Philippine Phirsts

Mid term examinations have finally arrived here at Aparri Bible Seminary, it is flat out hilarious how much more attentive students are when you inform them that you are about to review for an important test. Throughout the review I was pleasantly surprised with how much they remembered or took notes those first 2 weeks when I was sure they didn't understand a word that I was saying. Writing the tests were slightly easier than I expected; we'll see if these students can manage to impress me. I really hope they do well on these tests.

Last week on Thursday night I received an extended Ilocano lesson from a number of students here. There were several interesting moments, but the verb system is what I want to tell you about. I'll use my favorite activity here in the Philippines as an example. A hand fan is called a paypay (pronounced pie-pie) in Ilocano. In Ilocano most nouns can convert to verbs, so the present form of this verb is agpaypaypay. Ag is an augment and it is paired with a partial reduplication to form the present. The future is agpaypay, it drops the reduplication, and the past is nagpaypay, so it just has a different augment. If I wanted to say 'I am fanning' or 'I fan' it would be agpaypaypayak. Ak is a pronominal suffix that is a shortened form of the pronoun "siak" (pronounced shock) that means "me." Now the funny part, paypay literally means air-air or air supply. So literally agpaypaypayak means "me air-supplying" or maybe even "me very airing." In light of the band Air Supply (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HejVjzhKTY) and the aforementioned "very jokes" this is about the funniest verb in the history of the world.

Some other firsts that occurred recently: I tried pizza for the first time in the Philippines. It wasn't LaRosa's but it was pretty good, and was the only time I've seen real cheese in this country. Also, I tried halo-halo for the first time which is a type of dessert here. Halo is the Tagalog (the national dialect) word for "mix." Thus the dessert is called mix-mix because it has things like ice and ice cream and fruit and gelatin and licorice and you're supposed to mix-mix it all together. It was pretty good too. The best part of the trip was that the pizza parlor was air conditioned. Another first was my attendance at a big birthday party here. It was Pastor Angelo's birthday yesterday, and the church here in Aparri that he serves roasted a pig and basically had an all day party. We were there for dinner and supper and the roundtable that followed supper and the snacking that followed the roundtable. This was yesterday and I seriously think that I ate about 10 meals yesterday. If you're saying something to the effect of "You should have just said 'no, thank you'," you come here and try to say that and see how successful you are. They just make fun of me and give me a full plate, maybe you'll do better. The pig was pretty good though, I will give them that. And the banana cake, that was pretty good too.

For those of you who were curious, my eye is pretty well healed, there is still a little bit of blood in the white of my eye, but it is gradually disappearing. I want to add that all of this healing is natural, I took no part in the local cure.

It's hard to believe that I'll be in Indiana soon for Nate and Brooke's wedding. I'm looking forward to that. My flight leaves Manila in 28 days. I'll be in Indiana for a little less than a week, and then right back to hopefully finish out the school year. I say "hopefully" because immigration issues may still play a part; keep praying about that.

Nick