Shelbey, the babies eat nshima and porridge when they are weaned off of the bottle. Nshima is the staple food for the Zambian culture, which looks a lot like our grits but has very little flavor. They try to introduce porridge around 6 months of age. They eat porridge in the mornings for breakfast, nshima for lunch, and porridge again for dinner. They don't eat baby food like our babies do in the states. Sometimes they will add beans to the nshima to provide protein. We have nshima every Thursday for lunch.
Samar, we do the same things we do back in the states with the bilingual children if one of the languages is English. We take our language kits from birth to 5 and just talk/ask open ended questions and no yes/no questions. It has been difficult getting 100 utterances for our language samples because the majority of their utterances are in Tongan and they will need to be translated.
We're excited to hear about all of y'all's experiences at your off-sites. One more week of therapy and then we are off to Livingstone. Hope all is well with everyone and we miss you guys dearly!!
I can only imagine how much it makes you all light up inside when you see those babies running out to greet you! Sounds like you all have really made a mark on their hearts. ;) So you all eat the nshima every Thursday? Are yall able to add anything to it, or do you eat it the same way it is prepared for the kiddos? Just curious.
ReplyDeleteIt beautiful that you get to form close bonds with those kiddos. They prob love and need ya'll so much. Are you guys missin home?
ReplyDeleteHow sweet that they already love you so much after such a short amount of time. Do you all like the food there? I know you talked about nshima, but how different are the rest of the meals you eat there? I would love to know! Food is a big part of culture.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure the babies will miss each of you as much as you'll miss them! Just curious... about how many hours of swallowing and language therapy are you getting a week?
ReplyDeleteWouldn't translating from Tongan make the data not as comparable because the morpheme count would be totally different depending on how the Tongan language is put together? I realize that that sentence doesn't make a lot of sense. But you get the idea. So much at that age depends on every morpheme. What if they are different in Tongan? Do they have the same verb tenses, pluralization, etc. equivalents to English?
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