March 4: Training Day #1

Today was the first of three days of training for those in the roles of Team Leader, Scribe, Glosser, Typist, Record-keeper, Coordinator, and Logistics Manager. That made for 25-30 people—and what a great bunch they seem to be! There is a good mix of men and women, and interest seems to be very high. Everyone who was invited to take part showed up for the first day! So far all bodes well for the success of this workshop.

I began my instruction, as usual, with a presentation of my family tree, transitioning to an explanation of the fact that words are related to each other—closely or distantly—just like people are. This presentation seems to always captivate my audience, the part about relationships in a family being something that they can relate to and which is of great interest to them. Helping them make the connection to relationships between words is always a bit of a trick, but it seemed that I succeeded better than usual today. Whether I did as well as I think I did or not will become more obvious once we put this all into practice next week.

After a lunch of “riz gras” (oily rice)—hmm! Sounds much better in French than in English—I led them through an exercise that is intended to illustrate how general notions which have too many words associated with them are broken down into smaller, more specific topics so that people are focused in their attempt to retrieve words from their mental storehouses. I use a drawing of a house, then we talk about the parts of such a building, like roof, walls, floor, ceiling, door, window, etc. Then we list a few words that exist in association with each of these major parts of a house. We talk about making sure that each word is associated with the right part—so we don’t associate the word ‘pane’ with wall, but rather with ‘window.’ The picture below was taken during this exercise.

The next topic I presented was the “Response Sheet”—the sheet that will be used for each semantic domain to write down the words that are collected there. It takes longer to explain that than I think should be necessary, but it’s important for everyone to understand how we’re going to be doing the word collection.

Finally, toward the close of the day, I outlined the workflow that we’ll follow during the word-collection phase. This is the part of the training where the participants are first introduced to the big picture of the “how” of the workshop. Most of what is taught prior to this focuses on the “why.” There were lots of questions and a few animated discussions as the participants began to better understand just how everyone would contribute to the group goal of collecting thousands of words in two weeks.

On the personal front, I got set up for internet access today, so that I was finally able to read my email that had accumulated since we left the capital city for the town of Garango, where we are now. For reasons we were never able to figure out, I was unable to access the internet the same way Pam has been doing. Instead, I had to pay $20 for a 1-month subscription that provides me with up to 5Gb of data. But now that I’ve done that, I do seem to have a good internet connection. (The word “good” is of course a relative term. I won’t be surfing the net—more like wading in the shallows.) However, if I succeed here, I will have posted this to the blog myself, instead of having to send it to Anita to post for me. That fact alone earns at least the qualification "good."