Our language woes continue.

Yes, woes. Perhaps it’s a day where it’s not feeling like language successes are abundant, but also just that language learning continues to be so much of our life is woe in itself. Many years of efforts and woes!

And now, it’s two for one! Two language for one person. Every week.

In hopes of being placed with our adopted child soon, we wanted to learn some basic Thai phrases, specifically helpful for working with children. We began taking Thai classes at the end of April.

Here’s what this looks like: every Friday morning we have two teachers come to our home for two hours. Stephen starts with Burmese for one hour, while I take Thai in the next room. Then we swap.

While this is happening, three ladies are making bread in the kitchen, often listening to Burmese music and occasionally popping over for questions. For the first half-hour, a ten-year-old comes to do his daily guitar lesson on the iPad, so we hear chords being strummed (…this is too gentle a word for this guys’ passionate playing). And one woman sews in the Housewares room on an industrial sewing machine that sounds similar to a jet engine, while she also listens to Burmese music from her phone.

It’s a bit of an intense couple hours.

But, here’s what we’ve learned:
Kids learn language faster than adults, so our hope is that our child will pick up Burmese & English very quickly. That’s a good thing, because we aren’t too fast at it. (Coming from the two of us in year five and six of Burmese language study, that seems obvious.)

Your third language IS easier. People always said that, and I was skeptical. But now that Burmese really does have a place to go, so does Thai! The best way I know how to describe it is that my brain finally created a card catalogue for languages, and it now knows exactly where to put that. I’m not forcing it in: it just eases right into the system. So that’s nice.

With Burmese, we started from the alphabet, which just takes awhile. Not only are you learning sounds that your mouth struggles to make, but you’re drawing swirls and trying to memorize them and give them meaning. While incredibly difficult, I think this was the best way for us to learn Burmese: I love that we can read and write, and I’m a strong believer that it makes us more accurate in our pronunciation, understanding, and communication.

That said, we aren’t doing that with Thai. Honestly, we don’t believe we’ll be in Thailand forever. We feel a more long-term commitment to Burmese, and we mostly just want the capacity to communicate at a basic level in Thai.

So, all that to say: we’re figuring out what works for us, what we need, and what we have capacity for. Language teaches you so much on so many levels. It can show you how dumb you are and how smart you are, nearly at the same time!

And we’re going for it! Here’s to two-for-one language learning.

On Saturday, we finished our twelve-week course in self-defense! I was pretty proud of us all: we finished, we did well. We learned what we were capable of and got quite a bit stronger. We also made plans for being safer and smarter as individuals and as a group.

That’s a lot of wins!

So we wanted to celebrate. I told them we’d be going out to lunch afterward, but I took them to a bit of a “special” place. It’s a new place in town that Stephen and I have come to love: they have some delicious spicy salads, grilled meats, and smoothies made with all real fruit (and you get to choose your level of sweetness, which is very, very helpful here). Anyway, I asked them if they were up to try it on us, and they agreed.

When we got there, one of the ladies said, “Oh, this place is expensive.” I told her I’d picked it and I’d be paying for it. I said a friend had told me about it, and right away I wanted to bring the women. I knew they’d love it, and I just wanted them to enjoy it.

{I also feel like I’m saying this all the time recently: the person who chooses it, deals with it. If I choose the restaurant, I pay for it without any hullabaloo. The same goes for your casino bill: you choose to play, you figure out how to pay it. The list goes on, but somehow I’m still saying it.}

Anyway, we had a lovely meal. They loved the smoothies. They loved the crab & papaya salad. They loved the grilled chicken and chicken salad. It was lovely and fun.

And for the record, it was $44 for ten women to “go crazy” with smoothies and salad!

And then we hopped in the car.

“That was expensive, wasn’t it? How much was it?”
“I’m not telling.”
“I saw that this salad cost 40 baht, and this kind of smoothie was 50 baht…”
“Stop counting. Stop doing the math. I chose the restaurant, I paid for it. It’s what I wanted to do!”
{in whispers} “Some of the smoothies were 70 baht…”
“STOP COUNTING.”

Later that evening, some of the ladies were together at our nails night. One of the ladies said the lunch was so delicious and she loved going there. Another agreed that it was some of the best food she’d had. I told them I knew they’d love it: I had known it right when I went!

It was a good day.
And it was a good class.

