The first day of the Lotud RWC workshop (Wednesday, September 19) was a success. The start of the workshop was delayed by the disappearance of a document that had been edited Tuesday evening without (apparently) having been saved to the computer's hard disk, meaning that it needed to be redone Wednesday morning. Our first session, then, ran from 11:00 to 1:00, instead of 10:30 to 12:00, as had been planned.

The afternoon session, scheduled to begin at 1:00, following a one-hour break for lunch, was also delayed because the meal-preparation was behind schedule. So instead of two 2-hour sessions in the afternoon, we had only one--from 3:00 to 5:30.

Despite these unplanned (yet seemingly inevitable) delays and the resultant shortening of actual workshop time, the day was a success, at least in the eyes of the workshop participants. Those of us responsible for achieving the range of instruction necessary to ensure the success of the word-collection phase which will begin on Sunday are perhaps slightly less quick to label it a complete success, but since I believe that three full days are not needed to accomplish all of the training, I'm not too concerned at this point. If our day is shortened again on Thursday, I will begin to become more concerned.

One of the big reasons for the feeling of success this first day is the presentation that I opened with, which uses the illustration of family relationships to communicate how semantic domains are related to one another. I knew that familial relationships are very important in this part of the world (as in many others), but I didn't anticipate quite the level of enthusiasm that that presentation generated. The participants caught on very quickly to what I was trying to communicate--so much so that I was able to omit some of the iterative detail that I had prepared in order to help them understand.

One of the things I am still struggling with a bit as I try to plan the sequence of events during this training session is the fact that I need to spend a significant amount of time training small groups of individuals in the details of their particular responsibilities next week during the word-collection phase. While I'm doing that, I need to have useful things for the rest of the participants to do, and someone to oversee their work on those tasks. I have a number of ideas, but this is the first time that I'm doing this pre-workshop training phase, so I'm piecing things together as I go to a certain extent. Flying by the seat of my pants is not how I am most comfortable operating, so it's stretching (and stressing) me a bit.

The Lotud are a great group of people to work with, though. They have come a long way from the days of their ancestors when the Lotud people were some of the most-feared headhunters on the island of Borneo. (The SIL member who arranged for me to come here waited until I got here to let me know that piece of their history!) The 15-20 Lotud who are here for this phase of the workshop are some of the most enthusiastic and motivated learners you'll ever find. My challenge is to channel their enthusiasm in the right direction so that we achieve the objectives that have been set for this workshop.