The nine participants who were here for the training phase last week all came back; I’d like to think that that says something positive about their experience. In addition, five newcomers joined the ranks by 8:30, and three more arrived in the course of the day. We had hoped for ten last week and an additional ten this week; that would have allowed us to have four word-collection groups. But this number worked out well today. We had three groups of five people collecting words, two individuals glossing, and David Ford, who flew in from Addis Ababa yesterday, did the typing. Of the 17 Gwama speakers participating, 14 are young men and three are young women; judging by appearances alone, I would say that there are no participants over the age of 35. That is unusual for a workshop of this type. It will be interesting to see how things unfold.
With these numbers, the word collection is going at a decent pace, the glossers are not quite able to keep up (so a bit of a backlog there), and David is able to enter the Gwama and Amharic words into the computer at almost exactly the same rate that the glossers are able to keep him supplied with data to type.
The meeting of government personnel that was supposed to take place in the large room we had used for most of the training phase either never happened or it took place in a different location, because we were able to move all of our things back to the large meeting room again when it was time to begin collecting words.
When we convened at 8:30, we did so in the room where we had finished the day on Friday, a room that I estimate to be approximately 15 x 20 feet in size. With the new arrivals, there were 14 Gwama sitting in chairs or on tables (due to an insufficient number of chairs) and all three of us expatriates standing at the front. Imagine 17 people in a room about the size of a small supplemental classroom and you’ll begin to appreciate the degree to which our workspace would have been limited there.
After a few opening remarks, we were informed that the large meeting room was available after all, so we moved over there and arranged tables and chairs to be conducive to word collection. By shortly after 9:00, we had three groups happily navigating semantic domains and collecting words. I estimated the size of this room at approximately 50 x 100 feet, so there is more space there than we need, even with half of it being unusable because it is stacked full of chairs.
At lunch break, I got my first ride in a “bajaj,” the enclosed motorized tricycles that function as taxis here in Asosa. Anne-Christie had an errand to run, so we took this faster way to get into town from the Education Bureau, where our workshop is being held. She held out her hand to hail a passing bajaj, but he didn’t have space for three passengers. At that moment, however, one coming the other direction dropped off his only passenger and was persuaded to do a u-turn and pick us all up and take us into town. Five minutes or so later, after a detour around a segment of the street that was closed due to line painting and then not being able to turn onto yet another street we wanted because of the roadwork that happening on it, we were in the end deposited a short distance from our intended destination and charged a total of about 25 cents for the three of us.
Four passengers plus the driver can fit in this bajaj.
Kevin Warfel
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