The side effects of an introduction

The other day at morning tea I met with a colleague and realised that there was an odd coolness between us. Usually I get along pretty well with people, so this surprised me and left me trying to work out where things went astray. My conclusion is that we lost our way the day we met.

We met in a work context, but not a formal one. In making small talk, my purpose being to get to know this person I was to be working with, I probably asked about life before PNG. The reply I got felt like the reply one would get at a job interview as previous training and work experience was detailed. As he is an American, I’m told that this sort of introduction through qualifications is natural and normal. As an Australian, I heard it as arrogant. Ok, I’m Aussie, the idioms that came to mind were a lot more colourful than ‘arrogant’. Without realising it, I started to dislike the guy.

In response, when he asked about my past life, I would have given a general reply, mentioned sailing and not detailed all my university degrees. He probably walked away thinking me underqualified and out of place, for Australians typically undersell themselves in such a situation. Our introductions are usually low key and we do not like to be seen as self-promoting. Since then I have felt that this colleague does not value what I have to contribute. Maybe if I told him I had the equivalent of nine years full time tertiary study this might change, yet I struggle with the idea that my value is in my qualifications. I prefer people to get to know me as me, not as a collection of letters which can go after my name or as a job title.

So what now? Being aware of the fact I’m cool to him because of his cultural introductions and judgements I can start to change my attitude and get to know him as a real person, not as a stereotype. Knowing that qualifications and experience are more important to other cultures, I can try to remember not to hide my achievements.

Working in a multinational organisation means constant awareness of different ways of being polite, introducing and relating. So far I have negotiated this fairly well, but in this case, the relationship was derailed at the start. I am not too worried though, as I have plenty of other friends from the US to remind me that most of the time, that cross cultural relationship works well too.

TEA

Since returning to PNG a month ago I have been looking at which language group to work with long term. In a country with hundreds of languages waiting for translation work, it is a challenging process and a difficult choice. To help ease the process, we’ve been sharing this journey as a group of translators exploring allocations, or TEA for short.

Over the last few years, our organisation has accumulated a number of unallocated linguists. Some people were previously allocated to work with a language group and for various reasons vacated their programme. Some are new to the country. Some have been waiting for a work partner (me!). Some are committed to one project for a set period but are contemplating long term options. Together, we have been meeting for a cuppa, a chat and prayer. There is comfort and strength in sharing our struggles and working out the road forward between us.

We have also taken to inviting a guest to our gathering, usually a regional director (RD). When one first arrives as a linguist, RDs can be a bit scary as they seem to see a target painted on you and aim to recruit you for their region before another RD gets you for theirs. Having got to know a number of the RDs in person over the last few years, I now know that they are actually more gracious than that, but first impressions were intimidating. Having RDs come and share with us as a whole group takes away the pressure of feeling targeted.

Group discussions during a workshop in a village

Region by region we are listening to possibilities and priorities. We listen, we question, we pray, we ponder. We look at maps and are amused by place names. If one language group strikes a chord for one or more of us, we start discussing what the next step might be. This next step usually involves a visit to a language area, but the challenge is to do it in a way which allows us to have a look-see without promising anything long term. We find ourselves discussing options of language surveys and workshops, exploring legitimate reasons to engage with a community without raising expectations. We discuss ways to find out more information, while contributing to the community at the same time.

So far we’ve had four gatherings and heard from two of the eight regions. That leaves six more to hear from, when I’m already feeling overwhelmed with information. Yet sharing the journey between us makes it easier. Where we will all allocate waits to be seen, but at least we have found a practical way to take manageable steps towards that goal.

Return

When I first arrived in PNG two years ago, I arrived full of nervous excitement. I was arriving in a country I barely knew, but intended to live and work in for decades to come. I was arriving to a large organisation where I only knew a handful of people. I was arriving two days before my brother’s 40^th birthday and a week before Easter, so keenly felt the distance from family and home community. I knew little of what I would be doing.

The dramatic Kaintiba airstrip. One more stop and I'm home!

Two years later, I flew back to PNG for my second work term, with a sense of returning home and excitement to be back. Coming into Port Moresby I looked out the plane window and could recognise places.  At the MAF hangar where we waited for our flight to the Highlands, I had friends to catch up with, not strange faces all around me.  Flying into a remote and challenging airstrip on our way home I enjoyed the drama of the scenery and was not worried about safety.

