a few 3-4 day stretches of dense fog in Longview, but when you drive west in would be clear and beautiful. The most redeeming thing about it would be the layer of ice/snow that would coat the outside world in beauty. I am going to do my best to stay connected to you all again. Thanks for taking time to catch up. To those who do such a great job at communicating and encouraging we can’t tell you enough how much it means! May you rejoice in God’s goodness today! Amanda

December Update

It’s past time for an update from Longview. This is the time of year that everything seems to run together in a frenzy of activity. For me being gone 20 out of the 30 days of November didn’t help. Our trip to Wyoming to represent InterAct at Frontier went well, other than the girls and Joel got sick, I guess I had my share in October. The last ten days of the month the girls and I (Amanda) took a train back east to surprise my Dad with an early birthday party and take advantage of Thanksgiving get togethers to connect with family. We are so very thankful for this opportunity. We did a lot in a short amount of time, lacking sleep, and overdoing on junk food. Overall it was great, and I would recommend the train as a great way to travel (and very cost effective). December finds us trying to get back in the groove and get ready for Christmas. Soon we will

be welcoming in 2010. Life is full of challenges and I tend to get overwhelmed by them quickly, I’m so thankful that I was reminded tonight where the battle lies and where the Victory is. God’s Great Grace and Mercy are truly amazing! Can you imagine what it was like for God to leave the splendor of Heaven and come to this wretched earth as a tiny helpless infant...I get chills just thinking about it. Let’s Praise Him this Christmas season, giving Him the honor and glory He alone deserves!!! Just a little hello from this corner of the world. Merry Christmas from our house to yours!!!

Amanda-

November Video

We thought we'd share a bit of a video (with a song from one of our new favorite artist), some slides of what has been happening. Enjoy!

So we continue on...

October 2009 is now just a part of our memories, and November is ticking away. I went into October with big plans; I was going to master my schedule, make many leaps in language learning, and get many of my projects done as well. Instead I spent the entire month fighting a cold that still isn’t gone completely, which resulted in my schedule often going by the wayside. This of course affects my language learning goals and the time I had to work on various projects. All of this left me feeling somewhat discouraged at times. I still don’t understand sometimes why God allows certain things into our lives that seem to just make life harder. I was tempted to think that perhaps it’s not God’s plan for me to learn this language, but that thought didn’t last long. Instead I think He want to teach me how to better rely on Him, and not myself. This is a hard lesson for me to learn, it seems like I often find myself walking along in my own strength instead of letting Him do all that He wants to do in me. I’m so thankful for His patient grace that continues to teach me what I need to learn, and enables me to walk in victory. What an truly amazing God we serve. One of the blessings I have seen is that Joel and the girls stayed fairly healthy through all of this. Also Joel has been able to make some good steps in language learning. He has an above average skill in mimicry, and often gets comments on how well he is doing. So we are still moving forward...trusting God to lead us in each step. Language learning is often full of funny stories, the other evening my friend was telling me a word for “everything”, for some reason it reminded me of another word I knew, and without really thinking I blurted it out. I knew the word, but couldn’t remember what it meant. My friend looked at me and laughed and said, yeah that’s potato. I laughed too. Just think how funny it would sound if you told someone who didn’t speak English well, a word like pot, and their reply was to proclaim potato. Sure they start out with similar sounds but they aren’t really related. Little victories are there in the battle for language learning, we attended a feast the other day and as people were cleaning up, I understood when someone asked , “Where is the mop?” It’s a small phrase, but to hear and understand is a big blessing. Our girls are also getting in on the language learning. The other day Ruth asked me, “how do you say this in.....? She likes to say “umbawasthitch” (this means good day) at random times as well.

One other little update, last month our community did loose a young man, he was living in Calgary at the time, but had much connection to the community. We had the privilege of knowing this young man, who had visited our home a few times, He is greatly missed, but the good news is that he had proclaimed to be trusting in Christ. The hope if heaven is such a beautiful thing.

We now find ourselves on the road again. InterAct has asked us to represent the mission at Frontier School of the Bible (where Joel graduated from). We are traveling down to Wyoming now and will spend next week participating in their fall mission’s conference. Thanks for your continued prayers and encouragement, we will be sharing next Tuesday and Wednesday, if you think of us during those days, pray that students can be challenged to serve cross-culturally. We will keep you posted on how things go! Enjoy your day in Him-Amanda For The Sewell’s

Fall... what fall?

