My apologies for skipping last month’s newsletter. My excuse is that it was the hottest time of the year in the Philippines, only dropping down to around 80F at night, so I slept insteadJ. How are all of you doing? Sorry that I haven’t been keeping up on sending individual emails.
Early in May, I attended the Northern Philippine Mother Tongue Translators Association (NPMTTA is under of SIL) retreat for mother tongue translators at the SIL center in Bagabag, Nueva Vizcaya. The word “retreat” apparently means sitting and listening to speakers for hours every morning and afternoon, as well as eating. I think that eating was the good part of the retreat. Bob left early to attend a summer module class (he’s now living a few houses away from me to finish his MA at AGS).
The Applied Linguistics classes started on May 15. All of the linguistics classes for this year are in the form of 6 to 8 week modules. The first set consisted of Introduction to Linguistics, a 2-credit non-credit class with a grade (humm…), and Phonetics, or how to produce funny noises. The Japanese student studying here came up with a new sound to add to the chart: the voiced nasal trill with ingressive lung air. If you don’t know how to produce that sound, just listen to someone snoring through his or her nose, and you’ll get the idea. This week we have a break, but the next set of module classes will start next week. I’ll be taking Second Language and Culture Acquisition, Semantics, and Cultural Anthropology.
In June, Bob and I attended three weddings. The first was for a friend in Cavite, the province south of Manila where Bob went to seminary and pastured for several years. The second was for one of Bob’s cousins, Pauleen, in Nueva Vizcaya, and the third was for one of Bob’s friends in the same province.
I didn’t mention it in my last newsletter, but the dermatologist diagnosed me as having some kind of vasculitis on my leg. Sometimes when a person keeps getting sick for a long time, the body ends up attacking itself. It’s already in the “post inflammatory hyper pigmentation stage,” meaning that it has ended, but the color hasn’t disappeared yet. The patches should go away in a few months unless I get sick again. I’ve started to catch a cold a few times, but, fortunately, each time has gone away after only a day or two. Thank you for praying for my health (but you can keep prayingJ). I think it’s amazing that I’ve finally quit getting sick all of the time.
Prayer Requests:
- My Mitral Valve Prolapse is still giving me problems. Among other things, I frequently feel like I’m not getting enough oxygen, and often need a lot of sleep. Caffeine makes my heart problem worse, leaving me with no way to wake up in the morning;-(.
- Please pray that I’ll have energy for my upcoming classes. I became exhausted just going to the 6-week, M-F, 8AM-12 module, maybe because of my heart problem and the hot weather, even though I had very little homework and no papers. The next module will require me to write papers and do much more homework, and will be M-F, 8AM-3:10PM for 8 weeks. Thanks!
I will include you in my prayers. I have just arrived from the Philippines after attending my grandmother's funeral and burial. She was 93 years old. I can relate with how the hot weather in the Philippines can zap your energy. This was my first time in 12 years to go back home. It seems that the climate in the Philippines has become hotter. I remember wearing a sweater starting the month of June when I was a child since it is the start of the rainy season. This year, there is a small amount of rainfall. Could it be the lack of trees? They've chopped down quite a large portion of the jungles to make way for subdivisions and commercial buildings, which is a sad fact.
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