Nov. 25 Travel to Asosa in western Ethiopia for Gwama Rapid Word Collection

I am now in another part of Ethiopia, a land of quite varied terrain and ecosystems. It’s warmer and drier here during the day, but also cooler at night, than either Addis Ababa or Amaaro. The town where I’m staying is Asosa (sometimes spelled Assosa), which is the administrative center of this western region. The border of Sudan and South Sudan is not very far to the west, so I’m about as far in this direction as one can go in Ethiopia. I’m glad that I was able to fly here, instead of sitting in a vehicle for the 13 hours that it would have taken to drive here from the Addis Ababa.

For the next two and a half weeks, I will be living in the home of Andreas and Susanne Neudorf, a couple working with SIL and involved in the development of some of the languages in this region, but currently based in Addis Ababa while their children finish high school at an English-speaking school called Bingham.

The training phase of the Gwama Rapid Word Collection workshop will begin in a few hours, as I sit here typing this on Wednesday morning (Nov. 26). This is a predominantly Muslim group whose language is in the early stages of development, so there are a limited number of speakers of the language who know how to read and write it. At the Koorete workshop, we had only four word-collection groups because funds were limited. Here in the Gwama workshop, we are hoping to have as many as four word-collection groups; more is impossible because there are too few people with the required reading and writing skills.

Each situation is different from all the others, so I have to adapt my expectations and even the way I teach to fit the audience in each instance. It keeps me on my toes, but I am grateful for people like Andreas Neudorf, who arrived in advance and helped ensure that things were ready for us when we arrived, and Anne-Christie Hellenthal, the Dutch linguist who attended the Koorete workshop as a trainee and will now serve as the Coordinator for the Gwama workshop. Since the Ethiopian administration expects her to function as Consultant for other RWC workshops in Ethiopia in the future, I will be letting her do some of the instruction during this training phase. She will have a lot of responsibility as Coordinator, though, so we’ll play it by ear as to how much of the actual instruction she does in addition to that.

Kevin Warfel