Today was packing day. I will be checking one item--a large heavy-duty cardboard box weighing just under 45 pounds. Thanks to Glenn at JAARS P&S for helping me to tape and band the box so that it will travel well!

Departure tomorrow morning is scheduled for 3:45 from our home, 6:15 from Charlotte airport, and 10:15 from Washington, DC (Dulles). If I've done the math right, I will then have a 13-hour non-stop flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, scheduled to arrive just before midnight EDT, but at the start of the Ethiopian day. I'd better get some sleep on that flight or Friday/Saturday is going to be a v-e-r-y long day!

Stateside preparations for Ethiopia RWC workshops - to train colleagues who will run workshops

Oops! In the midst of all the preparations for my departure 24 hours from now, I neglected to post an entry yesterday. This is a quick attempt to make amends.

Wednesday I worked at pulling together all of the resources (lecture notes, video clips, Power Point presentations, etc.) that I plan to use during the training portion of the upcoming workshops. Some of these are stored on the internet, so I made sure I had copies on my internal hard drive in case I can't access the internet to get them when I need them.

I also learned Wednesday that there will be a total of four trainees at these two workshops in Ethiopia--an Ethiopian who works with SIL and three SIL expatriates (two who work in Ethiopia and one who is based in Tanzania). Each of these four individuals expects to serve as a consultant for other RWC workshops in the future, so I want to train them well. This will be the first time that I have the privilege of "multiplying" myself by training others who intend to do what I am currently doing. It will be a challenge to provide all four individuals with practical experience in teaching the material that is to be presented, but I do have two workshops in which to accomplish that instead of just one. I'm beginning to think through exactly how I can best train all of these interested and motivated people.

Kevin Warfel

I didn't have much time today to devote to RWC activities, due to my wife's cataract surgery this morning. (It went well, and she's recovering well.) I spent a couple of hours this afternoon learning how to take data collected during a RWC workshop and format it like a dictionary in a program such as Microsoft Word. We will use this technique during the upcoming workshops to print out the words collected each day, so that the participants can take copies home to check them for mistakes. This will be a new facet of the workshop for me (never did this as part of any of the previous workshops I've been involved in), so it was a bit of a learning curve. Nevertheless, this is a very important skill for me to add to my "toolbox." Many people want to print out their dictionary data, and I've had a vague idea about how to do it, but had definitely not mastered the skill. I'm still a long way from mastering it, but with some help from a colleague, I succeeded in getting results that were pretty much what I was hoping for. Thanks, Greg!

Today Anita and I met with our supervisor via Skype to discuss how we would use the money that has been budgeted for RWC workshops in this fiscal year (Oct '14-Sep '15). We learned that of the $63,000 we had requested in order to run six workshops, we received only $15,000. (The bright side is that that's $15,000 more than we had last year!) Still, we've got a pretty big challenge before us to figure out how to use that limited amount effectively. So Anita began contacting those responsible for the six workshops we had hoped to do, in order to gather additional information that will help us decide what we will and won't be able to do.

Preparations today for my trip to Ethiopia included notifying debit and credit card companies of my travel plans, arranging for transportation to the Charlotte airport at 4:00 AM on Friday, and corresponding with people in Addis Ababa about practical details for my first few days there. I also created a frequent flyer account with the airline I'm traveling with this time, in case I happen to book with them again in the future.

Exciting things have been happening, but I've been less than faithful in keeping you posted. Here's a very quick summary of the most recent news:

In September my supervisor, Verna Stutzman, facilitated a RWC workshop in Nepal where 22,900 were collected in fewer than 10 days' time. I found that astounding.

On October 5, Anita and I presented Rapid Word Collection at a Vespers service at JAARS. Many people who were there had never heard of RWC before. One of those people left within the next two weeks for an 8-month assignment in Vanuatu. After arriving there, "Rapid Word Collection" was mentioned by the Director's wife and the new arrival was able to put her and her husband in contact with me, so that about a week ago, I had a 2-hour conversation with them via Skype about the feasibility of doing RWC in multiple languages in Vanuatu. That was an energizing conversation that happened between 4:00 and 6:00AM EDT, due to the 15-hour time difference between here and there.

This past week, someone else contacted me about doing RWC in the country where he works. The situation there is sensitive (= "potentially hostile to Christians"), so I'll not mention details. He wanted to know if someone in our department could come in January to facilitate such a workshop for the language community where he is involved in Bible translation. I've been helping him assess the feasibility of that, and that's been an exciting enterprise.

Now I'm on the verge of leaving for Ethiopia (departure at 6:15AM this Friday), where two RWC workshops are scheduled in November and December. I plan to spend three weeks in each of the two language communities, so will be gone from home for almost seven weeks. While there, I will be focusing on training others to facilitate these workshops in the future. There will be at least two trainees from Ethiopia and one from Tanzania. Watch this space for more details.