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.

We’ve now completed the word-collection phase of the workshop in Kaansa. This was another very positive experience and, in my opinion, worthy of the term “success”. While we were able to treat only 1,200 of the 1,792 semantic domains that the questionnaire covers, we did collect more than 11,500 Kaansa words and expressions. The most noteworthy aspects of this workshop for me were these: (1) There were so many people who responded to the invitation to participate that we had 6-7 individuals per group most of the time, instead of 4-5; (2) Personnel substitutions were made only due to absences, not to lack of competency, which meant that there was no single word-collection group that was far better than the others, nor was there one that was distinctly weaker than all of the others; (3) Groups were formed randomly by the workshop Coordinator, and the members of each group all worked together in perfect harmony, without us needing to reassign anyone to a different group.

The goal that was set at the beginning of the workshop was 10,000 words or expressions. When we announced that to the participants on the morning of the first day, the participants were skeptical as to whether their language even had that many words! We assured them that we believed they would be able to come up with at least that many in the two weeks that they would be working on the task, using the RWC questionnaire. As a way to visually display the progress from day to day, a picture of a Kaansa granary was printed in large format and clipped to a piece of plywood at the front of our meeting place. The goal was to fill the granary with words, so as we tallied up the words that had been written down, we painted a portion of the granary for each 1000 words collected, and then tacked on pictures of baskets of grain representing 100 words each, to show the total achieved thus far. We updated the image before the beginning of each day’s work, and the participants enthusiastically followed the progress and were encouraged by it.

The Kaan king was present each and every day, though his arrival on the final day was delayed until the afternoon, due to the fact that he had to attend an administrative meeting in Loropéni (5 miles away) in the first part of the day. I also learned recently that at least one of the workshop participants, old enough to have grandchildren, made the 10-mile (or more) trip on his bike to and from the workshop site each day in order to be part of this historic event. Apparently he did so because the king had suggested to those organizing the workshop that they ask him. This is yet another piece of evidence of the importance of the king’s support of and involvement in this workshop!

Shortly after 5:00 on Friday afternoon, a closing ceremony was held in the “town square”. The site consisted of a large open area near a sizable shade tree. The open area was swept clean in preparation for the Obiré dance troupe, who performed near the beginning of the ceremony and again as people were dispersing to return to their homes. Stuart opened the ceremony by explaining what it was that we had done during the previous two weeks, then after the troupe performed, he and the king both made short speeches. Then I was given the opportunity to speak. I explained that, due to a magnificent effort on the part of those who had taken part the past two weeks, the granary was now full. That was a very good thing, but as they were all aware, there is still work to be done to turn the contents of the granary into something edible and nourishing. Thus, they should expect a time of food preparation, when the Showalters and their team would be grinding the grain into flour, then cooking it, so that it could be eaten. Thus the team would need some time to prepare the words that were collected so that they can be printed in the dictionary that has been promised. But once all that preparation had happened and they had had the opportunity to “eat” their fill of the result, they would be very satisfied with what had been done, and happy to have played a part in making it possible.

What now remains is to finish glossing (translating into French) the words that were turned in at the very end of the word-collection phase, just before the closing ceremony, and to finish entering words into the computer. This latter task will probably take at least a full day yet. After that, we will focus on correctly spelling errors in the typed data and merging duplicate entries.

And that’s news in a nutshell from Obiré at the end of phase 2 (word-collection phase).

The training phase in now completed. I am very pleased with the level of interest and enthusiasm displayed by those who attended this time of preparation. Monday, we will begin the actual word-collection phase, with numerous new arrivals who will help us as expert speakers of the Kaansa language. The sole expectation that we have of them is that they will provide Kaansa words for each of the 1,792 semantic domains that are part of the workshop. These new arrivals will be the primary source of information; almost all of those who attended the training phase will have a leadership role during this next phase, ensuring that the process of collecting Kaansa words goes as smoothly as possible, and helping the new arrivals to know how to best bring their expertise in the language to bear on the task and goal: a minimum of 10,000 Kaansa words by the end of the day on Friday, January 31st.