Where in the world is Susie? Itʼs a question I often get asked. And at the moment Iʼm in Senegal! The picture above is from where we had some leadership meetings the week before Thanksgiving. Then the first half of this last week I spent a few miles down the beach with some friends, sleeping in (I don’t know why I’ve been so incredibly sleepy lately), hanging out with them, and taking long walks on the beach. What a lovely few days of vacation!
Now these last few days I’ve been in a big city here in Senegal, celebrating Thanksgiving and getting ready for my next adventure, which is…
a trip to the bush here in Senegal to help another team with their language!
There is a team working with the J language down there. They’re pretty far along in learning the language and now need to study discourse analysis. If you don’t remember what that is, you can look at one of my older blog posts that explain it – here or here, or you can just know that it’s basically how you put a story together to have it make sense and sound “normal.” And now for the next few weeks, I’ll be helping this team (and likely some of the mother-tongue speakers of the J language) study J discourse. No, I don’t speak the language. No, I’ve never studied it before. But I just get to come along for fun and help them discover some of the interesting pieces of this language that God created, in order to better communicate who this God is.
Oh, and the week before Thanksgiving it was decided that one of the missionaries with the Doure people group of Guinea (where I went last year to help them make their alphabet) will be joining us as well, looking at the Doure language!
So yeah. A few weeks helping people better understand two languages that I don’t know. And the reason I’m going is to try to fast-track it, getting done in a few weeks what might otherwise take a few months. So, yes, we could definitely use your prayers! For health for everyone (I haven’t been feeling on top of my game lately), for the car to be able to bring us down there safe and sound (let’s just say that it’s been spending lots of time at the shop lately), for wisdom as we try to discover the patterns of these languages, for us all to work well together, etc. Thanks!