I was telling Genla about Ken Pagano, a minister in Louisville who organized a bring-your-guns to church event. I read about it in the New York Times: "Pastor Invites Flock to Bring Guns to Church." Sounds like an Onion headline! The idea was totally lost in translation. Genla just looked at me dumbfounded and said, "Why? To confess?"

The new morning ritual is that Genla reads the New York Times ("A" section only, the others line a birdcage--but that's another entry), underlining all the words he doesn't recognize. Then he asks me to explain them and gives me Tibetan equivalents.



I take these back to my room and recopy them into a notebook, then in the afternoon sometime I work them into sentences, preferably telling a little story with them and trying to use some different articles of grammar. Then I recopy what I've done to double-check my work.

In the evening after dinner, I ask Genla to quickly look it over and he makes corrections. I recopy the corrected homework on another page in Tibetan, wait a while, then see if I can then translate it back into English without peeking. Whew!



I heard someone say once, "Use a word three times and it's yours." I think that's probably true in your native language, but in Tibetan I think it takes me about 10 . . .