August 17: Day 1 of Word Collection

Monday’s highlights:

The Word collection began with opening remarks, then we set up the word-collection groups. With all that was going on, I missed my chance to take photos. From start to finish, I was busy helping everyone get off on the right foot; I never even got my camera out of its bag. We had unexpected numbers of participants and reassignments of roles, keeping me and other colleagues busy helping the groups. After a tea break, the groups began working more intently and collected a total of 877 words by the end of the afternoon. The day was cooler, due to a refreshing rain last evening.  Read on for more details.

Yesterday, in the late evening it began to thunder. It wasn’t long before the sound of raindrops on the tin roof became indistinguishable one from the other. Flashes of lightning were punctuated by loud booms of thunder. I managed to sleep even while the rain continued to fall. The room got cooler so that I needed to use a sheet for the first time here. There are no blankets in the room. Today was much more pleasant than the past few have felt.

I began my preparations for the workshop this morning around 7:00 am, setting up tables and chairs in the rooms we planned to use. After finishing that, however, I learned that two of the rooms that I had set up were needed for other meetings going on today, so I had to shuffle tables again to suit all the activities going on.

We didn’t know how many people would come this week to fill certain roles due to absences at the training last week. Nor were we sure how many additional Shilluk speakers would come to help give the words they knew. When people began to arrive, we were amazed by the number of interested participants.

In order for the process to run smoothly, we needed to have a leader and a scribe for each of the six groups. We had four group leaders and four scribes from among those who attended our training sessions last week. Four more people would need to be trained today to fill those roles for two more groups.

When the participants were seated, we welcomed them all and elaborated on the purposes for the workshop, then got underway. The SIL colleagues who are helping me facilitate this workshop, Leoma and Christine, spent time showing the new group leaders and scribes the word-collection process.

We had plenty of participants—more than I have ever seen at one of these workshops. Instead of having two or three Shilluk speakers joining each group, there were six or more. We may find it helpful to reduce that number down a bit, as productivity tends to decline when the group size is bigger than six.

By the end of the day, each group had completed at least one folder, and two groups actually completed three. While Leoma and Christine focused their attention on the word-collection groups in order to help them to be productive, I shuttled from the record-keeper to the glossers to the typists, making sure that they each understood how to do their bit. There was some turnover among the typists, so that some of the computers that we had prepared last week were no longer available, and we had to prepare other computers.

Every workshop has its unique challenges and one thing is certain: expect the unexpected.