A little update

Things in Oapan are grand! We are both feeling better, and David’s birthday is tomorrow! Our host family is so excited about the American cake!

I have discovered that I can no longer read, write or speak Nahuatl, Spanish or English. Nahuatl spelling in generally phonetic and I just tried to write the above “cake” as “kak.”

I have decided that most of the difficulties in learning Nahuatl draw on one language feature, that of agglutination. I think the main difference is that they don’t use prepositions. You have prepositional phrases in English, the romance languages, etc, etc. In Nahuatl, instead of saying, “I am going to the store” you would have to inflect the verb. In other word, you would have to add prefixes of suffixes (or both) to indicate you are going away from where you are to somewhere else and when (like “before leaving”). In addition you also have to mark the verb for person (and if it is transitive or ditransitive for objects, primary and secondary). The line up of these prefixes and suffixes next to one another often cause sound change, so that complicates things as well. Basically, you end up with some fairly massive words that carry a lot of meaning.

There are some things that I do here that make me chuckle to myself. One of these things is feeding eggs to chickens. If I don’t finish my meal, the leftovers go to the pigs or to the chickens. Occasionally, I have leftover eggs, and I toss them to the chickens. They all go crazy fighting over it. It makes me feel a little guilty, then it makes me laugh, and then I think, “How strange.”

David and I are planning to go to Xalita this weekend to look at some amatl (amate), since no one in Oapan paints them anymore. Then we will go to Taxco, known as one of the most romantic cities in Mexico. They are also supposed to have a lot nice silver there. We will head back to the village for one final week. Our final exam is on Thursday and we will have a going away party on Friday. We are so excited to see Okie Doke and sleep in our own bed, but we are going to miss our new friends! I can’t believe we have made it this far!

On an unrelated note, if you liked the book Kite Runner, I recommend A Thousand Splendid Suns. I read it last weekend, and I thought it was fantastic!

Pray for rain and clouds. It has rained the past two nights and been overcast during the day and it is glorious (because the temperature drops about fifteen degrees)! And pray that David and I do well on our final exam and phonetics project that we are working on! I will try to post some pictures this weekend.