My apologies for the lack of blog entries these past few days. I’ve been in a horizontal position for the past two and a half days, and prior to that, I was too busy with the initial days of the training phase of this workshop to find time or energy to write anything. In addition, electricity has been off more than it’s been on since we arrived in Amaaro, so I’m never sure when I’m going to be able to charge my computer battery. I’ve had to give priority to the work I’m here to do, and that has often left my battery drained when I might have otherwise been able to write something to post. So let me do my best to catch you up.
It was a long and bumpy ride on Tuesday from the capital city down to Amaaro. Think of paved roads that have deteriorated to the point where there are lots of holes in them. That’s what we were driving on most of the time, so I think we averaged about 30 mph for the whole trip. There were five of us in the SIL vehicle—our driver, who drove back to Addis Ababa over the next two days; Anne-Christie Hellenthal, a Dutch woman who works as a linguistics consultant here in Ethiopia, primarily in the West near the Sudanese border; Hussein, an Ethiopian who has worked for SIL for a number of years doing language survey and translation of documents from English into Amharic; Johnny Walker, a linguistics consultant in Tanzania who is interested in doing RWC workshops in the 8 or so languages in the area where I went in 2010; and me. I am training Anne-Christie, Hussein, Johnny, and Lydia (who works here in Amaaro) to facilitate RWC workshops in the future.
As we drove south, the terrain changed from semi-arid to tropical. That was fascinating to see. Here in Amaaro, there are small mountains on either side of a broad valley. I’m not sure if this is part of the Rift Valley or not. It might be. Everything is very green here since the rains continue sporadically in this area until sometime in December.
Soon after we arrived in Amaaro Tuesday evening, I began to sense the beginnings of a cold coming on: my throat was scratchy. Sure enough, I did a lot of coughing the next two days, but I was able to do my part in facilitating the training on Wednesday and Thursday. Lydia, Johnny, and Hussein also took turns teaching some of the modules those two days, and all went well. The Koore (KOH-ray) participants were excited about what would happen next week, as they looked forward to collecting words from their language (Koorete).
On Thursday evening, however, my health took a dramatic turn for the worse. I experienced chills so severe that I had to cover myself with a very thick blanket to get my teeth to stop chattering. For the next three nights and the two days in between, I did almost nothing other than lie in bed, too tired to be able to do much work. I tried to eat, but nothing appealed to me, so it was hard to force food to go down. Now it is Sunday morning here, and I believe that I am finally pretty much on the other end of this whole battle. Apparently it was a flu bug that I picked up while in Addis Ababa, and its manifestation coincided with my arrival in Amaaro.
Because I was more or less incapacitated on Friday, the final day of training for next week’s key players, my four RWC consultants-in-training had to lead the exercises that remained. I believe that they did it well, and they reported that the Koore who were being prepared for next week’s word collection were so motivated that they wanted to take portions of the questionnaire along with them to work on over the weekend. Their request was politely refused, but it’s very encouraging to see their level of enthusiasm.
Kevin Warfel
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