Saturday, July 14 Crow RWC: Preparing for departure

I am scheduled to leave tomorrow morning for southeastern Montana to lead a Rapid Word Collection (RWC) workshop for the Crow Nation, a Native American group located southeast of Billings, MT. I plan to leave for the airport at 4:40am, taking a neighbor with me who has a 7am flight. Rachelle has graciously agreed to get up much earlier than her usual time, in order to drive our car back home.

I'm looking forward to this opportunity to lead another word-collection workshop, as it's been a full year since I last did one. This will be my second time to visit Montana, the previous occasion being 40 years ago, when our family traveled together from our home in Pennsylvania, pulling a pop-up trailer and visiting lots of national parks west of the Mississippi River. That trip was full of great memories, and I expect this one will be too.

Like the workshop that Anita and I took part in last year in New Mexico, this one is being organized by The Language Conservancy (TLC). They are a non-profit organization that works with various Native American groups in the US, helping them revitalize their language by providing means for the children and young adults who've not learned it growing up to become competent speakers of it. SIL partners with TLC by leading word-collection workshops like this, so that they can then create written, audio, and online resources to facilitate the revitalization process.

Each workshop I lead is unique in some way. This particular workshop will be different from any other I've ever conducted because we'll be having word-collection groups working simultaneously in two locations a bit more than an hour apart. It will be interesting to see just how that works out.

There are 10 or 12 non-Crow individuals who will be helping at this workshop in one way or another. Those of us who are on site Sunday evening will meet to discuss some of the logistics, but several staff members won't arrive until late Sunday night, so a 6am meeting has been scheduled, mandatory for all staff, in order to prepare for the start of the event, scheduled for 8:00.