Not everything in my return went smoothly. When we arrived in Moresby, I was unsure if our arrival details had been noted and that we were being met with transport. This was not a worry though, as I had a PNG phone, had kina to buy credit and knew who to call. Other small things happened, but I knew the system to make things work and it did not bother me. Two years ago, had these things gone wrong, I would have been very stressed.

Welcoming other friends home.

Now that it is nearly Easter again, I am happy to be back and enjoying reconnecting with friends. The life and death cycle I wrote about during furlough has continued here too. A family I did orientation with ‘went finish’ while I was away. I did not know this when I left, so did not say a proper goodbye. Another family I am close to returned with their new baby. Two other families I am close to are preparing to leave. A friend who was over for lunch just announced that she is pregnant again. New people are arriving from orientation.

I still miss family and friends in Australia, sometimes more than others. When I was surrounded by American accents in church last week, I really missed my home church in Australia. When we sang a song it seemed everyone else knew, I missed the songs from the All Together books, which as an Aussie Lutheran I grew up on, but that no one else in this community knows.

Now I have two homes. I refer to being in Australia as ‘being home’ and coming back to PNG as ‘returning home’.  In each place there are people I love and things I delight in, and in each place there are challenges.

I had enjoyed being home (Aus), but it is good to be home (PNG).

Furlough: Life and Death

Furlough is a strange time that is neither holidays nor my normal work. It is a time of speaking at churches, thanking and updating the people who support me in the work I do. It is two months of catching up with two years of stories and connections.

New life

It is this reconnecting that is the exhausting part, as I cram two years of social connections into a series of short  visits. All the events which I would usually spread over two years are experienced in the space of two months. Often they are things I’ve heard about, but until you sit down with someone and cry about the loss of a loved one, or give a cuddle to a newborn loved one, it is not quite real.

Furlough is a rollercoaster of life and death, on scales both large and small.

There is death in visiting those who are starting to lose their clarity to Alzheimer’s disease. I had heard that they are going downhill, but did not know what to expect. Apparently it was a good day, with thoughts and memories more in order than at other times, but it was still the death of a part of the person who I used to know. I wonder what our meeting in two years will be like.

There is life in seeing children two years older than they were. Their vocabulary has increased, their independence and inquisitiveness is wonderful to see.

There are the deaths I knew about, and those that are surprises. In a church that I attended for a year, I knew that diabetes had claimed the life of a single woman in her thirties. It was only when I was there in person that I found that influenza had claimed the life of another single woman, also in her mid thirties. There are only a few of us in that demographic in the congregation, so for two of my age-mates to be suddenly gone is quite a reality check.

There are the many new lives which have been announced with delight. Some of them have also been photos on my fridge, videos through the mail or even a blurry face on skype, but until they are someone who I can cuddle or read a book to, they are a theory rather than a reality. I know my friends have been becoming parents while I was away, but it is hard to comprehend until it is lived.

There are the deaths of friendships as we have gone our own way over the years. There are the difficult decisions as to which friendships to invest my limited Australian time in renewing and which to allow to drift, knowing that in another two years, it will probably be too long to really reconnect. There are the elderly, who if I do not connect with them now, may not be able to again.

There are grand plans that have worked and hopes that have failed. There are new starts and lost opportunities. New houses, new relationships, new jobs, new passions.

There is the new life in the family, as I held my newborn nephew, the first in the clan to do so, even if I’m usually the overseas Auntie.

This cycle of life and death is normal. What is difficult is squeezing the highs and lows into a short time frame and continuing to care, even though it is exhausting. 

Voyage Planning

Teaching navigation to teenage sail trainees.

When planning voyages at sea, we’d lay a straight line across a chart between waypoints and make a week long plan of courses and magnetic compass headings. In a sailing ship, this line was always an ideal and rarely a reality as wind and waves determined our actual path. The start and end point usually remained consistent, although sometimes these too would be changed by conditions.

When I make travel plans in PNG, I leave a week open in my schedule to allow for changes to flight schedules and then plan around the planes. Planes are weather bound too, as fog, low cloud, soggy grass airstrips and other factors can cause changes to plans. Once we have the plane approximately planned, the other plans follow. Do we need to get to or from the airstrip? Does this involve a boat or a car ride? Who might have the vessel or the vehicle and the driver and the fuel to make that possible?  What weight is available on the plane and what is the combined total of our body weights and our cargo?