After a September full of summer weather, October brought winter on with a vengeance. The last week we have had temps below freezing and a dusting of snow covers the ground. That type of drastic change can make it hard to adjust, but we keep hoping for “Indian Summer” yet this fall. Two weeks ago we had the privilege of attending a seminar on Chronological Bible Teaching, put on by Worldview Resource Group in Lac La Biche, Alberta. For those of you who have seen the movie EE-Taow, story of the Mouk People, our teacher was Mark Zook, who is the missionary who God used in this powerful story. As usual it is hard to sum up in a paragraph what took 5 days of lectures to learn, but I will give it a try. Chronological Bible Teaching is not just teaching through the Bible chronologically, it’s goes deeper than that. It is understanding your audience, and how they view reality, in such a way that you can teach the key stories of the Bible, so that the Truth of Scripture is laid down line upon line, precept upon precept knocking out untruth as you go. Then when the message of who Jesus is and what he did on the cross is presented, it is understood within a framework already built by Biblical Truth, not muddled with old belief systems. This makes a clearer, better understanding of what the gospel message really means to mankind. As we sat in class, I often found myself thinking this is way over my head, it sounds so good in

theory, but the practical working it out, what will that look like. So as we settle back into routine, we pick up with what we know to do next. For us, in our context, we are still just trying to understand our audience. We must do this well, in order to best teach God’s story in an understandable and worldview changing way. Learning another language is a lot of work and yet there is joy in the little steps made along the way. Thank you for praying with us and supporting what God is doing here in Alberta. We face discouragement sometimes multiple times a day, yet God is so faithful and we praise Him for His goodness to our family. Today is Thanksgiving here in Canada, to be honest it still sort of sneaks up on us Americans. But of all the holidays to celebrate twice I guess this is the one. We do have so much to be thankful for and yet to much of the time I get bogged down in the battles of daily living. I continue to ask the Lord to be my strength, and to teach me how to live the way He really intended. There is much work to be done, may each one of us be found faithful!

Thanks again, with love from the Sewell’s-Amanda

PS If you haven’t yet watched the movie EE-Taow..we would highly recommend it, you can find it on-line, or click the link.

A quick check-up

How can someone who currently lives in Colorado, come here to Alberta and check our language learning ability when they have never heard the language spoken before? We are so thankful to glean from the consultant guided program New Tribes Mission has set in place all over the world. George and Harriet Walker came to our home last week to check progress in both our language use and the daily use of our time. We had done some ground work ahead of time by filling out questionnaires etc. Our first day we spent a lot of time just sharing what we do each day, how things are progressing and where we sense problems. The second day we had a native speaker in our home and we would simply say words after him, which allowed George to hear if our pronunciation is accurate. There are a couple sounds in the language that we don’t make as English speakers, so we need to step up our practice of these particular sounds. There are also about three nasalized vowel sounds, which means you need to push air through your nose as you say them, this can often sound like a “n” sound to our ears, but it’s not, and needs to be said correctly. As a wrap up George and Harriet were full of practical ideas to keep us on track in our culture and language acquisition, (aka, CLA). Our main focus is language at this point, since culture is best understood in the Native tongue. One of the big area’s we are tweaking after this consult is our planning, we need to be much more intentional about what areas of language we are going to try to learn. We will be isolating simple parts of speech to keep things at a basic level. For example we will learn how to take a simple statement like “I am picking up the cup” and from there learn how to say “ pick up the cup” and “do not pick up the cup.” To make sure we are covering all the bases we need to cover at this first stage we need to really plan each time we visit the reserve. Of course as we seek to gain understanding of language, we will also continue to cultivate our current relationships, seek new ones, and stay aware of the unique culture as well. We will be making some other adjustments to our days as well. We also discussed

that in order to keep making strong progress in CLA we need consistency and fewer “interruptions”. This is an area we covet your prayers in as many “good” opportunities come our way, but these at times keep us from the work. It’s hard to explain all that took place in the intense 2 and 1/2 day consult, but we come away from the time feeling much more equipped for the task at hand. One thought I’m chewing on is that, as the organizer of our home I need to find more ways to bring the language learning into our home, since my amount of time with people is limited. Abigail and Ruth need to be more a part of this process as well, since this is the life God has called our family to, not just Joel and I, but all of us. This consultant check is usually done at about six weeks after the type of consult we had in February. Due to scheduling and other time commitments it was put of till now. The next months will be full of hard work and faithful study and we hope to pass our basic or level one check sometime early next spring. One final thought that keep us pressing on toward our goals in our situation, loving people means learning their language, it might not always feel like “love” but thats what it is love. In God’s grace we labor on, thanks for walking with us!