Christmas in Africa

Merry Christmas Yesterday! We celebrated Christmas African-style this year. This means I got my hair done (in cornrows with a weave and a huge fake bun), my feet dyed black on the bottoms and part of the top, and matching Christmas outfits with the other Christians in the city (there aren't many). We had been out in the village learning doing language, but we left the 23rd to go to another city to celebrate Christmas with two journeygirls here and their African family. We got there the 23rd so we could get ready (it took me four hours for the hair alone and the feet is a 2 night process). We started the party Christmas Eve afternoon and it lasted through Christmas Day. Pastor tried to show the Jesus film Christmas Eve night but the projector broke. The cool thing about the way they celebrate here is they truly are celebrating Jesus's birth. It is not at all commercialized the way it is in the United States. They used it to witness to their neighbors. The Muslims have their big holidays that they celebrate so the Christians were able to show them that this is our Christian holiday and this is why we celebrate. It was incredible to see the way these African believers were reaching out and sharing Christ with their neighbors. Before that we were out in the village learning language. Amy Carmichael said that God could make a donkey talk and it would be about the same for her to learn Tamil, and that's how I feel about Bambera. It's not such a complex language, it's just nothing like English. Some things are funny, like they call a bicycle an "iron horse". And the word for year is the same as rain (because they have one rainy season a year), month is the same as moon, and day is the same as sun. Our "brother" in the village is teaching us Bambera. He wants to learn English so we're teaching him English while he teaches us Bambera. Africans are geniuses as language learning and he's learning English way faster than we're learning Bambera. It's embarrassing. We are doing a lot better though. I'm able to understand a lot of what people are telling me (after they repeat is slowly a few times and use hand gestures). We're back in Bamako because we had Christmas with everyone here last night. We're headed back to the village next tomorrow and will be working on language for the next couple weeks. Hope all of you had a great Christmas!



















This is a little girl in the village
and this is our hut in the village.