After a particularly frustrating and changeable recent patch of travel planning in PNG, I decided it was an activity that required the patience of a saint, the strategic planning skills of a General, the networks of a digital native and the flexibility of an Olympic gymnast.

Travel plans for Australia are another whole experience. I jump online and look up maps and schedules. Transport networks tell me to the minute when trains and due and how long it should take for me to walk between points. Tickets can be pre-purchased on line or swipe cards reloaded. Prices are compared and links take you direct to other services. I can plan my travel in small pieces and be realistic in expecting that most things will happen as planned. It is lovely to have things so straightforward!

Yet when a friend was running to catch a tram the other day, I realised how much I have adapted to ‘PNG time’. Why run for a tram when the next one is 15 minutes away? PNG time is relational time rather than scheduled time. Things take longer because people stop to talk to those they meet. Rather than running to catch a tram they would continue the conversation and let one or even two trams go by and only head off when the conversation was done.

I find I value both things; being able to plan ahead and being able to spend the time with friends. Now my planning involves leaving big spaces, so that relationships have room, but schedules are not interfered with, as I try to balance both ways of being.

Uniskript in action

Koriki Uniskript Alphabet

Teaching literacy to kids using a new alphabet in a language I do not speak was always going to be a full on but fun time… and it was! Over 18 days of classes, we played games, practised writing using water on the floor (finger painting!), built words with flash cards and read books to the class. We covered eight of the sounds in the alphabet and were working on building and recognising words, with surprising success. I had to leave before the summer school ended (Highlands meetings and transport challenges), so am still waiting to hear the final report from Debbie and Robbie who finished the sessions with my class.

The primary idea behind Uniskript is to make the connection between sounds and symbols easier for beginning learners to grasp. This is done through the bridge of what your mouth is doing and the shape of the symbol on the page. The Koriki Uniskript alphabet uses familiar shapes from local life.

Instead of talking about vowels, we taught about arrows. Other shapes were based on bows, fish traps and an armband. The number of arrows in a symbol reflects how wide open your mouth is when you say a sound. [i] is one arrow  as the mouth is long and skinny when you say [i], skinny enough to be covered by one finger and [e] is two arrows as it can be covered with two fingers. In teaching these sounds we taught the children to use their fingers to measure their mouths and used stories about one arrow in the ‘ivi’ (local fruit) to help make the connection between the [i] sound and the sounds in ‘ivi’. Along the way I learnt how to count to three in Koriki as well as assorted other helpful words. We also all ended up talking with our hands, as we mimed sounds and connected them to symbols.

Writing practise... or fingerpainting

We created sentence length ‘stories’ for all the letters, to hopefully help beginning learners build the bridge between sound and shape. The goal was to connect the item the shape was based on, the sound in the word and to sometimes include what the mouth is doing when it makes that sound. The prime example of this is the sentence which meant ‘When I put the mango on my lips, it got on my nose’. Ma’a is the word for mango and [m] is a sound (and a shape) made with the lips and the nose… a bilabial nasal for the phonetically inclined. These stories, and others we’d used in the teaching process, all came together in a locally illustrated book, created to encourage further reading and given out as a gift at the final graduation.

Home office... the generator must be off,
as all the people have disappeared!

We spent a lot of time creating books for the language group, as what point is literacy without reading materials? Most of the books we created were from a framework known as shell books. These come with illustrations and a story in place, we ‘just’ had to translate them. Robbie had several pre-translated books on file, but we also worked with our trainee teachers to translate, check and edit several more. The other books we made were the stories-for-teaching and an alphabet dictionary. As we worked on these books, we were incredibly thankful for the people behind shell books and clipart, as well as for software, laptops, scanners, printers and generators that made book production possible and fans that stopped us workers from melting down. In a few weeks we created over ten titles and several hundred printed books.

When working at a beginning level in a new programme, it can be hard to see what we achieved. We can count attendance days and books printed. We can record training hours for both our teachers and our students, but the long term impact on literacy in Koriki, and eventually in English, is as yet unknown. I can see great potential for Uniskript, as long as teachers continually make the symbol-sound-mouth connection that is the strength of this approach. If they do not, it is just another alphabet and justifies the questioning by those who ask how an additional step in learning can possibly by beneficial in becoming literate.

