New Website

Hi everyone, so as you can tell I haven't been the best at updating this blog, but I plan on doing better. Also, I got a new ministry website. Check it out at www.ntm.org/amy_heckman Thanks, for your interest.

Where in the world?

Where in the world have I been?

After school, I went to Florida for a while, to work, spend time with family, and decide which country to go to.

In March I went to Oregon to work on building up a support base so that I can go be a missionary in...I'll tell you in a minute :)

I took a little trip up to Northern Idaho, in April, to visit friends and make new friends.

I've been able to share with people all over Oregon what God is doing in my life and about where I'm going.

Where in the world are you going??

The Lord used a lot of different things in my life to help me make this decision. Advice of people I respect, people I know there, leadership there, people going there, and a friend who told me that God will open and shut doors you just have to get moving and trust Him. So the decision is MOZAMBIQUE, Africa.

Tuesday I leave for Missouri for 2 weeks, where I will go to Refresher Course, and be in Jenny Lowe's wedding.

Then I come back to Oregon to help with VBS, share at some other churches, and spend time with my home church.

Tenatively I will be leaving for Michigan in August, be there a month, and then head down to Florida for awhile longer.

Lord willing, I will be headed for Brazil in Feb or Aug 2008 to learn Portuguese (Mozambique's trade language), and then on to Mozambique.

August to December 2006

My Last semester at New Tribes Language Institute was spent in the linguistics class.
This was a stretching semester. One main thing I learned through this is that my mind is not linguistically bent. However, I learned many useful skills for the future. I also had the wonderful experience of spending 6 weeks working with, learning from, and building relationships with the Cherokee people in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Here are some pictures from my time there.

My Language helper and I. We along with Jenny my language learning partner would work for 2 hours a day gathering pieces of Cherokee language, so that later we could analyze it.

We were able to enjoy the beautiful fall colors while we were there. We also had the opportunity to go to the rodeo at the state fair in Tulsa.

In order to build a better relationship with our language helpers, we would go to events that they went to. Our language helper went to the gospel singings, and so we went along too. She also sang in them, as you can see on the left. We went to a Cherokee church. This helped us get more exposure to the Cherokee language, and we got to know some wonderful people.

Although we were able to enjoy many experiences, we spent most of the time sorting, filing, and analyzing. Then when the 6 weeks were up, we went back to school and started on the 2 week analysis and write up of the Cherokee language from the data we had gathered.