We’ve now completed the word-collection phase of the workshop in Kaansa. This was another very positive experience and, in my opinion, worthy of the term “success”. While we were able to treat only 1,200 of the 1,792 semantic domains that the questionnaire covers, we did collect more than 11,500 Kaansa words and expressions. The most noteworthy aspects of this workshop for me were these: (1) There were so many people who responded to the invitation to participate that we had 6-7 individuals per group most of the time, instead of 4-5; (2) Personnel substitutions were made only due to absences, not to lack of competency, which meant that there was no single word-collection group that was far better than the others, nor was there one that was distinctly weaker than all of the others; (3) Groups were formed randomly by the workshop Coordinator, and the members of each group all worked together in perfect harmony, without us needing to reassign anyone to a different group.

The goal that was set at the beginning of the workshop was 10,000 words or expressions. When we announced that to the participants on the morning of the first day, the participants were skeptical as to whether their language even had that many words! We assured them that we believed they would be able to come up with at least that many in the two weeks that they would be working on the task, using the RWC questionnaire. As a way to visually display the progress from day to day, a picture of a Kaansa granary was printed in large format and clipped to a piece of plywood at the front of our meeting place. The goal was to fill the granary with words, so as we tallied up the words that had been written down, we painted a portion of the granary for each 1000 words collected, and then tacked on pictures of baskets of grain representing 100 words each, to show the total achieved thus far. We updated the image before the beginning of each day’s work, and the participants enthusiastically followed the progress and were encouraged by it.

The Kaan king was present each and every day, though his arrival on the final day was delayed until the afternoon, due to the fact that he had to attend an administrative meeting in Loropéni (5 miles away) in the first part of the day. I also learned recently that at least one of the workshop participants, old enough to have grandchildren, made the 10-mile (or more) trip on his bike to and from the workshop site each day in order to be part of this historic event. Apparently he did so because the king had suggested to those organizing the workshop that they ask him. This is yet another piece of evidence of the importance of the king’s support of and involvement in this workshop!

Shortly after 5:00 on Friday afternoon, a closing ceremony was held in the “town square”. The site consisted of a large open area near a sizable shade tree. The open area was swept clean in preparation for the Obiré dance troupe, who performed near the beginning of the ceremony and again as people were dispersing to return to their homes. Stuart opened the ceremony by explaining what it was that we had done during the previous two weeks, then after the troupe performed, he and the king both made short speeches. Then I was given the opportunity to speak. I explained that, due to a magnificent effort on the part of those who had taken part the past two weeks, the granary was now full. That was a very good thing, but as they were all aware, there is still work to be done to turn the contents of the granary into something edible and nourishing. Thus, they should expect a time of food preparation, when the Showalters and their team would be grinding the grain into flour, then cooking it, so that it could be eaten. Thus the team would need some time to prepare the words that were collected so that they can be printed in the dictionary that has been promised. But once all that preparation had happened and they had had the opportunity to “eat” their fill of the result, they would be very satisfied with what had been done, and happy to have played a part in making it possible.

What now remains is to finish glossing (translating into French) the words that were turned in at the very end of the word-collection phase, just before the closing ceremony, and to finish entering words into the computer. This latter task will probably take at least a full day yet. After that, we will focus on correctly spelling errors in the typed data and merging duplicate entries.

And that’s news in a nutshell from Obiré at the end of phase 2 (word-collection phase).