Sprechen vous English?

We are up and running with the Youth With A Mission (www.ywam.org, www.ywamkyiv.org) Discipleship Training School (DTS) here in Kiev. We started the school March 22 with 14 students and 8 staff from countries such as Nepal, Kyrgyzstan, the United States, Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Denmark, Poland and Moldova. All in all a very interesting mix of very interesting and different people. Spoken languages in the group are a bit easier to account for, since everybody but half the staff speaks Russian. Our Polish guy and the American girl speak quite a lot of Russian, but prefer to speak English. So....what do you do, when you’re a Dane who speaks English, but still doesn’t know much more Russian than how to describe what kitchen utensils we have in our apartment, and you meet people who freeze and look like I just asked them to jump in the river when faced with the question: “how are you doing?” in English? Hmm....you have to use your imagination and your non-verbal-communication gifts. Wise people claim that 70-80% of all communication is non-verbal. Being someone who enjoys talking, I’m sure that those statistics are hugely exaggerated, but still there is a place for non-verbal communication. And then there is a place for making up your own languages. I get by with a weird mixture of mainly English, a little bit of Russian, and a few Danish words thrown in here and there.

Today I was leading process group here in our home with a group of students. I do manage to pick up more and more of what they say in Russian, as long as I know the topic they’re talking about, but most of the Russian-speakers don’t really get my English. Today, after the serious talk about Bible study and other school-related topics, we made progress though. I pointed at pretty much all the different items that are in our living room and told people the English names, and some of the Belarussians in the group seem to improve their vocabulary drastically through that little exercise. My wife Jeannette has put small pieces of paper on a lot of items in our apartment with the name of the item in English, Russian and Danish. Jeannette is also trying to improve her Danish skills. Thankfully I only have to worry about my Russian:-)

There are many times throughout a day where it’s incredibly frustrating that we just don’t understand each other, but we’re learning and growing all of us in our language skills. So I’m sure that by the end of this school we’ll all have developed our very own versions of English and Russian. So Dobre Morning to everybody :-)