August 18: Day 2 of Word Collection

Tuesday’s highlights:
I’ve used my top sheet two nights in a row now, and it’s raining again—a nice gentle one—as I’m writing this, so I’m almost sure to have to use it again tonight. Today was MUCH less stressful than yesterday; so many things went more smoothly today. Productivity of the word-collection groups virtually doubled today compared to yesterday. Several participants were reassigned to a new role—and they’re all happy, and most everything seems to be going much better. Read on for more details.

I have the fan blowing in my room tonight because I’m trying to dry my clothes that I washed last night. It’s a challenge to get clothes to dry in the rainy season! The fan will shut off at 10:30, when the power goes off, but I won't miss it since I’m feeling borderline cold in this rainy weather (70 degrees?).

Eight cows (each representing 100 words) were added to our field, which was colored by a 3-year-old here.

We gathered all of the workshop participants together—I counted 51 of them at 9:15— this morning to report the results of our first day of word collection. Eight cows had been placed in the field to represent the 800+ words that were gotten yesterday, and I ended up being the one to give the group a pep talk this morning. I’m not particularly gifted at that sort of thing, but I did my best to be encouraging about what had been accomplished, while also explaining that 10 days of results on that same scale would leave us short of our goal of 10,000 words. I encouraged them to use English as little as possible and to think and discuss in their heart language, as that would facilitate the flow of words. Leoma then explained that some individuals would be asked to change roles in order to help shore up the weakest links, especially to help the team of glossers, as they had already accumulated a bit of a backlog after only one day. I told the group that I was setting a challenge goal of 1,500 words for them today, but that if they worked extremely well, they might even reach 2,000. They seemed excited about trying to reach these higher goals.

Animated participation in the word-collection process

Leoma, Christine, and I were all relieved and very pleased to see people in all parts of the process working with much more confidence and effectiveness as a result of the personnel changes and the coaching that we had given on a number of fronts yesterday. And it was a blessing that each of the individuals who was asked to change roles is happier where he is now than where he was before. Since we were moving some of these people out of more prestigious roles, I did not necessarily think they would be so accepting of the proposed changes. But everyone now seems to be happily participating where s/he is, which is a wonderful thing! As a result, more than 1800 words were collected today, and I’m sure the group will be very encouraged by that news when we present it in the morning.

We had as many as eight people working together to translate the Shilluk words into English.