July 2001

Dear Friends,

We have returned from our two weeks of intensive language study in Malawi. Thank you for your prayers. It was an extremely challenging time that stretched us beyond our comfort zone in many ways. We thought that Chichewa would be similar to Swahili because they are both Bantu languages and therefore it would be easier to learn. Unfortunately, that was not the case. Chichewa is a tonal language and the tones are not written. You learn the tones as you speak. Our approach to learning was to spend the morning with our tutor in the classroom working on grammar and developing
monologues/dialogues. In the afternoon, we went to the surrounding
villages and practiced what we had learned. In addition to the language we also studied the culture.

Every day we walked the dry, dusty road from the Chongoni Church Study Center where we were staying. Many women and children were coming and going from the local maize mill. Carrying a large basket of maize on her head and a baby on her back, each woman stopped to greet us. "Muli bwangi, amai. Ndili bwino, kaya ino." The response was the same, great delight and clapping as these white faced visitors tried to speak their language.

Severina, a young girl who was working at the study center, invited us to her village. Entering the matriarchal village of Severina’s great-grandmother, we called out, "Odi" and waited to be received. We were introduced to the elderly grandmother who was almost blind. She took our hands and said that she couldn’t see us but she would see us in heaven! Taken into the thatched mud hut and seated on a woven, split bamboo mat on the dirt floor, we practiced our monologue that we had learned in class. A greeting, a proverb, and the
scripture verse from Luke 1:37, "Nothing is impossible with God." Afterwards, we walked around the village and shared in their life. Bobbi even attempted pounding maize in a large wooden mortar with a huge pestle. What a job!

We felt privileged to experience God’s people in these new ways. In spite of extreme poverty and tremendous problems there was joy and great hope because their hope was in the Lord.

Thank you for your prayers. We experienced encouragement from the Lord to keep going when we were tempted to give up. Keeping going is the main thing in learning a language, so your prayers really helped us persevere. Thank you.

In His Love,

Bobbi and Bob Snyder