The Collins Family
Collins Family August 2015 Update
Download the Collins August Update with photo here.
Dear and good friends,
Greetings to you from North Carolina. It has been a hot summer with many days near or over 100 degrees. That should get us ready for Dallas where it is supposed to be 95 plus for the next ten days. I’ll be teaching there in a professor exchange, where a prof from Dallas is headed for Peru to teach students that I had last semester and I will be filling in for him in Dallas working with gringo students for the first time since my days at Ohio State.
Interestingly, Nancy and I got our MA’s in linguistics in Dallas largely on the same campus that we’re headed to this coming weekend. We head out on Sunday and classes start on Thursday.
I’ve taught the course before, but never in English. I will have 21 students and two TA’s. Like my Latino students in Peru, these young people are mostly headed into cross-cultural ministry as translators, development educators, or literacy workers. I‘ll be teaching Phonology, a course aimed at helping students learn about the sound structure of other languages while giving them a good background for helping them cooperate in the development of alphabets in previously unwritten languages. Literacy, of course, is a necessary condition for effective Bible translation.
I’m looking forward to the challenge of teaching Engish speakers, but I ask for prayer as well. As I get older I find that I still love teaching and the students, but I find the administrative aspects of class—grading homework, daily lesson planning, technology—to be heavy. We’re still at it, though. Thanks to so many of you who have followed and supported us for lo these many years. We became members of Wycliffe and the Summer Institute of Linguistics back in 1977.
I returned from Peru in June. On June 20, Nan and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary. I take yet another opportunity to thank her for making it possible for us to live in Latin America, including 12 years in an Indian village.
Nancy and I have run into a small enclave of Mam speakers here in the Raleigh area. It has been fun and invigorating to be able to speak Mam again with native speakers.
Elisa and Yury’s twin sons share their birthday with Nancy. The family wasn’t all together on the big day, so the boys celebrated twice, once on the actual day, June 7, and once when we could all be there. Jacob took me aside and explained: “Grandpa, we’ve had two birthday parties but I’m still only six years old.’ I guess he’s aware at how clueless Grandpa can be and he just wanted me to be clear on this.
God’s best to you all as you enjoy the rest of the summer.
Wes and Nancy Collins
