Anita and I plan to leave tomorrow morning on our next step in this great RWC adventure journey—a Rapid Word Collection workshop among the Kaan people of Burkina Faso. Stuart and Cathie Showalter, friends and colleagues whom we've known since we first arrived in Burkina Faso in 1990, have worked with speakers of the Kaansa language for many, many years and are now in the final mile of their marathon toward the goal of delivering a published New Testament of the Bible to this people group in their mother tongue. However, since Christians represent only a small fraction of the Kaan community and the Showalters want to continue to demonstrate that their work is for the benefit of all Kaan people, they intend to hold a double celebration. Not only do they intend to unveil and dedicate the published New Testament, but they also intend to present to the Kaan community a bilingual Kaansa-French dictionary. It is to this end that I will be leading them in a RWC workshop, with the goal of enlarging their database of the raw materials (words) for that dictionary. Then a team of individuals will focus on preparing the data for publication in time for the ceremony (date still to be decided).

It is an extremely ambitious goal to attempt to produce a printed dictionary so soon after the data collection, so I am very interested in hearing how that goes. I expect to learn a lot through their experience. My present focus, however, is to help the Kaansa team collect data as cleanly as possible, to avoid having to spend unnecessary time correcting mistakes in the information after the workshop. The training I have prepared for them focuses on two things: how to use the RWC word-collection method, and ways to ensure that the data collected are error-free.

This will be my first time to provide the RWC training in French. All my notes are in English, so I'll be reading silently in English, translating in my head and then speaking in French. Should be interesting! I'll let you know how it goes. (Eventually, I want to work from French notes, but my materials are not yet at that point.)

Travel plans: 

Wednesday, January 8: drive from home to the Showalters' home near Washington, DC, where we'll spend the night

Thursday, January 9: fly from Dulles International airport to New York (JFK), and then on to Brussels (Belgium).

Friday, January 10: fly from Brussels to Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), then settle into our rooms at the SIL center there.

Saturday, January 11: shopping in the Ouagadougou markets, visiting with friends we haven't seen for a while

Sunday, January 12: more visiting with friends

Monday, January 13: travel by road from Ouagadougou to Obiré (8-hour trip, I think), where the workshop will be held

Tuesday, January 14: make last-minute preparations for the workshop

Wednesday-Friday, January 15-17: training phase of the workshop, training the key players regarding their individual roles

Saturday-Sunday, January 18-19: down time; also, making adjustments to the plans for the workshop, as necessary

Monday-Friday, January 20-24: first week of the word-collection phase of the workshop

Saturday-Sunday, January 25-26: down time

Monday-Friday, January 27-31: second week of the word-collection phase of the workshop

Saturday-Sunday, February 1-2: down time

Monday-Friday, February 3-7: clean-up phase of the workshop, checking data for accuracy and fixing mistakes that are found

Saturday-Sunday, February 8-9: return to Ouagadougou somewhere in this time frame

Monday-Sunday, February 10-16: visiting with friends in Ouagadougou; also make a trip to Bonzan, the village where we lived and worked for 8 years, to see friends there whom we haven't seen for a long time.

Monday, February 17: leave Ouagadougou on the first leg of our return flight, arriving in Brussels the next morning

Tuesday, February 18: fly from Brussels to Washington, DC (Dulles); stay overnight at the Showalters' house

Wednesday, February 19: drive home from the Showalters'