Survived first week of classes!

So, I feel like a dork because I just now realized that people have been making comments on my blog and I just now read the comments! HA! So thanks for those, they were encouraging! And sorry it has taken me so long to discover them!

So thankfully we made it through our first week of classes! (Picture of everyone in front of the University on Monday, first day of classes! Hopefully our excitement that early Monday morning will carry throughout the whole semester!) For some reason I thought I was going to have lots of free time. Wrong! So we may have waited until the day before the homework was due to start it, which thankfully it got done, but we also realized that this is going to be a lot more work and reading outside of class than we had expected. We didn´t really want to wait until the last minute but doing lots of other errands got us behind. But, we got it done. And have realized (yet again) the importance of time management.

I LOVE my classes. LOVE LOVE LOVE. It is awesome to be studying exactly what I am most interested in, linguistics- and with a Christian point of view, and to train us to work in Bible translation in the future. Right now all the students (17 total) are in the same classes. We have 3 right now- Semantics, Morphosyntax, and Sociolinguistics. The last two we will have all semester and Semantics will be only the first half of this semester. The professors are from Chile, Peru, and US. The professor from the US worked with an indigenous people group in Guatemala and translated the New Testament in their language. So his experience and wisdom is so valuable for us!! I have also been really expressed with the other students. They are all very intelligent and so passionate about what we are learning. They are from all over Latin America and ages range from 23 to 40s. So it is a really neat atmosphere to be studying in. I am so thankful to be here! Friday afternoon we did a group devotional and as we all sat there together, I just felt overwhelmed by everyone in that room. Everyone is unique, some already have experience working with an indigenous groups, others are just starting out, several want to go to the 10-40 window and want to work with Muslims, one wants to serve in Asia and many want to work in indigenous groups in Latin America. So as I sat there and looked around I feel overwhelmed being around so many people who all have the specific calling to work in Bible translation. And it made me wonder about all the great things God is going to do through these people.

(p.s. Make sure you look at the previous posts, I uploaded lots of pics!)