July 19

Lewis continues his courageous and diligent expansion of vocabulary as he seeks to be able to relay concepts in the Family Relations class, learning words he'd never had to use in his mission or medical work here up to this point. So if you ever need to know them, he knows, as of this week, a bunch of words relating to childhood emotional and social development. I'm impressed.

I continue my valiant battle with the language as well, with much less spectacular results, but I'm still making headway.  Today I was able to communicate to a sister in the branch that we would not be home on Saturday, but that Thursday would work.  And afterwards, of course, I became aware of all the prepositions and possessives I'd left out.  But hey!  I attempted. She understood. That's progress.  And earlier this week I took an item of clothing to a very nice seamstress to have a zipper replaced.  I memorized two sentences and made it through about one and a half before my mind went blank.  But I am optimistically counting it a small victory that she understood enough that she directed her answer to me (which I could not understand any of) instead of immediately turning to L to communicate.  :-D

And, speaking of language learning, this week in English class we tackled the "r" sound.

That squiggle that looks like a leaning 2 is the phonetic symbol for r.

I am learning all kinds of things.

And if you want to watch a fun lesson on how to say that sound try THIS youtube video

One interesting enjoyable thing this week was meeting with a young Vietnamese-Czech Republic woman in her early 20s who is here for a few months visiting her grandmother and teaching English.  She speaks English and Czech and can understand, but is not confident in her ability to speak, Vietnamese.   She found the young elders phone number and requested to meet with someone who could have some new member discussions with her in English.  Three of the 4 young elders and sister here speak English as a second language, some not yet confident at it, so they asked us to meet with her.  She's pleasant and forthright and we enjoy her.

Jeffrey Holland will be here for meetings in mid-August including one with the members here.  Our small branch has started putting together a small choir for the occasion.

And here are a few photographs taken as we were out and about running an errand this week.