The notebook

In a world that has largely moved on to electronic communications I continue to cart piles of paper about with me. Journal, Bible, novel, diary and a notebook are my companions. Sometimes I carry a sketch book too, as I believe that creating is part of what it means to be made in the image of the Creator.

My notebook is my external memory device. It is where I note things to deal with later, be that things to purchase, people to contact, thoughts to contemplate, books to read or events to write about. When I worked on sailing ships as mate, it was an essential part of my functioning in a complex and responsible role. As I move between places and tasks in my current work, it is the item which helps to keep the right things happening at the right time and in the right place. It is of particular use when in the village as with limited access to the internet, and to the outside world in general, I cannot follow many things up immediately, but most stockpile tasks for later.

One page in my current notebook is labelled 'Aus' and is a long list of things to do while in the land of plenty. There are a few other pages of shopping lists for specific stores (hardware, stationary, grocery). There are numerous notes for future blog posts, noting events and reflections in a few dot points so that they can later grow into prose. There are notes for a meeting and from a meeting, as well as addresses to add to my database.

The page that makes me smile though, is the one that gives evidence of my need to wean myself off social media when I go to the village, as it is labelled 'Life as fb posts.' This page started as I realised I was thinking of events in brief and interesting ways that under normal circumstances I would post for the world to see. So, months later, here are some thoughts from my first weeks in the village when I was still writing such notes to myself.

• Jan 25: We started drafting the Kope NT today!!!!!!!! It took six hours for 13 verses, but it is a good team, good to be started and good to be... thorough.
• Jan 26: Sitting on the verandah contemplating vowel length, tone, stress and their relationship to tense. Feeling like a real linguist.
• Jan 27: Because functioning in English, Kope and Greek was not confusing enough, we've added Hiri Motu to the mix. 
• Jan 28: You know it's a hot day when the chickens all find a cool place to nap at 10am and they're still there at 3pm.
• Jan 29: My ankle callouses are back after spending hours sitting on the floor each day.
• Jan 30: Half an hour to download a few emails to my phone. It's no wonder I've resorted to writing fb posts in my notebook!

…and Tide

 Village wharf as a spring tide comes in.

Time and tide wait for no one.

This is a maxim I thought I understood from my days sailing, but it has taken on new meaning as I live in the tidal delta area of Gulf Province PNG. Tides in our area average 2-3m, with spring tides sometimes going over 4m and neap tides having less than a metre variation at times.

This daily breathing in and out of the river system is part of life. It defines when and where you can travel, as some short cuts only work at high tide, and some routes are best followed with the flow of the tide, rather than travelling against it. The tide defines what people can catch and eat, as the greater the tidal variation in a day, the more the water is stirred up. I’m still learning which things are easier to catch in clear water, and which are more likely in muddy water.

 Same wharf when the spring tide went out.

Although the daily tide dictates life, it does not come into the village, but keeps within the river banks. It is king tides that cause flooding.

King tides occur due to a number of factors, growing bigger when some things align, such as when the partial solar eclipse occurred in January. Rain upstream from us also raises the water level, and although not a king tide, the flooding is similar.  This is when the water comes through the village, making life a little more interesting, as these photos show.

 

 Note the drain in this picture,
it is nearly a metre deep…

 …and vanishes in a king tide, so watch your step!

 Having avoided swimming in the drain with a mis-step,
I reached the bridge, only to find that it was floating,
which made crossing to the other side …’interesting’.

Time…

In Papua New Guinea we talk about ‘PNG time.’ By this we mean that things will happen when they happen, and that clocks and schedules are not the driving force, but relationships and other matters are. For me, who comes into this from a sailing background where five minutes early to watch (duty) was considered on time, it can be quite challenging. Often, I find life has become a case of hurry-up-and-wait, especially when something is happening ‘soon’.

