Day 4  *photos* Gwama Rapid Word Collection workshop


Another wave of the “storm” that struck Wednesday afternoon hit first thing Thursday morning. It was both more severe and less severe than Wednesday’s storm in certain ways. It was more severe in that we lost not just the tables we were working at, but the entire room we were working in, with the only prospect for a replacement being the small room we had moved to last Friday. It was less severe in that those who came to give us the news that we needed to move did so in a way that was more personal and understanding. Anne-Christie was allowed to escort their leader to Fek’adu’s office in order to find a solution to our need for a space to work.  This is the large meeting room we started in:

 

 

As I hope you can see from the next photo, it would have been impossible for three word-collection groups, a group of glossers, two typists, a coordinator, and a consultant to find a way to work in the small room we had squeezed everyone into for a group session on Monday morning.   Pictured here is our typist David in the smaller room:

 

Thanks to Fek’adu’s efforts and the goodwill of an office director at the Education Bureau complex where SIL has its office and where our workshop is taking place, we were granted the use of a room containing 10 desks and a table in the middle, where we were able to meet today. The Director moved his staff out of that room and into smaller rooms elsewhere in the Education Bureau so that we could move all of our people and paraphernalia into his staff’s normal working space. Seems like a tremendous sacrifice on his part and a tribute to the relationship that SIL must have with him for him to be willing to do that.                                                                                               

 

 





There is an important social, and even spiritual lesson in the comparison of these two “storms.” The first, while more trivial in that it involved only furniture that was relatively easy to replace, left me feeling distressed. The second, even though it was more drastic and threatened to leave our workshop homeless, left feelings of gratitude and grace. The difference was in the way that those in positions of authority wielded their power.

Regarding the process flow during workshop, it seems that the trademark of this particular RWC workshop—the thing it will be remembered for by us who have been involved in many of them—is the degree of equilibrium that has been established between the word-collection groups, the glossers, and the typists. There is no bottleneck anywhere in the work flow, nor has any one person or group had to wait long periods of time with an empty “inbox.” The first three (of nine altogether) families of semantic domains worked on—numbers 2, 5, and 6—have been completed (words, glosses, and data entry). Participants are now collecting words from families 1, 3, and 7.

Kevin Warfel