The Vernon Journal

My husband is always teasing me about how I say certain words… like “egg” and “leg”. (I say them with a long “a” instead of a short “e” …which he insists is the proper way.) We’ve always been curious to unravel the mystery of my little accent , so this silly little questionaire, which supposedly [...]

All of you now know that we are living in a bamboo house (see our pictures). There are, of course, many gaps and openings for any number of things to get into our home but generally we do not have problems with bugs or lizards or anything bothering us. The great thing about the open [...]

The Akha are a people of the hills. We came to understand this fact intimately during our first stint in an Akha village. One of the first bits of language that we learned was how to say “good bye”. There isn’t really an exact equivalent. Basically, the person leaving says one of two things: “O [...]

When we arrived, we really couldn’t say anything (or understand anything) in Akha. Well, actually, we did know how to say “Hello” & “Thank you”, but we found these two phrases woefully unhelpful in most situations. For about the first 48 hours, people would speak to us and our eyes would glaze over; we had [...]

Oh, the joys of illiteracy! Take our experiences yesterday. We were looking for breakfast and ended up in a 7-11 (finding this to be the least “risky” of the available options… we’re still pretty new at all of this). We settled on two strawberry yogurts and a bag of plain white dinner rolls. But I [...]