Now that we have started drafting Scripture in Kope, I will have a language learning session with one of the village ladies in the morning, then return to my house and get ready for the translation team to arrive ‘soon’. I will get everything ready for a stated time, and then wait for people to actually arrive. Sometimes they dribble in over the next hour or so, our start point being that once there are three translators, we can start. Other times everyone arrives at once and we get straight to work. Occasionally no one comes at all and I eventually receive a message that they’re all busy with something else. On one occasion I turned up and they’d arrived before me and were waiting for me!

Part of living with PNG time is that I always have a back up or interim plan. While I wait for translators, transport and other such things, I usually have with some reading material, a letter to write, my language learning recordings to listen to or my vocabulary flashcards to go over. If a plan is cancelled, I have back up options in place, which usually means catching up on typing up notes into my computer or preparing for a text we’ll be working on soon.

Interestingly, while I am learning patience for PNG time, some PNGns have learnt impatience with whiteskins not keeping to whiteskin time. While waiting for locals to arrive is normal, there was one episode of are-they-here-yet when waiting for whiteskins to arrive at an appointed time that they did not keep. I guess when my culture has spent so long emphasising the important of being on time, I should not be surprised that we are then expected to be on time.

Being home in Australia at the moment, I realise that I have absorbed more of the PNG time frame than I thought. I am now more likely to be five minutes late than five minutes early, as was my habit before. I make meeting times with an ‘–ish’ at the end to emphasise that I might not be as exact as before. When I have a more important meeting, I’ve been turning up extra early, as in recognising the importance, I’ve become over cautious with timing.

The timing of things in PNG can require the flexibility of a gymnast, as plans are made, remade and dropped. How to read the timing of events, and when I need to be somewhere, is a skill I’m very much still working on, and one that is undergoing some readjustments now that I am back in the land of clocks and schedules.

Apologies and some links

At the moment I'm on furlough/home assignment in Australia, and although I've got plenty of notes for things to write about, I've not made the time to sit down and write about them. I've made it a priority for this week though, so hopefully this blog returns to normal scheduling from the 15th.

In the meantime, here is a video about the dedication of the Kope Jesus Film last year.

(You can watch the whole film too, if you want to hear what Kope sounds like!)

My Language

 Tompkin looking the part
as Paramount Chief

One time while we were waiting for the translation team to arrive, I was chatting with Tompkin about the Kope language. Although there are only seven Kope villages, there are differences of language use among them. Deciding which words we use can be difficult, as one village may not accept something that is not the way they say it.

While chatting Tompkin told me that Kope is his language and that he is the final authority on the language. This may seem like a big claim, but as he is Paramount Chief over four of the seven villages, it is a reasonable claim. He used to be Chief over all seven villages, but some conflict that I don’t understand caused the three lower Kope villages to break away and declare their own chief in the last decade.

Knowing that Tompkin speaks for all of upper Kope will hopefully smooth the way in translation, but I am concerned that the old conflicts may mean that lower Kope reacts against his choices of words. While we were finding out more about dialect differences in a lower Kope village, we were told that the Jesus Film had errors. In trying to find out what these were, it seemed that the biggest problem was that the voice of Jesus and the voice of the Narrator were both from Ubuo village (upper Kope). It was not the words used as much as the place the people were from that was the problem.

Being aware of this division means I can work towards overcoming it before it becomes a big issue. Although we do drafting in Ubuo, we have done checking in Bavi (lower Kope). While there I also gave out paper to a number of people and asked them to write their stories for me to put into story books. I want to give the other villages a voice in the literacy materials we produce and show them that their village variation is valued.

 Tompkin and Pastor Elah hard at work translating Luke.

