Mr. Pope Head

We have a wonderful woman here, Teresa, who has been teaching in our children's ministry conference. Our week started out pretty rocky with all of the teaching materials being stolen from our vehicle (oh, and along with Teresa's passport), but Satan can't keep us down! Our God is bigger than that! The conference is going well. We have about 28 people attending; teachers and children. I've been translating! This is my first time to translate something so big- and to translate for such a long period of time (yesterday we taught for about 8 hours). That's a lot of talking for me.

I knew there would be some errors in my translation. I really thought it would be my verb tenses, which when in doubt I just use the present tense and they can figure it out! It wasn't my verb tenses that topped my list. It was an explanation of "Mr. Potato Head".

I was determined to give them an excellent description of that silly potato that we all know and love. So I began with "it's a potato", I just so happened to leave out the fact that it was plastic. I went on to say that you can add funny hats, eyes, lips and mustaches to the potato". I notice that I'm getting funny looks. I keep going, thinking that I can really help them picture him. I get about mid-sentence and realize that I had made one tiny little mistake that threw off the entire description: I was using the wrong article.

The Spanish language has two forms of "the", masculine "el" and feminine "la". I forgot that the word for potato can mean something totally different if the article is changed. Had I used "la papa" they probably would have been able to picture a "Mr. Potato Head" a lot faster. Unfortunately, I used "El Papa" which means "The Pope".

I think I've invented a new toy: Mr. Pope Head. You can give him funny hats, mustaches, you can make him wave to you. Your child will have so much fun with his or her Mr. Pope Head. What do you think? Hot toy on the Christmas list this year?