MozamWeek

One down and one to go: the seminar marathon continues for another week! We finished the Discover Your Language course well. All the participants worked hard until the final day. We put the rough draft of the 3 short grammar outlines into booklets and printed them for each of the participants. So, I think the seminar was a success. At least now several leaders in the Tete community know what we do in SIL . They have expressed interest in continuing the cooperation with us through the revision of the grammar notes. Seminar 2 is halfway over. We finished the first 20 lessons of the Nyungwe Primer and teacher's manual in the first week. There were hiccups and a slow start, but we are doing it. We have gotten into a rhythm and it seems like things will be easier from now on. Imagine writing a paragraph with only vowels and the letter "n". That is how we started! Second lesson we could add "t". Third lesson we added "m" and so on. We are now using about...

Today we started the second week of the Discover Your Language seminar in Tete. It has been really interesting, encouraging, and eye-opening. First of all, we have 15 people showing up to study the grammatical structure of their own languages every day! From 8am to 3:30 pm every day, we are learning to describe how Nyungwe, Nyanja, and Tawara are put together... how they use nouns, verbs, prefixes, and particles to make sense of their world and communicate. Sound exciting? Well, they are into it! The first day, I had to go and remind people that we were counting on them for this workshop. The department of Education complained that our timing was bad: they were sending Nyungwe and Nyanja advisers out to the districts to distribute materials. They didn't have anyone to send to our seminar... until the cars broke down. On Tuesday morning, their transportation fell through. "You must be praying. We can't leave town so we will come to see what you guys are doing." Every ...

In 1995 I studied in Portugal for almost a year. While at the University in Lisbon I met a Mozambican who was there studying Linguistics. We met weekly and discussed the languages of his part of Mozambique: Tete Province. We studied the map for language areas and the dialect chains in the region south of the Zambezi River. We sent questions to our SIL contact in Maputo at the time. In 1996 I arrived in Mozambique and met that contact person... Mikael was working on the survey of Mozambican languages. He was planning a trip to Tete Province... and my Lisbon linguist, Sostenes, was coming to Mozambique to do research for his thesis. I put the two together for the survey trip... Mikael worked on logistics and questionaires and wordlists; Sostenes gathered data and interpreted for the trip. Thirteen years later I'm living in Tete with Mikael and planning seminars for the next month on those same languages. In my contacts with the department of education, I speak to Teresa, the Nyungwe ...