Long-awaited Pictures

Megan and Kris

The church I've been going to in Camdenton had a potluck after church on my last Sunday. We had a good time catching up since I'd been gone about 5 weeks.

Elijah and I got to spend some time outside exploring this morning...


Trash! I was around the corner and when I got back, Elijah was exploring a whole new area...
What on earth is THAT?!

I made it safely to Florida after my 5 day traveling marathon. We got into the Gills 2 hours later than planned because of a flat tire on the way to the airport, but all is well now. Thank you for your prayers while I've been traveling!

Love,
Carrie

Car Update

The newest on my car is that the problem was DEFINITELY the fuel filter. BUT the mechanic didn't have any fuel filters in stock. Please pray that the one he ordered will get in on time for him to install it tomorrow (Friday 11th) so I can pick up the car Saturday.

I'll be traveling the next 4 days from NC to MO, and MO to Orlando. Please pray for safety driving and flying!

Thanks!
C

The Car

Thank you so much for praying for the situation with my car!! Right now, we're looking at changing the fuel filter, which could solve the entire problem! Of course, the mechanic found nothing wrong with it when he drove it, but based on what I've told him it's doing, the fuel filter may be the issue. Praise God with me that this is an inexpensive fix!

In North Carolina

Thank you all for your prayers and Elisabeth and I drove here. We were able to stop in Tennessee at her brother's and sleep! Please continue to pray that my car will be able to be fixed, and that it's not the transmission!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Prayer Requests

Hi Friends, Well, my time in the training program at New Tribes in nearly finished, and I will be heading to NC to see my parents. My plans have changed from what I had perfectly laid out. The decision was made this morning to have my transmission worked on here in Missouri rather than pushing it to (hopefully) get to NC.

How have I seen God working this far?

1—A man on staff has offered to take care of my car on this end: getting it into the mechanic and dealing with it while I am gone.

2—I have a ride to NC with a classmate!

3—I have a way back to Missouri, where my car will be.

This all before 8:00 this morning! Praise God with me for going before and laying out His plans. Please pray for me as I have to repack, decide what to keep or get rid of, and work out many of the logistics of my new traveling plans! Thank you so much for your prayers; they mean more to me than I can express in words.

Love, Carrie

The Best White Elephant Gift...

Yes, at the Youth Christmas party, I bequeathed Mr. Wilson to an unsuspecting 9th grader. He (the fish) traveled in a beautifully decorated glass milk jug. He was so well disguised that our beloved youth all wanted to shake the milk jug and drink the innards... luckily, we caught them (most of the time) before too much damage was done!

Six of our guys...yes...six.

Blowing plastic bubbles

I've had a great time with the youth group over the past year and a half--it will be hard to leave them. Tuesday, 18th, will be our last meeting that I will be at.

Bible Translation

Target Audience for our translation: 3 year olds

This week we went through Bible Translation class. It had multiple aspects, as we discussed what was more important to keep in translating: form (word for word translation) versus meaning (communicating the message). It was very good to look at multiple English translations and see that even the most "literal" translations that we have are still not word-for-word from the Greek and Hebrew. It is just not possible, because languages do not always have a word-for-word translation. Just try to explain an idiom to a non-English speaker--it won't happen in the same number of words! And if that non-Englisher speaker tried to explain one of their idioms literally, it would not make sense to us.

One of the other parts of the translation class was to take Mark 2:1-12 "Jesus heals the paralytic". It takes teamwork to create a translation, and we were on teams for the project. We had to choose a target audience, and then translate the scripture into 3 year old acceptable terms. It was more difficult than we anticipated! In the end, we may have ended up with a translation acceptable to a 5 year old, but the goal was accomplished: we learned that translation is not easy!

Prayer Request for the next week:
--Church Planting class begins tomorrow. We will be in teams discussing different aspects of Church Planting from learning the national language (in my case Spanish) to leaving the tribe after a church has been successfully planted.

--I'll be saying goodbye to many friends that I've made over the past few years. Some of them I have gone through all 4 1/2 years of training with, and some have just come to school here this year. Please pray that we would all have a good last week together!

