Thursday, July 13 - Word Collection Day 4

Today was a day of surprises, most of which were unrelated to the word-collection workshop, so I’ll get to them in a moment.

I gave a pep talk in our group meeting this morning, urging the participants to increase their pace to get through all of the semantic domains in two weeks. I showed them numbers from the first three days, indicating that Day 2 and 3's totals were not like Day 1. They got the picture and went to work with renewed energy and enthusiasm, and I sensed throughout the day that we were doing better again.

When I did the final tally, I saw that today’s output was back up to Tuesday’s level which was quite good, but we may not get through all of the material in the ten days. I’ll keep trying to encourage them to move more quickly, all the while keeping the report on what they have accomplished very positive. The total for the first four days is 5,721, which is very good. We will almost certainly end up with more than 10,000 words. Whether we’ll reach the group’s goal of 13,000 or not remains to be seen.

My first surprise of the day came when I got set up to shave this morning. The city water is often off and I have to shave from a cup and shower from a bucket, but this morning it was on, and as I ran water from the tap, it came out warm! (I have not had warm water here at all since I left Abidjan nearly two weeks ago.) In the shower, hot water come out of the showerhead!!! I can't explain it; there was never anything other than cold water from the tap or shower in my previous room. I don’t know if it will ever happen again while I’m here, but I enjoyed it this one time even if I never experience it again. This evening, as I washed the sweat off before crawling into bed, the city water was off again, so it was a cold bucket bath that I experienced.

The next surprise came as I was leaving my room for breakfast. I saw that the lawnmowing crew had arrived and was busily at work in the courtyard outside my room. (I took a picture, which I will share with you here.) Sheep, goats, and chickens roam freely here, and this group of sheep decided that this was where they were having their breakfast today.

The quiet lawnmowing crew

The third surprise of the day came about an hour after the groups began collecting words this morning. The electricity went off. That’s not too surprising, considering where I am. However, electricity gets cut here less frequently than the city water, and when it does, it usually comes back on within 30 minutes. This time, however, it stayed off. That was the surprising part.

Computers began running out of battery power, so Matthieu began looking into getting the generator that they were counting on as a backup. To his dismay, he learned that the person who owned it was out of town for a wedding, this being a Thursday in the “season” for weddings. So the generator was unavailable.

Being unable to continue typing words into the database because his computer had run out of battery power, Matthieu set about correcting the words on the sheets of paper, then passing them to me to type, since my computer battery was still in good shape. I was kept busy all morning in this way, doing data entry in addition to the record-keeping that is my normal task. The power came back on about 12:30, but Matthieu did no more data entry the rest of the day, preferring to spend his time correcting spelling and translation errors and passing sheets to me to enter into the database. By the end of the day, I was exhausted from the frenetic pace I had kept up almost all day long.