I got told twice this week that I looked like I was getting fatter. I actually don’t think it’s true and I know at least one of them meant it as a compliment, but it has severely injured my self-esteem nonetheless. Besides my self-loathing for eating too many tortillas and still biting my nails, everything else is going great. The school Christmas program was really cute. I was impressed with how all-out they went with the set and costumes, but then the performances were all on CD and the kids just acted it out as it played, but they did a great job and it was very entertaining. My favourite part of the evening though was observing all the Paraguayan mothers ordering about their kids and taking pictures in their high-heels and low-cut tops.
It was also a very special weekend at church. Last night there were testimonies. I got my friend Carolina to write hers out and I translated it so I could know her story. She started coming to church a few months ago because she was friends with the school librarian. I wish I could have understood some of the other testimonies too. 3 of the people baptized were middle-aged woman, there was one other girl my age, and then two guys my age. One of them, Adilson, has been in and out of jail since he was 14. He’d always go for the winter. He killed a few guys too. I’m not sure if that’s what he was in jail for, or if it happened while he was in jail, because the prison system here is terrible. Apparently the inmates all have knives and some even have guns. Our church has a prison ministry and my friend Juan says that he has been threatened with a knife in the prison before…I don’t exactly feel called to that church ministry right now, heh heh. But anyways, I don’t understand Adilson very well because he speaks really fast and I think Portuguese is his first language, but I think he really brings a lot of life into the church. He also does the gardening.
Edson is a week and a half old and already well-adjusted; today in church we had a dedication and he let out a perfectly cute little cry at the most opportune moment near the end of the prayer, what a dramatista (might be a Spanish word. A person who likes sports is a deportista, and person who jokes around is a bromista, and so on). I really like him a lot, and I sure had my fill of cute kids today because I went to a friend’s house for lunch that also lives with cute kids. I get invited to someone’s house for lunch every Sunday, sometimes I even have to choose where to go because of multiple invites. Continuing my observation of family life, Maria Teresa is a single woman who lives with her sister who has two kids, and the grandma also lives with them. Her job is reupholstering cars, but in January she wants to take 2 weeks off and go visit her brother in Bueno Aires, 14 hours away, and she asked me to go with her!! The only problem is she might have too much work to do, so I may have to become an apprentice and help her, while at the same time practicing my Spanish…we have a mutually beneficial relationship. People really like for me to teach them English as well. Especially when I watch a dubbed movie, I feel very privileged to have English as my mother tongue.
Today I watched “A River Runs Through it” for the third time in two weeks, but this evening it was in Spanish with no subtitles. I was watching solely for educational purposes but it turned out to be very inspiring. Besides the gorgeous Montana scenery (montaña means mountain in Spanish by the way), one of the themes is about helping others who need help, especially those closest to you. At the end one of the characters is giving a sermon about how we want to help them, but often we can’t, “sometimes because we don’t know what to offer, and other times because they won’t receive our help. And so those who we love elude us. But even so, we can still love them… we can love completely, without complete understanding.” I’m not so sure that merited quotation marks, it is a very loose paraphrase of the Spanish, but the thought has encouraged me greatly. I cried for a second time today, because I was supposed to talk to some of my family members on the phone and we weren’t able to and it left me very disappointed. At the same time, I had a great day with all the people at church and with my roommates when I came home, and I know that even though I don’t understand their language or share their cultural knowledge, I can still love them. And they love me, even though my accent is ridiculous and I conjugate my verbs all wrong and I conflagrate the words for “ball” and “chicken” to try and say “skirt.” By the way, as another one of my exercises in humility, this week I used the word “fighted” and said “arrove” in place of “arrived.” Just a warning in case you start wondering the writing in my blogs starts to get weirder, that happens when you are learning another language I guess. In closing, I highly recommend “A River Runs Through it,” but watch it during the summer, because it makes you want to go fishing. Next week I have more to say about baptism.
# posted by Ellen @ 7:28 PM