Weighed down by generosity

One benefit of Uniskript that I did not expect was the community pride in having their very own script and being the first in the country to have a Uniskript programme in place. This community from the jungle-swamp of Gulf Province held their heads up and their language in high regard.

One overwhelming thing, which cannot truly be measured, was the generosity of  the parents towards us. Melanie* and I were weighed down with gifts when it was time for us to depart. Bags, spoons, pineapples, coconuts, bananas, head-dresses, pig tusks… so many things that were given to us to say thank you for giving our time, skills and resources to helping their children become literate and their language be unique. It is a subjective assessment, but I think the parents liked what we did with Uniskript. The kids certainly enjoyed the books!

*Somehow I have failed to name Melanie until nearly the end. My fellow swimmer in the literacy/Uniskript deep end, she looked after one of the more advanced classes, mentoring trainee teachers and working long and hard on book production. She was the fourth member of our team, the people behind the ‘we’ in this blog post.

Uniskript: Educational Challenges

Writing practice

Uniskript is an innovative approach to literacy which makes the connections between sound, mouth and symbol more explicit and therefore easier to learn to read. It has been developed through the University of the Nations in Hawai’i and although apocryphal reports have been favourable, it has not been thoroughly tested. During December and January I was able to be part of one of the first significant trials of Uniskript, as we established its use in the Koriki language, a dialect of Purari, in the Gulf Province.

In July last year, two Koriki women accompanied the local translation and literacy workers, Robbie and Debbie Petterson, to Hawai’i to work on Uniskript in their language. I call the Pettersons local, for although they are from NZ, they have also been working in the languages of the Gulf region since 1984 and are the sort of people that locals know as Auntie Debbie and Uncle Robbie. Two men from another local language also went, to get Uniskript started in Urama. Together they worked on alphabets unique to their language, using iconographs relevant to their culture. This means that each alphabet is unique to the group it belongs to.

Arriving in Gulf to help with Uniskript, I was jumping in the deep end…as usual. We spent half a day training eight volunteer teachers before classes started. Over 100 kids turned up, to a summer school literacy programme during the official school holidays. I challenge you to find that enthusiasm for school in Australia! We started with four classes, based on their current literacy skills in English and Koriki using the ‘normal’ (Roman) alphabet. I ended up with the class that had never been to school before.

My job was to mentor the two trainee teachers assigned to my class. I have not officially studied education principles, but having collected several university degrees and been in various educational settings before, have a surprisingly strong skill set when it comes to teacher training. At the same time, I was helping the children to learn. We were not only teaching them literacy through Uniskript, but as the absolute beginners class, we were also teaching class room behaviour and all those skills which Aussie kids learn through kindy or pre-school, such as how to hold a pencil and which direction a book goes (left to right, top to bottom, which end is the front).

The students in my class ranged from 20 (the day there was a funeral in the village) to over 40. Most days attendance was in the mid 30s. Calling the roll was one of my many challenges, as kids had multiple names. It took me a few weeks to be smart enough to dismiss students one by one as I called their names. In doing so, I found one student listed three times under different names. Another girl had two different first names and three surnames, presented in varying combinations. Ages in the class varied from four and a half to ten. None of them had been to school before.

Our class faced most of the common educational challenges for village schools in PNG. The class size was too big. The teacher was undertrained. The teacher who was well trained (myself) did not know the language. The students did not know English or Tok Pisin. The classrooms were suffering from tropical fatigue (The stairs to my classroom had rotted away, so we had to come up the other stairs and through another classroom and an office to reach our room. I had planned on including outdoor games, but these were cancelled when getting outdoors meant disrupting another class). We had minimal resources (It surprising how many flash cards you can create from one 2min noodle carton and a black marker, and we nearly ran out of chalk). The teachers were volunteers, so sometimes did not turn up, as they had to go fishing to feed their family. A village incidents, such as  funeral or a fight,  interrupted schooling. Class started late after a rainy night that meant that everyone slept in and the path to class was muddy… and so on. In this context, the work we did was a reasonable test of the effectiveness of Uniskript for teaching literacy. Any good results had few other sources to be credited to.

Now that I have set the scene for our Uniskript teaching, I’ll point you in the direction of some photos and get to writing about how Uniskript works and how the students and community responded.

For photos, please visit my photojournalist friend Erin’s blog:

http://speaklifespeakup.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/Uniskript/

http://speaklifespeakup.wordpress.com/2014/01/13/Uniskript-part-ii/