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 ...

Yesterday we went up to our HILL to see how things went while we were in Vila. We found the "guard" there who we entrusted with the task of keeping people from stealing or destroying our rocks. Sure enough, the RockBreaker was back! Some guy has been basically removing a big boulder from our land. He started a month ago, worked for a couple of weeks when we weren't looking, and then he got Malaria... so he took a couple of weeks off! On Monday, he was well enough to pound on the rocks again... though he was informed by our guard that we didn't want him to continue! He went to get his "boss" who hired him to remove our boulder. It turns out that some lower official ignored the plot markers and gave away our land to a Brazilian! He is planning to build his house on our spot... as far as he knows, this is legal! Needless to say, we were shocked and unsettled. Not exactly angry, but very concerned. We have all the legal documentation from the city planners and h...

This week and next our family is in Vila Ulongwe... near the Malawi border in Mozambique. Mikael and I are teaching at Hefsiba Bible College. I'm teaching Literacy Principles for Mozambican Churches for the 5th time. It is always a joy... and this time it is especially easy. I have only 5 languages to deal with, the course materials are already developed, and the big project will have to wait for the next part of the course. That is where all the hard work and late night consulting sessions come in. But, that is next time. We are talking about why churches in Mozambique should be interested in their local languages. Why should they develop materials that are easy to read in churches? Why should they struggle through the process of writing in a language usually only used orally? What is the point if Portuguese is the official language anyway? There are theories for all these issues and more. Only about 30% of the population that can read or understand Portuguese well. The rest strug...

Mikael arrived Tuesday afternoon, safe and sound, tired and hungry, and grinning from ear to ear! What a welcome sight! We missed him for the week he was gone! Not only did he drive up in a great car that everyone assures him was a great deal, but he got a chance to shop for presents while in Maputo! Thanks to those of you who sent Christmas money that we never were able to spend in Tete, he brought 2 new bicycles and a scooter for the kids. Of course he didn't get much rest until at least one of them was assembled! Needless to say, they didn't actually get their homework done that night! Last week was the LAST week of the term for Zambezi Junior School. The last week of the first term (the school year starts in January here) is traditionally International Week. Each class chooses a country to study and represent at an open house on the last day of school. I look forward to uploading pictures of Tete versions of Swedish forests and midsummer, Argentinian tango dancers, and a wh...

A slightly amusing result of the robbery in January was that my spare make-up was stolen. I don't use much here in Mozambique, but a bit of sunscreen and face powder make me feel more "put together". In lamenting my losses, I began to replace what I could from the local market. One day when leaving the minibus stop, I saw face powder compacts lined up on a mat on the ground. Some young guy was selling make up to minibus riders... like me. Well, the majority of minibus riders are Africans who are truly Dark and Lovely. As I stooped to check out the offerings of the local selection, I was disappointed to see that all the compacts were "medium" and "dark". Upon inquiring where I could find a wider selection, he indicated a central market. There to my delight, I found it: Dark and Lovely, light . It was only $2.00; a great bargain considering that my usual powder runs about $8 and has to be shipped from America! So, I've gone native... the color isn...