--Please pray that "Black Beauty" my favorite little Saturn will continue working until I get to North Carolina. The transmission has been acting up, and I have a 16 hour drive ahead of me December 20-21.

Thank you for taking this requests with me boldly before the throne of grace!
Love, Carrie

A Few More Okie Pictures:

Pastor DJ being guarded by the Romans (formerly known as Linguistics Students!)

3 VERY FULL carts of groceries for 60 servings of food 3 meals a day for 7 days...

And yes, I did find Muskogee, OK and said,
"Okie from Muskogee."

DONE WITH CHEROKEE!!!

I have finally finished my Cherokee write-up! I am going to begin translation class on Tuesday morning. (I'll write some about that later this week.) Please pray that we as a class will finish the next 2 1/1 weeks strong!


Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. Hebrews 12:1-3

Back in Missouri

Thank you for your prayers while I was in Oklahoma! I made it back to Missouri Saturday evening and was able to get unpacked. Thankfully, I did that right away, because I got a cold Sunday. I'm still recuperating from it, but decided to stay here at school for the Thanksgiving holiday to rest up. Thanks again for praying!

Love,
Carrie

Spread the Words--and the Rice!

Do you spend a lot of time playing games on the computer? Well, here's a new one that will make you smarter AND help feed people. It's a vocab game, similar to the one in Reader's Digest each month. The catch is--people get food when you get the definition to the word correct! One correct answer is worth 10 grains of rice, and it takes a short time to get to 100 grains, or one bowl. Check it out, it's a lot of fun!

BOTTOM'S UP!!: How to Go Crawdadin'

This weekend a few of us went up to Missouri for a little R & R. On Saturday, we decided it would be fun to go crawdadin'. Here's our little "How to" Guide, in pictures:

Step One: Go in the summer. The water is warmer.

Step Two: Flip over rocks looking for said crawdad.

Step Three: Discover a better spot down stream where you can spot them from five feet up.

Step Four: Decide when ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
(Can you spot the bottom-feeder fish?)

Step Five: Take them home.

Step Six: Let the big ones duke it out.
(What haven't you ever heard of Fighting Crawdads?)

And the winner is....HERCULES!!

Step Seven: Cut dem tails.
(This is not the proper LA method.)

Step Eight: Wash dem tails!

Step Nine: Fry and enjoy!

Good luck next summer on your crawdadin'!

Down at the River

On the Campgrounds

This is "The White Dorm" where I live. I've got my own little cell-like room to enjoy. I keep forgetting to take a picture of it now that there's stuff in it.

This is the building the Linguistics students study in.
Mom, here's the pile of broken wood. :-)

Cherokee with the Scrapers

Everyday, Monday through Friday, Nate, Justin, and I travel about 25 minutes to go see Junior and Eda Scraper. They have been faithfully teaching us Cherokee for 4 weeks now. It's been great getting to know them!

Eda, Junior, Justin, and me

Junior, Justin, and Nate after a language session

Verb Party?

Yes, we really are weird enough to have a verb party--and halfway enjoy it! We had to figure out the prefixes on the verbs as a group. It was...loud? We made a lot of headway, though we didn't finish the task. Our goal for the next two weeks is to continue with the verbs. Thanks for your prayers as we undergo this!

This is Justin the Seal. He's our entertainment. He's also one of the guys I work with for language sessions. Nate and I are in the background working in the corner the three of us claimed for our "office".

Maybe I was confused about the verbs? I don't really know...

Romans Party at Elm Tree Baptist

The Young Adults class at Elm Tree Baptist held a Roman's night for the church. We even had a "craft time" where we made Roman arm bands and crowns. It was a great time, and the young adults had put a lot of work into it.

Visiting the World's Largest McDonalds

Last week we made an emergency run to Missouri and got to stop at the world's largest McDonalds on the way home. We stopped and got a little snack to get us the rest of the way home.

You'll have to trust me on this one...this really is me, and it really is the world's largest McDonalds...and it really was 1:00 AM.

This is Elisabeth; we ventured out together...thankfully we made it home together also!

Time flies when you're having...

...verbs?

