It's been a challenge to maintain a positive attitude the past two days as I've seen the quality of this workshop degrade over time, with no apparent solution. Due to minimal funds available from the Lotud Language Association, and due to the less-than-ideal timing of this workshop, the individuals involved are unable to devote themselves exclusively to their workshop responsibilities. They need to go home and attend to other things for part of the day, or they need to help with meal preparation, or ... I don't know what all of the "distractions" are. What I do know is that I only see two teams collecting words at some points in time and that various members of the administrative team (record-keeper, glossers/translators, and typists) disappear at times for varying lengths of time. This is something I've never had to deal with before, so I talked to the coordinator (Sylvia, the Lotud speaker who feels called by God to be the catalyst for the project of making the Lotud dictionary a reality) about it and she said that, because these people are all working as volunteers, she can't tell them what to do. Also, in the Lotud culture, it is nigh impossible for one individual to tell another what he or she must do. And so we limp along, in a sense, doing what we can, often with a single glosser, and that is what is holding up the process.

In just over two days of collecting words, we have just over 2000 of them. That's quite good, actually, considering that we have only two or three groups doing the word collection! At that pace, we'd have 9000 words by the end of a workshop of normal length. Of course, this workshop will only go for two more days, so I expect that we'll end up with 3000-4000 words by the time we're done. The problem is that only about 500 of the words collected so far have gotten typed into the computer. The bottleneck is the addition of the English and Malay meanings. Unfortunately, I can't help with that process, nor can any of the rest of us non-speakers of Lotud who were sitting around yesterday with little to do. To redeem the time, we've been working at completing the dictionary entries that we do have, correcting typographical errors,adding the part of speech (noun, verb, etc.) and refining the English glosses. This is some of what we had planned to do during the last three days of our time here (Friday-Sunday), but now it appears that we'll be using that time to gloss and type additional words into the computer.

In light of how things have evolved, my attitude shift that took place last Friday (early Saturday morning here) as a result of chatting with Anita is the most important thing that has happened for me during this workshop. Because I am no longer focusing on how many words we collect or what we have to show in some other tangible way for our time here, but am concentrating on providing whatever support I can to this group of people, I am able to avoid being completely discouraged. However, it is still disappointing to me to realize that a group of people like this, with all of the zeal and enthusiasm that they have, could be doing so much more than they are at present. It's hard to see potential in someone and then to see them not live up to that potential. But I recognize that my presence here is simply the first step in a divine process that will continue long after I have returned to North Carolina. And so I continue to do what I can--the real reason I came here in the first place, though it took me a few days to realize that.