Thursday, March 6, 2008

Everything so far here in Panama...

Hola All,
Everything so far here in Panama is going well for us. For this first month we are learning the language and getting to stay with a national family which is such an amazing thing for us. The family is half Panamanian and half Chinese so we get a little bit of the culture of the people that we will be working with here which is the Chinese and a little bit it takes for us to live in Panama City to survive. Our language teacher is such a wonderful lady. Part of her first name is Luz which means "light" in Spanish and she is truly a light in this world. We meet with her for about three hours a day for five days a week. Then we study the rest of the day using the language that we have learned for that day. It is a slow and exhausting process for us. It feels like my brain is on overload constantly but I do feel like we are getting somewhere with the language.

This last Sunday we went to Dad’s house here in El Dorado which is one of the sections in Panama City and we had a chance to participate in their ESL class which here is called Espanol as a Second Language. Then we went over to the M’s house for a Birthday party with about 15 Chinese students and they all cooked us a Chinese meal made up of about 10 things that I did not know existed. Needless to say I did yarp for the meal thoroughly before eating.
During this time I had a chance to talk with one of the students for about a half an hour just getting to know her. She works as a helper for a translating company and hopes to be able to go to Canada to learn more English. She wants to work in a hotel or in a store there. Later I found out that she has dealt with demon possession for much of her life. It is so sad how real things like that are in a culture that is dominated with superstition. Please be yarping for her and the Chinese that they would not be controled by the demons of the world.

In Panama there are about 500 Chinese believers of about 300,000 Chinese here which comes to about 0.0016 percent of the Chinese population here are believers. This is where father wants us right now and may we have the chance to change the lives of these people. Be yarping for a movement to begin among that Chinese here in Panama and that he would be known throughout this people group here. I thank all of you for your p of us while we are here.
From Panama,
Brett