Our focus for the past week (and next 3) has been the verbs within Cherokee. We're discovering that you can communicate a full English sentence with only one word in Cherokee. For example, you can say "She will not be stomping" with only one word. We're getting to a very exciting point in the language, as we are now accustomed to writing it down and the sounds we should expect to hear.

I'll post more pictures soon! Thank you for your prayers!

Love,
Carrie

Surprises around every corner...

We got to go to a United Keetoowah Band pow-wow on Saturday. The Keetoowah are a tribe of Cherokee here in Oklahoma. These are only a few pictures of the 115 participants in the pow-wow. They came from all over to participate. It was great to be able to see a pow-wow.

We also were surprised with the presence of Chris and Ginger. They are in Tulsa visiting with family, and decided to drive over to visit us. Please be praying for them as they are waiting to hear if they will be receiving their visas in time to leave in January.

Love,
Carrie

Home on the Range...

Sweeping the Dining Hall

This is the size of our rooms!

It took us about six hours to get to Tahlequah, OK from Roach. This weekend will be full of cleaning and finding a language helper at church on Sunday. I'll be working with one of my classmates, Justin.

Please be praying:
-- that we will find a language helper that we can work well with.
--for us as we rely on each other for meals, cleaning, and bathroom sharing.
--families that will be adjusting.

Love,l
Carrie

Ooooooooooo-klahoma!

On Friday morning, our class is driving down to Oklahoma to begin studying Cherokee for six weeks. We will be staying at a Cherokee-run conference center outside of Tahlequah.

Until then, we are frantically working on "Kuman". Kuman is a language from Papua New Guinea. Our goal is to discover what the Kuman think they are saying, and to discover the grammatical structures within their language. This project is due Thursday morning.

Over the past few weeks, a few viruses have been passed around campus. As our minds are exhausted and our bodies following in exhaustion, would you pray with us that the linguistics students would not get sick? Our desire is to finish strong in this assignment this week, while preparing for our 6-week move to Oklahoma.

Thank you for your prayers!

Love,
Carrie

An Example

These two pictures make one white board of Northern Tepehuan non-action clauses. Northern Tepehuan is a language group from Mexico. Non-action clauses are sentences that resemble "This tree is tall." They describe the subject in the sentence. It took many different color markers and a few hours, but I was finally able to figure out most of the meanings of the words. Today I'm working on the action clauses: "You hit me."

Please pray that I will have a clear mind on this 3 day problem of Northern Tepehuan!

Love, Carrie

More Linguistics

This picture is all that we have learned in the past three weeks of linguistics. This week we will learn and review for two days before we begin the "Long Problems." We'll spend three days to two weeks working on long problems: Northern Tepehuan, Tomi Ksa, and Kuman. Please pray for our class as we begin this stress-ier time.
Love,
Carrie

Table Rock Lake

Our class had the opportunity to go to a lake house this weekend, and we spent many hours out on the water...here's a few pictures of it:

Caution Flagger: Man Down!!

Christin, Janna, and Tiff tubing

I tried wake boarding...but didn't make it up

That was the extent I was ever out of the water!

We had a great time, and tomorrow morning we return to our linguistics studies. (Technically, tonight...we have homework...)

Love C~

My new Apartment...Again

Welcome to my new house!! I finally have a place to hang my hammock, so I'm in it quite often. My door is on the left...come on in...The living area (from the kitchen)
The kitchen (from the living area)
There are two of us in the apartment. Please pray that we would communicate well with each other this semester and enjoy each other's company.

Indiana

Last week I left Louisiana for Missouri and quickly moved my things to a new apartment. Then I went up to my cousin's wedding in Indiana. We had a great time up there, and we're looking forward to the next time we're all together. This is (almost) all the cousins. We're missing three cousins for the picture. I made it safely back to Missouri--but not without stopping at a friend's along the way.
Tyler, Mike, and I were on a SUMMIT trip together a few years ago, and Mike married Ashley this summer. It was so good to see them again!

I'm back on campus now, trying to get my apartment put together. I'll put up pictures, once the boxes are gone!

Thanks for all your prayers,
Carrie