for this visit the father was not home he had somethign come up at his church and so it was me alex the mom and the three kids, usually the mom doesnt speak very much her english is not great and she almost never talks when her husband is around, this leads us to believe it may be a cultural issue. But even though her english is not excellent we were still able to have a intresting conversation about the differences in languages in africa and how she personally spoke 3 languages and her fourth was soon to be english, she also described the diffculties in relation to her hispanic coworkers many of whom speak only spanish, this ended up turning into a very intresting disscusion on race reations in america as well as immigration policies. For the first time we also really got to interact with the two girls ages 2 and 4, before they had done their own thing during our visits but with their father not home we got to interact with them and we got them to open up and talk to us more than they ever had before, we even got the 2y/o to learn the words for train and duck, which she then enyoyed saying many times, all in all it was a very enjoyable visit

For our visit last week, we started out like anyother talking about eachothers weeks and how everything was going. But at somepoint alex brought up holloween. they had heard of this before but were lost to its meaning and cultural significance. It was very difficult to explain what the holiday was, and it made me reflect on how strange in fact the tradition is, kids dressing up as strange things koncking on doors yelling out a random phrase and then being given candy. We did our best to expalin it but i think they were still a little confused. The other thing that took up most of our time was a virus on the family coumpter. I dont know exactly what it was, but it woulnt allow you to download anything off the internet ie anti virus software, and it made surfing the web almost impossible, we told them there was little we could do and that they might have to either get another coumpter or buy anti virus software, neither of which are great options, other than that it was a great visit

This is the third week our family visit did not work out. This time Erin and I had arranged with Alex to pick up the Burmese translator and then visit our family so that we could maybe set-up a better visiting time. However when we went to the translator no one answered the door. That was a bummer but we couldn’t wait around too long for her for fear we might miss our family again on their way out. So then we headed over to our family’s apartment in hopes of catching the mother before she left. When we got there it seemed the same as the past two weeks. We knocked once and no one answered. However when we knocked a second time just in case the father of our family opened the door. At first I was relieved and thought we would finally get to have a visit again and hopefully find out what went wrong the last two weeks. Unfortunately when we got passed the initial surprise of someone being home we noticed he looked exhausted. The apartment was dark and one of their sons was fast asleep on the bed. By the look of the father we had just woke him up and he did not look too excited about a visit, understandably. As much as Erin and didn’t want to lose another week with our family it was obvious that now was not a good time for a visit. So to the best of our ability we told him we were sorry for waking him up and that we would find a better time to visit and we left. He was probably very confused on our seemingly random drop by and the visit left Erin and I confused as well. After talking with Alex again our next plan is to try again on a different day and time with the translator. If that doesn’t work Alex recommended we switch to another family which is sad because we would like for this one to work out but we may not have a choice in the end.