Village in a Box And Other Stories (with a Video)

We’ve been studying the Uriay language for over a year now. It feels like forever, yet we’re excited that each day brings us closer to fluency and being able to share the rest of God’s Talk with our friends!

Most of our study time now is spent hearing and telling short stories.  We practice constantly, probably driving the people a bit crazy with our simplistic tales of what we did today. But hopefully the practice will pay off down the road. 

The verbs in this language are pretty crazy! We’re finding that some things, like the words for “coming” and “going” can change depending on whether you’re going up river, down river, into the jungle, or back to the village. And they can change as well if you’re carrying something. For instance, the phrase, “we’re going” is “mi maimi”, but the phrase, “we’re going on top/up (of the river, village, etc)” is “mi maneteme”. It makes it difficult to keep it straight sometimes!

We’ve been using two fun visual aids (ideas borrowed from other missionaries) to help us with our storytelling. One is called “Village in a Box”. Our coworker, Jason, drew us a simple layout of the village on a piece of cardboard. Then, we use DUPLO people (can you tell we have toddlers?) to act out stories around the village. Our friends always enjoy hearing what stories we come up with, especially when we incorporate little animal figures. It’s an awesome tool that allows us to make our stories as simple or complex as we want.

Another visual aid is a photo book. Throughout our time here, we’ve been taking pictures of the various cultural events (like hunting, scraping sago, etc) that we’ve done with the people. We’ve sorted each event into 8 or 9 photos on a page, printed the pages out, and put them in a thin notebook. Then, we can pull out the notebook and flip through the pages, trying to tell as much as we can from each story. It’s fun for the people to see themselves in the pictures and remember back to various things we’ve done together.

We still use flashcards and listen to recordings of stories that the people have done for us to help us with our comprehension abilities. But we’re excited at how fun these new methods have made our language sessions! And we hope they will drastically improve our language abilities as we practice.

Here's a quick video with a few clips from some recent language sessions.