March 9: Word Collection Day #1

Parking lot

The activities for this first day of the word-collection phase of the workshop began with an opening ceremony, which is a fairly big deal in the culture here. Important people from the local area are invited, speeches are made, and food is served. The committee that organized this ceremony went one step further, however, and invited some artists to provide some entertainment. There were three speeches—by the translation project leader, by the prefect, and by the consultant (yours truly) —with songs and dances interspersed.

Opening Ceremony speech by Kevin with SIL linguist Pam Morris, who organized the workshop

Dancers

A singer/guitarist

While the final song was being sung, all of the invited guests were ushered to the next room for refreshments. The workshop participants remained behind and received their usual coffee-break fare. Once everyone had eaten what was served to them, we all gathered in the room where the ceremony had been held, and I gave some brief instructions to those who had not been present last week. Then there were the formalities of assigning individuals to specific groups and having everyone sign a form that allows us to use pictures of them in places like this blog, our newsletter, and SIL publications. It was at least 11:30 before we got started with the actual word-collection process.

As the groups began collecting words, I asked my two trainees to help me interact closely with the different groups to make sure that they understood how to apply what we had taught them last week. There were a number of places where people didn’t quite remember or hadn’t quite understood, so it was good that we were monitoring them closely and could provide correction early on. By the end of the day, in spite of a number of things that had gone wrong, I had a good feeling about how the groups were doing in general. Everyone seems to be taking their responsibilities very seriously, wanting to do the job correctly, so they respond very well to the words of advice and correction that we express to them.

Emile, a group leader

Granary, for keeping track of words collected

Each group was able to finish at least one folder in the three hours of time that we had to work today. That left them all feeling encouraged, I think. One group finished two folders. Apparently that group has a leader who understands French quite well, so they were able to be very productive.

I was able to get some of the computers ready for typing, which will start tomorrow morning. There are still a few that are resisting my efforts to get them set up the way they need to be. I’ll continue working with those tomorrow morning. Two folders were glossed and are now ready to be typed. Five others are either partially glossed or waiting to be glossed.