Day 9 Final Day of Word Collection and Closing Ceremony

Today was a flurry of activity, as we brought the word collection to a close, then glossed and typed each entry into the computer, before cleaning up all of the “debris” from the workshop and heading for “home.” I was responsible for supper tonight, and we had invited another couple in addition to Anne-Christie, so a busy, but fun-filled evening was stacked on top of a whirlwind of a day.

My day began at about 4:30, when I got up to cut up onions for the stir fry I would make for supper. I had to get an early start on that because I was not guaranteed to have enough time in the afternoon. As it turned out, it was good I did them in the morning. Then at 5:30, I was able to chat with Anita and Evan via Skype. (I must say that it has been a nice surprise to be able to communicate that way. When I left home almost six weeks ago, I expected that I would not be able to communicate in any way other than via email, and even that was not guaranteed on a regular or predictable basis. As it has turned out, I’ve been able to chat with each of my children at least twice and with Anita many times over the course of my stay here in Ethiopia. That has been an unanticipated blessing!)

The workshop convened at 8:30 am, as usual, but today we stopped the word collection at tea break (10:30) in order to give the glossers time to finish their job before letting everyone go, and it worked out that we were able to exactly complete the seventh family of semantic domains, leaving only the eighth and ninth groups unfinished. Since the ninth one is very linguistic in nature, there are no plans to do anything with that one; but the eighth family will be the focus of a follow-up workshop, perhaps in January, where some of these same participants will be invited back to finish the work for which they had made good progress.

The team of glossers worked feverishly to complete their work on the final folders that came in from the word-collection groups. They even recruited a couple more individuals from the word-collection teams to help with the task. They worked on, even as Anne-Christie and Fek’adu and I gave our closing speeches and then passed out certificates and group photos to the participants. It was just past noon when they were finally given permission to leave. All were eager to get back to their families and something more familiar and less taxing than thinking about their language. Their exit was in the form of a controlled stampede.

Anne-Christie invited Fek’adu (logistics manager), Alemts’ehai (typist), and the two men from the Culture Bureau whom we had trained to do the follow-up workshop (in January?) for lunch, and David and I were included in the invitation. We went to the Bamboo Paradise Hotel restaurant, where two pizzas, two injeras with bean paste, a spaghetti with vegetables, and a rice with vegetable dish were ordered and eaten. It was a nice meal and a nice time together, but I didn’t understand much of the conversation since it was mostly in Amharic.

When we returned to the work of wrapping things up, it was nearly 3:00. I was responsible for the record-keeping and for setting up two other computers to be used in the follow-up workshop. I had hoped to be done by 4:00 so I could get back to the house and take care of preparing the rest of the items for my stir fry, but that didn’t happen. Instead, it was about 4:30 when the last of the data entry was completed and I was finally able to finish configuring the computers. By the time we finished getting the database onto the newly prepared computers, it was after 5:00.

Back at the house, I set to work cutting up the other vegetables for the meal, and thanks to David’s help, everything was ready with about 15 minutes to spare before I needed to begin cooking, so I had time for a bit of horizontal time with my eyes closed. The meal was pronounced a success by our guests, though to me it didn’t taste like what I do with that same recipe back home—maybe the soy sauce I got here is different? After supper, we played cribbage as two teams of two before saying ‘good night,’ after which I pretty much fell into bed.

(You may have figured out by now that I waited until Saturday morning to write this. But it’s still Friday back home, so I’m not really late. ;-) )