Got only three hours of sleep last night—had trouble falling asleep after having slept so much and so deeply the night before. So I was afraid that I might have trouble staying awake during the day today. However, that was not a problem, as I was kept so busy that I had no time to think about being tired.


The biggest project of the day was printing out the questionnaire that we will be using in the upcoming workshops. For many of the participants of these workshops, English is their third or fourth language, so not the one they are most fluent in. Thus, having the principal document available in Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia, will make it much easier for them to excel in the roles they will be playing in the workshop. Hussein, an SIL employee with an excellent grasp of both English and Amharic, has been working very hard to complete the translation of the questionnaire into Amharic. But his has been a mammoth task—500+ pages of material, and we knew that he would not be able to complete it before the first workshop was scheduled to begin. However, he worked on this project right up to the last moment, and today was the day that the document was printed out (in whatever state he was able to achieve)—preserving both English and Amharic, so that each individual can use whichever language he feels most comfortable with, though in some cases, there is no Amharic yet, so English will be the only resort.


Once the questionnaire was printed out, it needed to be divided into the appropriate sub-units (each of which will be placed in a separate folder for use during the workshops), and the contents of each folder needed to be stapled together. Three of us worked on this task throughout the day—one printing and two dividing, sorting, and stapling. I spent about half of my day assisting with this project.


The remainder of my day was spent on practical details: signing for a float in local currency so that I can pay for my meals and lodging while on-site for the first workshop, getting a local SIM card working in my cell phone, activating a USB device that will give me limited internet access via the cell phone network, making sure that we have all of the equipment that needs to be transported with us for the workshop, and so on. I also spent an hour or so explaining to the person who will be doing data entry for the second workshop exactly what he will be doing and how it fits into the overall workflow of the word collection.


On the way to the SIL office this morning, I did not see women carrying things on their heads like in Burkina. That is just one of the cultural differences here.


It is 11pm here as I’m writing this. I tried to go to sleep at 8:00, and I believe I did sleep for about an hour. But now my body is insisting that this is “awake” time, and I feel fully alert. Not exactly what I was hoping for, as I need to be waking at 4:00 AM to prepare for the 12-hour drive that awaits us. A driver from SIL will be taking four of us to Amaaro, in the south of Ethiopia. He will spend the night there, then drive back by himself. I don’t envy him at all! From what I heard, this will be far from a 12-hour drive on a superhighway!