Sunday, May 30, 2004

Ministry To Goats???

So, we were sitting around at our house after life group today chatting (It was Marcus, Angie, Amedeo, Marta, their children and I). I have been talking to them about helping out in our kid's time during life group. During a portion of our life group (church) all the kids go to one of the back rooms of our house to have a special story and activity time that is designed just for them. We take turns teaching them on a weekly rotation. Right now, since I am leading life group in Italian, Angie and Marcus are taking turns every other week doing kid's time. That's why I was talking to Amedeo and Marta about helping out. This past week I prepared a document with the specifics of kid's time, the logistics, what goes on, etc. Then I used a function in Microsoft Word to translate it. For kids the word "capretti" came up. Naturally, as someone focusing on youth ministry, I am constantly looking for new words to describe youth and kids. Normally, when I am comfronted with a new word I doublecheck it one of my dictionaries to make sure of the accuracy of the word. In this case I triple-checked it. First by looking it up in Word's translation dictionary, by typing the Italian word in first and it came up with "kids" in English. Then I used my dictionary on my Ipaq and looked it up finding "kids" again. When I showed it to Amedeo, he smirked and said in Italian, "I'm not sure you mean this word." I said it means "kids" and is another way to describe children in English. He thought for a second and he said I don't think we would use it that way here. I started to get confused. He asked Marta and she began explaining that it had to do with sheep and goats. I sat dumbfounded for a few seconds when it hit me, what I was referring to the children as was 'little goats' or 'kids' in it's other English usage. When we explained it, we all laughed and I told Amedeo, I have to laugh at my inadequacies with the language at times, rather than cry. So at this time we will not be starting any new ministries to 'little goats.'

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