It’s been hard to know what to blog about because of everything that’s happened here this past week. I apologize to those of you who don’t know where we are exactly, but I really can’t be more specific right now. Let’s just say that if the only reason our Father sent us here was to experience what we experienced last week, I feel like we could go back to the States in peace. I’m pretty sure that’s not all He has in store, but it was so monumental, so unlike anything I had ever witnessed, and so solidifying to my faith that I am humbled to the core to be here in this land, experiencing all this first-hand.

In some ways, it feels like more of a step of faith to be here now. I’m not worried or anything, but it all just makes it so much more real that we are here for a purpose. Does all this make sense? Probably not. But I spent good quality time wrestling with my desires last week, wondering if it’s really our call to be here in this strange land. Part of it has to do with the event, but part of just has to do with us passing our six-week mark, which is a common time to start feeling that letdown of excitement. We’re almost done setting up the house, which we’re hoping means next week we’ll just start doing almost nothing but language learning. We’re very, very happy about that, but it’s also this weird realization of “Wow – we’re really here.” Silly, I know, but there it is.

My thoughts are all a bit cacophonous after last week, so I’ll just leave this post with a few new cultural oddities I’ve learned.

• To honor an important date, such as a wedding anniversary, a special event that happened in your life, or an anniversary of someone passing away, you make donuts and hand them out on the street to passersby. Usually someone will set up a makeshift stand with donuts on a table, and a line will quickly queue to partake of the free goodies. A rather odd way to commemorate, I think, but they’re quite delicious. You usually see this happening at least once a week.

• I just learned that in this language, you don’t eat soup – you drink soup. Kinda makes sense.

• Chickpea has a set of those Duplo-like plastic building blocks. You know, the larger legos for toddlers. The plastic bag that contains the blocks reads, in English, “The hand eye brain integration moderates” and “Interest, Grow in Wisdom the Sex, Creativity.” We think it has something to do with blocks being appropriate for little boys, but we’re not 100% sure. They seem rather Rated-G though, so that’s good. But apparently they are a bit sexist.

• Speaking of language oddities… Hopefully I won’t totally reveal where we are with this (and if I notice that it does, I’ll remove it), our language is difficult for native English-speakers to learn because it’s so opposite from our mother tongue. As I’ve mentioned before, sentence structure goes All the nouns / all the prepositions and articles and such / all the verbs. One of the reasons it’s difficult to speak is because you have to think of the entire sentence you want to say before you open your mouth, because where we would say, “Do the kids want to play at the park now?”, here you say, “Children now park to the play do they?” It can be quite exhausting.

But – I don’t think I’ve mentioned that you also tack on prepositions, modifiers, possessive words, and articles to the ends of words – which means that sometimes not only can one word be an entire sentence, but it can become one very crazy, very hard-to-read word. For example, “elektroansefalografiliestiremeyebileceklerimizdenmissiniz” means “apparently you may be amongst the ones that we will not be able to make have a test for measuring and recording the electric activity of the brain.”

I am not kidding.

I’m hoping against hope that I won’t need to use this sentence too much.

Who knows, though, after learning this language, I may need to use this sentence for myself.

posted: 07 April 23
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