Say What?

We’ve made it through our first week of training out here in Colorado! Oh, what a week it was. We arrived at our training center just outside Colorado Springs on Monday afternoon. I had mentally prepared myself to have all of us in one room for the month, but we were pleasantly surprised to learn we are actually in two adjoining rooms! (Translation: we don’t all have to go to sleep when the kids do and wake up when they do. Magical.) After we got settled in our space, we took the kids to meet their teachers and explore their classrooms. The awesome thing about the COMPASS program out here at MTI is that, while we’re in class everyday, our kids are learning a lot of the same materials in kid-appropriate ways. And they love it. The kids met their teachers and then we got together with all the trainees to introduce ourselves and get an idea of what the month will look like.

There are roughly 35 adults and 20 kids in our program. Some have already been in their respective countries for a bit, but most of us are getting ready for our first longer-term move. And we’re heading all over the world. Seriously, all over. Ireland, Germany, Mexico, Lebanon, South Sudan, Kenya (represent!), India, Papua New Guinea, Japan, China. And the list goes on. It’s been amazing to hear the stories of how people have been led to their future home and what they’ll be doing when they get there.

This first week we focused a great deal on language learning. But we’ve got a whole list of languages we’re needing to learn between everyone in our group, right? Tricky! We’re actually focusing on how to learn a language rather than the details of specific languages. We spent a good deal of time learning the sounds of the phonetic alphabet, which I thoroughly enjoy. I took enough linguistics classes back in college that I was super close to minoring in it, so now it’s all coming back. Kinda cool to see something like that come full circle and be so helpful now. We’ve also spent hours and hours in the last few days practicing how to make all the phonetic sounds, particularly those we don’t use in English. Our jaws and tongues were pretty sore by the end of each day. Then, on Friday morning, we were broken into groups to meet with native speakers of various languages to work through some really cool ways to learn language that are pretty different from what we’ve done in the past. There was no memorizing of vocabulary lists or starting with the alphabet. Instead, we asked specific questions to our language helpers and then worked from there. I spent the morning working on Russian and Pete worked on Mandarin. Not quite our future language of Swahili, but we are both really excited to apply the skills we picked up in the last week when we get to Kenya in a few months.

Out here, we don’t have class on the weekends. Such a good time to rest our brains and our language-learning lips. Saturday morning we went as a family to the local YMCA to workout. Then Ella and Pete went on their weekly date to a movie while Sam and I took naps. It hadn’t been my plan to nap, but, you know, sometimes it just happens. It was great! All of our meals are together during training (like at camp!) and last night was pizza and ice cream sundaes followed by a movie for all the kids. And lots of the grown ups. Because yes, some of us did end up watching The Secret Life of Pets along with the kiddos.

This morning we got ourselves dressed up and joined my dear friend, Bryn, and her family for church nearby. (More on that later, since it deserves its very own post.) After brunch with them, we drove down to explore Garden of the Gods. A fairly perfect Sunday afternoon drive. Now we’re back at the lodge, the boys are napping, and I’m here. Ella is up practicing with the worship team, which about makes my heart explode. After participating in our morning worship sessions for the last week, Ella asked if she could be a part of the team. They joyfully said yes and invited her to practice today. I think she’ll be playing something percussive. I’m so excited to watch her gifts start to pour out!

We’re excited to jump into another week of training!