The butcher handed me my meat purchase and I simply said “Salamat Po”(Thank you Sir). That is all it took to convince him that I knew Tagalog and he was off. It felt good to realize that I could understand and respond to his first several questions, but it took only a minute or two for me to feel like a fish out of water. Once he got past the simple “How long have you lived here?”, “Where do you live?”, “Are you studying Tagalog?” and “For how long?”, I was totally lost.
Our days are very busy with language, culture, our children and just the time it takes to live here. Candy spends 5-6 hours per day five days a week acquiring language and culture, while I spend 6-8 hours a day. Our language time is split between class, time with a language helper, time out with people and time just reviewing the vocabulary and grammar that we have been learning. We are thoroughly enjoying our Tagalog study, but it is definitely a challenging language. It really is requiring us to retrain our brains with a whole new way of thinking about communication. There are words and grammar structures that we use in almost every sentence in English that simply do not exist in Tagalog.
While we are learning to love the Philippines and all of our friends here, Thanksgiving and Christmas just will not be the same without our families and all of the people we are used to being able to spend time with this time of year. We are more grateful than ever for all of you and even more aware of the impact so many of you have had on our lives now that we are so far away. It is humbling to think where we would be, first without our Savior, and second without all of you. We truly can say with Paul: “I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all making request with joy…”
Please pray for us that the Lord will enable us to build more relationships with Filipinos outside of our language helpers. Most of our neighbors work long hours and are rarely home, and the church we are attending is about a thirty minute taxi-ride away. Our heart and desire is to make a difference in peoples’ lives here in Manila even while we are in language school, but this is proving more difficult than we expected just because of our location. Pray also for wisdom concerning church. We are very blessed at the church we are attending, but we are praying about looking for a smaller church closer to where we live so that we can be more involved in peoples lives.