This post is kind of all over the place, so I apologize. I’m just sort of writing down all of my feelings, so bear with me.
We’ve been in the French group now for 2.5 years.
Let me preface this by saying that we have never really wavered in our decision to stay in the French group. We’ve never thought about returning to English and even if we ever leave New Mexico, the next place that we live MUST have a French group or congregation.
But…..it’s hard. And ‘hard’ is an understatement. We are SO busy. We both work full-time. I leave the house each morning by 6:30 and get home anywhere between 3:45 – 5:30. Husband leaves around 8:30 and gets home around 6:30 or so. There’s the house to take care of, the dogs, studying for English meeting, studying for French meeting (which takes 2-3 times longer), chores, errands to run, vet appointments, public talk scheduling (my husband does this and it involves contacting and coordinating with speakers from Texas, Colorado, Arizona and California), service, meeting parts (in both English and French), selling my mother-in-law’s house, planning an overseas trip, I could go ON AND ON AND ON.
So needless to say, life in the French group can be very overwhelming. Take everything that you would normally do as a person in the truth and times the difficulty factor by at least two. For example, PREPARATION. We usually start preparing for our Wednesday night meeting the weekend before, (the meeting consists of ½ French and ½ English). Comments MUST be prepared in advance. I read every scripture ahead of time, because I never know which ones the conductor will ask to be read and I want to be prepared. I highlight the ones I am comfortable with (just stuff you don’t even think about in English, you know?). We try to start studying for our weekend meeting on Thursday or Friday. Again….very time consuming. We use the Simplified edition which you would think would help a lot, but it is still difficult. I study only in French first, but when I prepare my comments or I don’t understand something, I have to refer to my English magazine.
Talks….lots of preparation. Google Translate is evil, so I don’t use it often. I use what I already know, Word Reference (an amazing app) and my Verb book. Which makes things accurate, but it takes FOREVER.
And….we only have 35 publishers in our group. So for a ‘regular’ sized congregation (60 – 100?) preparing 1 or 2 comments is sufficient. In French? It’s more like 7 or 8, especially for the Sunday meetings. Same with talks/assistant parts…they are given much more frequently because of the size of our group.
Next up? DISTANCE. It takes about 25 minutes to get to our meetings. This isn’t completely terrible, but we were used to about a 7 minute commute. Not anymore (although that may be changing). And our territory is the entire state of New Mexico. Some days, we drive almost an hour to the territory and only have time to work maybe 3 doors (our territory is not door-to-door, it’s a list of address in a particular zip code). And then we drive an hour back to the hall. And if no one is home…it can be a little discouraging.
It is HARD learning a new language. It’s overwhelming. Sometimes I wonder WHY we do this. We can only go in service on the weekends, so honestly, we don’t find many people home and if they are home, usually they are not French speakers. It can get discouraging.
But…before you start thinking what a Debbie-Downer-Negative-Nelly I am, now I’m going to talk about the good things. The rewards. Something happened Wednesday night that made me realize WHY we keep plugging away.
I had a French talk. I’ll be honest….I feel like I butcher the language. I have no accent whatsoever. The accent is hard for me, because you almost have to change the sound of your voice completely to get the accent down and it just feels so….weird. Almost fake. Like you’re imitating someone else’s voice or trying to sound cooler than you are ha ha. One of the gals in our group is totally fluent and the first time I heard her comment in English I had to turn around and look to see who it was because I didn’t recognize her voice. It’s a very noticeable change. I stumble in my words a lot. My pronunciation is not consistent. I could go on and on. But anyways, I wrote my talk and sent it to my assistant (who is pretty much fluent) to look over. I told her to PLEASE let me know if it didn’t make sense, if I needed to change anything, etc.
She emailed me back and changed one sentence. ONE! I wanted to cry (in a good way). When I had my very first French talk (this is only my 5th one I think), there was a bunch of stuff that I did wrong. I had to change a lot of it. But in 2.5 years, I’m down to having to fix only one sentence. This is huge for me. I’ve learned a lot.
After my talk, one of the sisters in our group who is from France (and totally fluent obviously) tapped me on the shoulder and said I only missed the pronunciation on ONE word. ONE. This is high praise coming from her. Again….I wanted to cry. (By the way, I have personally asked this French sister AND my fluent friends to tell me when I screw up. I want to know. I want to know the right way to do it and use it as a learning experience. A lot of people have gotten offended when they have been ‘corrected’, but I welcome the correction. I mean…how else do you learn?)
But here’s the part that made me remember WHY we do this and why we will continue to do it. After the meeting, this same French sister came up to me and she had tears in her eyes. She gave me a great big hug and told me (in English, with her thick French accent) how much she appreciates us being in the group. She said that she knows how hard it is to learn a new language and commended us on how well we are doing and thanked us over and over again for being in the group because she then gets HER French meeting. French is the language of her heart. And because we have people to support the French group, THE NATIVE FRENCH SPEAKERS GET THEIR MEETING IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE. I never thought about it this way. I always (selfishly) thought that the native French speakers were supporting US trying to learn their language. I guess it does work both ways. I never would have thought that I could have been a source of encouragement to someone in the French group, particularly this sister who talked to me afterwards (she is of the anointed and so knowledgeable about the Bible and knows French, Spanish, English, and Hebrew.) And little old me, an English speaker who butchers the language of her heart, is encouraging her???
It comes down to this: if there are not enough people to support the French group, there will be no French group. I’m sure this logic applies to any foreign language group out there. Currently, we have 8 native French speakers in our group. They get to hear the meeting in the language of their hearts because of our little group. Imagine as an English speaker if you went to a foreign country and had no other choice but to go to a Chinese language meeting. That was your only option. How would you feel? Probably frustrated, and your spirituality may suffer. You would have to learn Chinese and not get to hear any talks or even comment for that matter in your own language. That would be terrible! Even if you knew a little Chinese (enough to get by), you still wouldn’t get the FULL meaning and application of the talks and comments, because Chinese is not your first language.
So when I get discouraged because we don’t find many people in the ministry, or when I get frustrated and overwhelmed at the amount of time it takes to prepare something that used to be so simple, or the time we spend driving all over town (and the state) to not even find anyone home, or when I get frustrated with irregular verbs, or when I understand the side question that is being asked but I don’t know how to answer it in French, or when I think I should be way further along than I am, I will remind myself of how far I’ve come and how much I’ve learned in 2.5 years, but mostly I will think of those 8 people in our group. Those 8 people, who get to hear about 75% of our meetings (all but the service meting and every other public talk) in their native language, the language of their hearts, all because of our little group. I will remember the brother from Nigeria who came here with his family as refugees last year who comes up to me after every single meeting and gives me a hug and thanks me for my comments. I will remember the friendships I have created with people of all ages within our little group. I will remember my French friend with tears in her eyes last night thanking me for being in the French group, so that she gets her French meeting. THAT is why we continue to do this, no matter how time consuming and frustrating it can be. The rewards greatly outweigh the struggles.
The end.
