Moving Forward

On March 14th, I moved out of the SIL Center, because they had a large group coming in for a workshop that required all available housing, and I moved in with Mary, who works with SIL as an ethnomusicologist. She also happens to be a great sax player.  Mary has a lovely, comfy, airy house an easy walking distance from the Center, and I am staying in one of her spare bedrooms until I leave at the end of the month. She has a woman who cooks lunch during the week, and does the laundry twice-weekly, which is convenient. The negative is that the cable to her high-speed Internet has been cut, and how long it will take Onatel, the sole Internet provider here, to remedy the situation, remains a mystery. 

Saturday afternoon I visited the place where Kate works (see the earlier FESCHIBA photos for her picture).  Kate, a neighbor to Mary, works with street boys in the Dassasgho neighborhood in Ouagadougou near where I am staying.  Most of the boys, known derogatorily as garabout (garçon + marabout), are from the Fulani ethnic group, and are sent by their parents to live with a local Muslim teacher (known as a marabout) to teach them the Koran. After spending a few hours with them reciting koranic verses in the early morning, this marabout, in turn, sends them out to beg for the remainder of the day.  These earnings are then given to the marabout as payment for their keep.


The Mossi are the prominent ethnic group in Ouagadougou, speaking a language (Mooré) which most Fulani don’t understand, since the latter speak Fulfulde.  As a result, they are frequently not well treated, many are supplied with drugs, and later abused when they become addicted.  The Christian drop-in Center where Kate works provides these young men the opportunity to learn to read, learn some basic French, perhaps some Mooré, and to have a good meal, sleep, play with other boys, and learn a trade.  

 

 

Above are photos of one of the chalk-boards for learning the alphabet, the boys working together in groups on a project, and a detail of some boys racing to be the first group to finish putting together a simple puzzle.  It was amazing to me how they hadn’t the slightest idea of how to go about solving this basic visual game, but they had never been exposed to anything like this before.  The older boys seemed to have the most difficulty. Although most look younger to me than they actually are, they range in age from as young as 7 years of age to as old as 18, most falling somewhere in between.

Tuesday Fina drove Martine and me to the village of Garango where we watched a bilingual dictionary in the making.  Garango is about 3 1/2 hours south-east of Ouagadougou.

Using a method called Rapid Word Collection developed by someone called Don Moe, we witnessed speakers of Bissa Barka busy working on collecting words in 9 semantic domains and hundreds of sub-domains, from household terms, and occupational terms, to the plant and animal kingdom, and then much more abstract concepts like ways of thinking, or emotions.  According to Moe, we tend to organize words in our minds in a network of relationships, and these form his semantic domains—families of closely related words—which are then used by linguists and lexicographers to “collect words”.  Words that didn’t comfortably into a domain, and words not translatable into French were, of course, allowed!



There were about 30 people participating in various ways, suggesting words for each category, translating those words into French, inputting them into an especially developed computer software, and finally uploading them to a test website for other Bissa Barka speakers to later look at it and give their input. Once the words have been collected, they will be double-checked and “cleaned up” for consistency. We may have been in a village of a poor African country working with a newly documented language, but we’ve come a long way in dictionary-making from the age of index cards and scribbled words on scraps of paper arranged in alphabetical order in shoeboxes. . .

Word gathering

Inputting the data

A closer look at one semantic domaine

The words in Bissa Barka in the left column, French equivalents in the right-hand one

Adding the data to the software

Counting the words "harvested"

So far they have collected some 7500 words and they hope for at least some 12000 by the end of the week. . .

Meanwhile, due to the extremely hot weather during the daytime (and evenings!!) which have been experiencing, the water level is way down in reservoirs, and water use by Ouagadougou residents is being cut back by the sole water supplier, ONEA.  Taking a shower is becoming a challenge, and the clothes I was hoping to have washed today may need to wait at least another day.  For emergencies like this, water is stored in large plastic barrels, in anticipation of the water being cut off for hours at a time.  Apparently the water supply schedule (by "sector" here in Ouagagougou) has been announced on a radio station, and published in at least one newspaper, but the information is not readily available on ONEA's website, so it is bit of a mystery to most of us who don't have access to either.

And yesterday there was a power cut from early afternoon until about 8 p.m. . . It is really very difficult getting anything done . . .