Day 8  Gwama Word Collection  *photo* and story of a Gwama writer

Bekama (bay-KAH-muh) is one of the scribes in this Gwama workshop—the person who writes down the words that his group comes up with as they move from topic to topic. Moreover, his group has produced more words than either of the other two, so his writing speed is apparently not hindering the group’s progress. This is rather surprising, considering that he only began learning to write his language earlier this year, through a pair of two-week workshops.

Bekama is the son of Jiregna, so his “full name” in Ethiopian style is Bekama Jiregna. If further detail is necessary to distinguish him from another individual, he could add the name of his paternal grandfather, then his father, and so on. He was born 29 years ago into a family that currently includes four other children—Bekama’s brother and three sisters. Two of the sisters are married; the brother and the other sister are not yet.

Bekama has two wives and a one-year-old son, Sultan (whose “full name” is therefore Sultan Bekama). He lives in Keser Kabale, a village in the Tongo woreda (compare to a “county” in a US state or some similar administrative slice of territory) nearly two hours from Asosa by private vehicle and longer by public transportation. He has land there where he farms corn and sorghum as his primary crops, supplemented by two local grains called t’ef and daguza in Amharic, plus peanuts.

In addition to farming, Bekama has a position in a community-development project at work in his home area. He is the coordinator for the support of orphans in four villages, seeing that they have school supplies, uniforms, and so on so that they can attend school and get an education.

Bekama speaks at least four languages to a reasonable degree, as well as a little bit of English. He grew up speaking both Gwama (his father’s language) and Komo (his mother’s tongue), and because both of those are minority languages, he also learned Oromo in order to communicate with people of other ethnic groups in the area. So he is fluent in those three languages. Because Amharic is the official language of the country, he has also learned to speak that well enough to communicate with people wherever he might travel.

When asked what motivated him to be part of this rapid word collection workshop, Bekama explained that his language has value for him, so he wants to see it developed in every way possible—being written, having a bilingual dictionary (Gwama–Amharic), etc.—and he wants to help other Gwama speakers to value their language as he does. He claims that the opportunity to play a part in the development of his language excites him more than words can express, but he expressed surprise at the fact that we have collected more than 5000 words during this workshop. At the start of our two weeks together, he would never have imagined that Gwama had that many words.

Bekama, serving as a scribe for the Word Collection to benefit his language

written by Kevin Warfel