Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Sunday: Continued




Big update today, with several posts coming up. Sorry it's taken three days to get another update posted. As you might imagine, it's rather difficult to find internet access around here. Because of that, I was pretty rushed with the other posts, so there might be some typos in there.

Anyway, back to Sunday. During the church service, I translated a greeting from Jim Mikrut to the church. It's a good thing my Spanish came back to me quickly! Where I left off with the last post, we were off to a drama at the biggest evangelical church down here, Nueva Vida. It was called Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames. It was basically a drama showing the experiences of a number of people when they died, based on how they lived their lives. Overall, I thought it was very good, especially when I heard that the actors had only rehearsed it for three days. Best of all, at the altar call at the end, there must have been at least 80 or 90 people that went forward!

The pastor that was directing the play had been traveling around Mexico for several months, rehearsing with actors from different churches and directing them as they performed it in their churches. This church was his last stop on the trip, so it was being video recorded to send to some place in Canada. At the end, I was told that he was going to be interviewed, so could I please translate (so the people in Canada could understand). Sounds like a little interview in a quiet back room, right? Wrong. When it came time, I was called up on the big stage in front of several hundred people that had come to see the drama. From there, I stood off to the side and translated his whole speech. When his wife started to give a greeting, she kept on talking and talking and talking... I just assumed she didn't expect me to translate. Of course, she did. I just summarized.

After the drama and greeting/speech from the director, we had a nice supper of tacos at the church. Following that, we returned to the hotel to get some much needed sleep.

Picture 1: Hiking through the mud, trying to find kids to invite to VBS.
Picture 2: The clowns, along with Barb Mikrut, that came with us.
Picture 3: Dinner at the church Nueva Vida (New Life).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Tim-
Welcome to the interesting world of translating--especially when people don't pause to give you a chance!

Oaxacakid said...

Yep, you never know what's going to happen when you're translating. It's always interesting when people through in those pesky American expressions that don't translate well. :)

-Timothy