Meanwhile, although Kope is Tompkin’s language, he often reaches for the draft Kope dictionary to check the meaning of a word. All the translators like to refer to it. I am somewhat surprised that these people want to see how outsiders have defined words in their language. Even though we have written it with their help, it has still largely been an outsider task. As we edit this dictionary, I have to remind the team that it is okay for Wouobo people to speak like they are from Wouobo (NW end of tribe) and for Gibi people to sound like they are from Gibi (SE end of tribe). We just need to mark in the dictionary where each word comes from. I am thankful that the English dictionary I have in the village marks British and US spelling of words (colour/color, metre/meter, organise/organize) as well as word preferences (queue vs. line up). This gives me a good precedent to list all the words from all the villages, but to mark them for where they are from.

Kope is Tompkin’s language, but this is not as clear cut as it sounds. Each language has its custodians as well as its differences. It is finding the balance of these that is the challenge.

Dedications, again.

I have written about dedications of fuel pumps, phonetowers, houses and films. I have written about my struggles with ownership in a communal setting. These two themes came together for me when my tables and chairs arrived in the village, and helped me to better understand both the constant dedications and some of the local mindset of ownership.

During a recent village trip, I had ordered tables and chairs through another mission and was waiting for them to arrive. My translation team was pleased to be moving up in the world, and asked a few times when ‘our’ tables would arrive. I was thinking in terms of ‘mine’ and they were thinking in terms of ‘ours’. This did not bother me as much as other incidents, as the tables were for the translation work, so could easily be understood as ‘ours’.

 Testing the new table and chairs that had just arrived.

The tables were delivered and installed, along with a real mattress. (Oh, the luxury of a good night’s sleep in the village!) I was not around when the tables were first used, but when I got back, I was told that they had held a small dedication ceremony for the tables and chairs. They had prayed for them before they used them. I was a little surprised by this, which after all the dedications I’ve been to, I really shouldn’t have been.

On reflection, I realised that dedicating the tables and chairs to the translation work sets them apart from ordinary use, and hopefully protects them from going walkabout to other worthy causes. It is now known that these are the chairs set aside for the translation work, they are not for everyday things. We’ll see how that theory holds up in practice…

 Flopped on my new mattress and in danger
of falling asleep, it is so good!

Language Learning; Assumptions and Imagination.

While learning Kope, I am organising my own daily language classes. In these approximately hour long sessions, I use a variety of approaches, but one of my main tools is pictures. I have a collection of old calendars from PNG, as well as series of pictures that make up a story, and sketches of life in PNG. Using these pictures we describe things, ask questions and tell stories. Along the way, I have discovered that my imagination and assumptions work differently to women I am sitting with and learning from.

One picture I intended to use to learn the phrase for ‘The boy is reading’. I got many phrases, but not that one. The boy was lying on the mat, the boy was looking at the camera, the boy was holding the book, the boy was looking at the pictures (of which there were none) and the boy wanted to read, but at no point was the boy reading. I was both frustrated and fascinated by our different assumptions. My teacher thought the boy was too young to read, so would not describe him as reading. He was also clearly looking at the camera, not at the book, so couldn’t be reading.

Reading? From SIL PNG 2014 calendar, June.
Photo by Catherine McGuckin.

Another time, I had been learning the many ways to say ‘go’, depending on who was going and when. I then wanted to switch to saying come, but hit a road block, because whenever I wanted to elicit the phrase for ‘we will come from X’, I was told that we had not gone there. After that I got extra practice with the phrases for going, as first we had to go before we could come. I was being abstract in my approach to language, but they were being much more concrete.

 A tiny picture of a frog chasing a snake
chasing a gecko that was the basis of a
fun story we made up.

I have been using a number of picture books to learn how to tell stories. The first time I gave the book to someone and asked them to tell a story, but they quickly got stuck. The next time I stumbled my way through the book, being corrected every second word, then asked them to tell the story. Most people would tell the story very much how I told it. Only one or two people would add their own colour to the tale. I wonder if this reflects a culture which values being able to remember and retell traditional tales more than it does being able to create new ones.

Pictures are a wonderful tool for language learning, but they still require common assumptions for the learning process to work.