After two weeks

So, sorry I haven't been updating more often. Studying has been taking up a good bit of time lately, but I'll try to be a little more frequent with some updates.
The second week of class we continued to introduce new objects and such in class, but we also began to distinguish more between tenses and looking at sequencing of events. Again, this was all done by demonstration. The teacher would have one of the students get up and act out a series of commands and return to their seat. Then the teacher would tell us in past tense what the student had just done, and then "read their book" to us, in which the would use the sequential past tense to tell the story of what the student had just done. We've also acted out the story of the garden of Eden and Balaaam and his donkey (I got to be Balaam). They have fun ways of introducing vocabulary. One day they chose a king and a servant and prompted the king to ask his servant for a vineyard. It's always fun to see people improvise to do things. We were outside, so the "servant" took a stick and drew lines in the dirt and acted like he was planting seeds. Then the king asked for a wall, so he took rocks and made a ring around the vineyard. Then they had a story where a bad woman (isha ra'a) came to steal from the king, and there was a guard who chased and caught the person, and they asked the king what he wanted to do with her, and he let her go. I could go on, but it gives you a good idea of how they conduct class. It's very interactive, and there are two teachers and one student teacher that play off of each other very well. We've also been memorizing some short six line dialogs that follow the story of Jonah and performing them in class. The drills for homework now focus more on grammatical points, so we're learning more of the verb patterns and how to conjugate verbs.

As far as other things besides class, today was the last Sunday that Sheka Immanuel, a pastor from Nigeria that's been studying over here for the last three years, will be at Jerusalem Baptist Church. He's been leading the Sunday School there, but his classes are finished now so he is heading back home in a week to return to his family and ministry there. Before Brother Al's sermon today, Immanuel told a little about what he wants to do when he returns home. One thing that he wants to do is to start a library. Pastors (and everyone else) have very few resources, and so he wants to use the books he got from seminary and any others that people will donate to start a library. He's looking for books of pretty much any kind: theological books, novels, schoolbooks, Bibles, etc. He also hopes that this can be an outreach, because if a place with these resources is available to everyone, then several Muslims will also make us of the library. His mailing address is

Rev. Sheka Immanuel Bambur
ECWA Good News Church
P.O. Box 619
Jalingo 660001
Taraba State, Nigeria

in case any of you have some extra books that you don't need anymore. Just tell him you know Joe from Alabama that he met in Jerusalem Baptist Church. Please pray for our brother as he goes home to be a light to Nigeria and an anchor to teach sound doctrine in the church.