I mentioned last week that I needed to get a picture of our new church sign that my friend Bill and I put up. Here it is. You can click on the pictures to get a bigger view.
Category: Deaf
“You did pretty awful. Didn’t you?”
Today I volunteered to help one of the local interpreters (sign language) with an assignment. The program was to have been 3 hours long. Certainly she needed help. No other interpreters were available. While I understand I am not qualified to interpret under the standards of RID interpreters, there are no such rules here. An interpreter doing their work for 3 hours straight is not proper. Besides, I love interpreting. It is one of my favorite activities in my ministry.
So, I told her I could jump in and relieve her every so often. She was certainly grateful for the help.
When the program started I knew I was in trouble. I did not clearly understand the man’s speech. On top of that, he was, of course, speaking Spanish (not my native language) and I was interpreting into Mexican Sign Language.
After the interpreter had been up there about 20 minutes I stepped up to relieve her. I did not do so well. She jumped back in after a 5 minute break. I let her go another 30 minutes before I jumped in again. This time I did better since the subject matter was a bit simpler and I had had almost an hour of listening to the man. I was up about 10 minutes the second time to wrap up the lecture. Thankfully it did not go anywhere close to 3 hours.
The older Deaf and the teachers at the Deaf school said I did a good job. Not great, but “you will get there.” One of the Deaf girls (yes, the same retarded girl I mentioned before) met me with: “You did pretty awful. Didn’t you?”
Thanks for the encouragement!
“I hate the cold!”
Yesterday one of the girls at the Deaf school was bemoaning the cold. She is probably about 18 years old. But she is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. She probably has not been in school more than a couple of years and has grown up in one of the villages outside of town. This is to say that this girl would fit in well with the hillbillies living around Mayberry.
She told me how cold it was yesterday and how much she hates the cold. It did get a bit chilly. The high was only 93. I wonder what she thought of the weather today. It was an even cooler high of 89. She must have been freezing.
Definitely a different culture
Today I was teaching about John the Baptist in Sunday School class at the Deaf church. He is not the John who wrote the book of John nor First, Second and Third John or the book of The Revelation. John, the author, is the one we refer to as Saint John.
John the Baptist however was a cousin to Jesus and was his “forerunner.” He went around preaching that Jesus was coming. John attracted some attention. The Bible says that he dressed in camel skins and ate locusts and wild honey.
The insect that the Bible calls locusts are what I called grasshoppers when I was growing up. I think that is pretty common in the US. Wikipedia has a pretty good article about locusts and shows that they are capable of the destruction of “biblical proportions” that has been attributed to them.
In Spanish the word for locusts (or grasshopper) is langosta. If you are up on your seafood in various languages, you will know that langosta is lobster as well. I did my best to describe lobsters for them. Though they are teens and fairly well educated, they are Deaf and do not know all the names of animals that do not affect their lives regularly. After my great description of a lobster and they knew what I was talking about, I asked them if they liked lobster / langosta. Basically…no. It was “OK,” but nothing too exciting for them.
I then told them that what John the Baptist was eating was not lobster anyway. He was eating an insect by the name langosta. They did not know what it could be. So, I pulled out some pictures that I had of grasshoppers. They got excited. One blurted out (in signs), “Oh! Those are really good. Especially with chocolate!” They not only knew what they were, but could tell how best to eat them!
After we were done being grossed out and amused by their excitement I said that John probably did not eat them with chocolate. But the Bible does say that he ate wild honey. So perhaps he dipped his grasshoppers in the honey instead.
Just because we don’t understand something that the Bible says, does not make it untrue or unbelievable. Maybe from our perspective we cannot wrap our heads around it, but it may just be a matter of experiencing a new culture to get an understanding.
The wisdom of a 2 year old
We had an activity at the church tonight with the Deaf. Since we work with mostly a younger congregation, we played kids/teenage/young people games.
We played paint ball. Without the paint…or guns…or masks…well, maybe it was not so much like paint ball. We used aluminum balls and set up chairs and obstacles to play capture the flag. We also played basketball without a ball. But we at least had baskets. Or, plastic buckets. That is at least similar to basketball. The ball was a beanbag. Whoever had the ball could not move, but the others could. You just pass the bag
from one team member to another. It got a bit violent, but fun.
The final game was bobbing for apples. I have not played that since I was a kid. It is much easier to play now that my mouth is bigger. (No snide remarks please). All the boys got very much into the game. None of the girls played, except my daughter. She wanted to get an apple so badly. As soon as someone would finish she would act like she was going to stick her head in. When we finally told her it was her turn to get an apple, she just reached in with one hand and had it in a jiffy. All without getting her head wet. Then she looked at all of us with our soaked faces and shirts as if to say, “silly boys, it is a lot less trouble to just use your hands.”