Catch Up: Wayumi

Wow, I’m behind! I’ve let a month go by and not typed a thing. Let me go back to the beginning of May…

The entire NTBI senior class went to Jersey Shore, PA for a week of Wayumi. We got a sample platter of our future classes at the MTC in Missouri, ranging from Animism to Linguistics. Each day we heard from staff who’d been missionaries for years and had lived every minute of the information they were teaching to us. The classes were fascinating and helped to give us a better view of the “big picture” of tribal church planting.

Besides the traditional classroom, there was plenty of “hands-on” activities. They included shooting (skeet and blow darts), butchering a pig for a “mumu” (a part of a traditional Papua New Guinean dinner), hiking (mostly for fun), and village time (a simulation of basic language learning).

I think I already knew this, but I was again reminded that Payton is good at shooting everything, even a traditional Joti blow gun that’s 10+feet long! Even though he was only practicing on a stationary pizza box, I am now fully confident that if we need meat in the jungle, he can probably give the monkeys a run for their money. Just kidding!

I liked “Village Time” the best. I wasn’t even that good at it…plus normally you don’t learn languages in groups of 6 people, so maybe I’ll be better at it when it’s real. We all felt like babies as we pointed at things and tried to find the words for fire, banana, pot, arrow, wood, arm, etc. And then, we had to try to repeat the word and then write it down! All of us had very strange spellings when we tried to compare notes later! The funny part is, I can still remember the Yanomamo words for machete, slow down, and a few other random phrases. But, here’s the kicker…they didn’t give us the phrase for “What is this…?” for a few minutes until we had stumbled around for a while. Can you imagine trying to discover that phrase?!

That week was such an encouraging way to wrap up most of our semester before the summer.