Thursday, July 14, 2016  Opening Ceremony preceding first day of  word-collection workshop

First thing on the agenda today was an opening ceremony. Several people gave short speeches about the value of the local language and of the current workshop; I was asked to summarize what it is that we plan to do, so I spoke for about five minutes along those lines. At the end, a local government official pronounced the workshop “begun,” as is the local custom. The ceremony was theoretically scheduled to begin at 7:30 am, but as we all knew would be the case, it didn’t happen until about an hour after that. It’s all part of the culture in this part of the world.

After the traditional and political leaders had gone, I was asked to elaborate a bit more on the way the workshop would work for the benefit of the new arrivals who had not been at the training days the beginning of this week. Then I showed them a video of a RWC workshop that had been done in Ghana. It had French subtitles, so the people here were all able to follow reasonably well. Once these preliminaries had been taken care of, the participants were divided up into groups, and they went off to various nearby locations to begin collecting words.

Our work setting is a village elementary school with three rooms. One of the rooms is dedicated to the administrative team—the glossers (who add the French meaning for each word), the typists, and the record-keeper. The other two rooms are available for the word-collection groups to use, although it quickly became evident that everyone preferred to spread a mat on the ground outside and sit there as a group to collect words. So we had six groups scattered over the better part of an acre of ground. Until the rain came, that is!

The sun was out quite bright when we left the regional capital at 6:30 this morning, but by 10:00 am the skies were becoming dark, and soon thereafter the rain began. It quickly became heavy, and the noise on the tin roof made oral communication difficult. Fortunately, the decibel level soon subsided to where work could resume, but the rain continued for an hour or more, making the ground outside quite wet and/or muddy. So strong was the desire to be out of doors, however, that once the rain stopped, a couple of groups moved their mats to the concrete skirt around the building and worked in the open air.  Photo to come.

We encountered the usual “bumps” at the beginning of a RWC workshop, but helped the various participants to better understand how they should each do their part to make everything work together harmoniously, so by mid-afternoon things were flowing along pretty well. Nearly 1500 words were collected in this first day, in spite of it having been shortened by the opening ceremony. This is real proof if the this method being called Rapid Word Collection.

Kevin Warfel