These are the kinds of things you discover during a four-hour church service…
Sindidzazichitanso
This gargantuan word comes from the final word in the Chichewa hymn, Idzani, Mzimu Inu, better known to English speakers as Come, Holy Spirit.
The morphology of this word is as follows:
si- negative
ndi – First person singular (class 1)
dza- future
zi- object (class 10)
chit verb root “do”
-a indicative mood
-nso adverb “also”
So, an English translation of this word might be, “I also will not be able to do it.”
The previous line in the song, is “Zoipa muzichotse”
Zoipa “badness/sins”
mu- Second person plural (class 1)
zi- object (class 10)
chots verb root “remove”
-e subjunctive mood
So the sentence might be translated, “Sin, take it from me.”
English certainly has longer words than sindidzazichitanso but I don’t think we claim any single word that packs that much semantic information into a single word.
The agglutinative languages of Africa are certainly fun to pry apart. It’s getting your brain to put them back together when you’re in the middle of a conversation that is the hard part.
Got any long words in a foreign language that you know?
I gotta say, David, that I’m very jealous of your job (from a linguists’ point of view, at least).
Is this a job?
When are you coming over to join me?
Your experience, then
. Perhaps when I’m a little wiser, and have a wife and children to keep me company 
.
Get the wisdom on the field.
I think single missionaries are twice and productive as married missionaries and four times as productive as those with kids.
Indeed, David, then compare the costs of sending singles and families. I reckon singles give you at least 16 times more bang for your buck than families do.
BUT, in defence of the married state I am shortly to enter on, in some circumstances, where such families are rare in the church, there is great power in the witness of a loving and stable Christian family. And they probably have more staying power than singles.