Monday’s highlights:
Leoma Gilley, the initiator and driving force behind this upcoming workshop, arrived from Nairobi just before noon today. A lot of the practical planning has been pending her arrival, so our preparations began in earnest this afternoon. While awaiting Leoma's arrival, I spent some time with Christine Waag, an SIL linguist here, in an effort to help her with the dictionary program that she is using and that I have worked with quite a bit. Read on for more details.
Today Leoma arrived from Nairobi, where she is based. Leoma is the one who initiated this workshop for the Shilluk, having worked with them for a number of years earlier in her career with SIL. This people group retains a special place in her heart, just as the Puguli do for Anita and me. The Shilluk have the entire Bible in their language, as of a few years ago, but they still have no dictionary, so Leoma’s desire to help them add this valuable resource to their “toolbox” has finally coincided with the availability of funds to make it happen, and here we are. The excitement is mounting as we get closer and closer to actually seeing this event take wing.
While awaiting Leoma’s arrival to begin looking at the details that we still need to put in place for the training portion of the workshop, I spent some time this morning with Christine Waag. Christine is a German linguist working with SIL here in South Sudan. She is helping several language communities who are working on translating the Scriptures into their respective mother tongues. Her part in that is to help them use FLEx—the dictionary program that we use in the Rapid Word Collection workshop—to provide the word-by-word meaning for the Scripture that has been drafted. This is something that is very important for the biblical translation consultant who will check their draft for accuracy at some point in the future, since that person does not know the language, but has knowledge of the Greek (New Testament) or Hebrew (Old Testament).
Christine was finding some of the things she needed to do rather cumbersome, so I asked her to show me her difficulties so that I can either show her an easier way to accomplish what she needs to do or explain the problems to the FLEx programmers so they can improve the way the program works. Unfortunately for Christine, most of her dilemmas fell into the latter category; I had no special knowledge about those parts of the program that she didn’t have. In fact, she knows more about how to do what she’s doing than I do. There is another part of the program that I have a lot of knowledge about, however, and I’m pretty sure that she’ll be able to benefit from that feature. So we’ve arranged to have a session on Thursday evening where I’ll introduce her to the “Hermit Crab parser.” Doesn’t that sound like fun?! (No, I’m not even going to attempt an explanation here of what it is.)
Since Leoma arrived shortly before lunch, she had little or no time to prepare anything for her noon meal, so I offered to cook vegetables for her. She accepted the offer and promised quinoa as her contribution to the meal. So we shared quinoa and stir-fried vegetables and began to get acquainted.
After lunch, Leoma and I met with Paul, who is the Language Programs Manager here at SIL South Sudan and who has been making arrangements for this workshop in advance of our arrival. We talked about which rooms on the SIL compound were available to us and which ones would be most suitable for our needs. We talked about our equipment needs. We talked about lots of practical (and boring to you, no doubt) things like that. Then we left the rest of the preparations until tomorrow, when two Shilluk men will join us and bring more information about who all we are expecting to come and help with this event. Tomorrow will likely be a full day of planning and action, as we get ready for the arrival on Wednesday of the participants who will have key roles to play during the word-collection phase of the workshop.
For supper, five of us went out to the only restaurant I’ve been to as yet. I had roasted chicken once again because I was hungry and wasn’t interested in taking a chance with something I was unfamiliar with. I came back with a full stomach, so am feeling very satisfied with all aspects of the activities of the day.
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