I love that over twelve weeks I got to really know these women, discussing fears and challenges in their lives. We talked about their marriages and their families and their concerns in the community. We talked about their worth and how we can stick together.

I love that we hit each other with pads and sometimes accidentally hit each other for real. I love that we learned groundwork with each other: sitting on each other and tackling each other. I love that we broke down barriers, so that by the last week they weren’t apologizing every time they hit me or had to sit on me. (They still apologized some. But we made progress!)

Thankful for the organizations that made this possible and invested in our friends, told them they matter, and loved them well!

Three years ago, as we sat in the adoption agency filling out our initial application, we were told we’d be placed within a year to eighteen months.

I never thought I’d be writing here, three years later, as a family of two. 

Two months after that, when we completed and turned in our entire dossier, our caseworker responded that was the fastest she’d ever seen. I felt even more optimistic.

Far too optimistic to consider this current moment would ever be a part of my story. 

Still later, by the end of 2016, we completed the home study and waited on our final step before placement—a class offered once per year. We were told we’d be in the class that coming May, and then we’d be waiting to be placed; but they’d go ahead and put us on the waiting list…
It seemed so fast. It seemed so soon. 
So we left for a last trip to see our families. We took a photo; we made announcements so that it wouldn’t come as a shock if we suddenly had a child in our home.

And then more years went by, instead of weeks or months. 
I just didn’t think we’d get here. 

And I’m not always sure what to do with it. 

Honestly, the days are okay. Some days I’m broken, but most I’m okay. There is more than enough to distract me: conversations over tea, bags to be sewn, jewelry to made, bread to be baked, dinners to be eaten, English classes to be taught, games of Sorry to be played. I can talk myself through any one day. 

It’s when another month has suddenly gone by. It’s when I’m looking to another Christmas, another birthday, another year: when I thought there would be three or four of us. When I didn’t think I’d be here. 

But we are here: we’re rounding out year three of waiting, and stepping into year four. Not leaping, not holding our breath, but just stepping forward into one more day and a bit more waiting. Maybe a lot more. I don’t really know. 

I might know less now than I knew then. I’m most certainly aware of how little I know, how little I can influence. 

Two stories have been circling me, as I meditate on them. The first is from Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. 

“How long?” Sohrab asked.
“I don’t know. A while.”
Sohrab shrugged and smiled, wider this time. “I don’t mind. I can wait. It’s like the sour apples.”
“Sour apples?”
“One time, when I was really little, I climbed a tree and ate these green, sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard like a drum, it hurt a lot. Mother said that if I’d just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn’t have become so sick. So now, whenever I really want something, I try to remember when she said about the apples.”

The second story is in Mark 8. Just before this, Jesus has fed the crowd of five thousand; and then he fed the crowd of four thousand. Then Jesus and the disciples get into the boat to go to another district, and the disciples have “forgotten to bring bread” and have just one loaf among them. As they are arguing over this, Jesus asks, “Why are you discussing the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember?”

Of course there is no coincidence that he’s just multiplied loaf after loaf of bread, as they sit arguing over one, maybe just hours later. 

But am I, too, writing about the child(ren) we are waiting to adopt, when I’ve just seen the epic moments he’s given us with the children in our community? 

I “don’t have any children, yet in spite of it all have a whole village full of children.” (Britt-Marie Was Here,Fredrik Backman) And yet God has answered prayer after prayer for them. Would I see miracle after miracle for a village of children, then turn to fret for the child(ren) we continue to wait for?

Why are you discussing this?
Do you not yet perceive or understand?
Are your hearts hardened?
Having eyes do you not see?
Having ears do you not understand? 
Do you not remember?

Do you not remember my provision for this community?
Do you not understand that I love this community of children as much as I love yours?

And so we wait, remembering what we have seen and heard.
And so we wait, for sweet apples.
And so we wait, with hope.

_________________

{Side note: I particularly love the question in Mark, Having ears do you not understand? In our community, I have two favorite lines used by parents. 1) Do you have ears?!, used when a child isn’t listening or obeying. I can hear God saying this to me in Burmese: Do you have ears?! And still you don’t hear me?!
And further straying from the point, my second favorite phrase used by parents: 2) Are you dead yet?!, used when they take a fall off a table or something scary happens, similar to when we’d scream Are you okay?! In English.}