Writing down languages for the first time

Here in Mpanda, we've just had a workshop to create our first experimental rules for writing down the Bende and Pimbwe languages. I (Olly) was working with the Bende language.

This is the first workshop that I have been involved with since starting work in the office. We invited four participants from each language to attend the workshop and got started after a short delay on the 28th of August. The workshop took place at our office here in Mpanda, with a mixture of teaching the participants about features that might occur in their languages and then investigating their languages to look for them.

 To this end, one of the main activities of the workshop was sorting through cards with Bende words on them looking for various features. For example, on one of the days we separated the cards according to the first consonant in the root (the root is the part of a word that is the same for different forms of the word, for example, in Bende muhiighi means 'hunter' and bhahiighi means 'hunters', the root is hiighi). This activity helps you work out all the consonants in the language which, along with other steps, is the foundation for making a good alphabet.

As well as looking at things like consonants, vowels and vowel length, a significant feature in Bende is tone. We started looking at this in the second week of the workshop. In many Bantu languages like Bende, the pitch of the syllables in a word can be significant for the meaning so it is important to investigate these tonal features.  We had already found before the workshop words like ikala with two different meanings: 'ember' or 'mongoose' depending on the tone. What we needed to find out was how many different tone patterns there are for different length words and how often this can lead to ambiguity. We discovered quite a number of words where the tone changed the meaning and so we decided to write this difference, we decided to write 'ember' as ikala and 'mongoose' as ikāla (and other words with the same tone pattern similarly).

The other main area we looked at was word break issues. Bantu languages typically modify words by sticking on prefixes or suffixes and it's important to work out which of these are part of the word they are joining to and which are separate words (or somewhere in between). For example, ighōgho means 'log', if you want to say 'on the log' it sounds like 'kwighogho'. During the workshop we discovered that this is formed by adding 'ku' to the start of the word and also that it didn't become fully part of the word so we decided to write 'ku-ighōgho '.

Bende alphabet chart

Needless to say, a lot of these decisions will have to be tested more widely and more Bende people consulted than the four who attended the workshop. However, it was really exciting to be able to produce an experimental alphabet for the Bende language and use it to write down a story and some proverbs from their culture - the first step on the road to Bible translation! 

Clouds and Silver Linings, a.k.a. Our journey to England

As many of you will know, we recently made a flying visit back to the UK for my (Cat) best friend's wedding. You may also be aware that our actual journey was fraught with last-minute changes and various delays...

The Plan:
Wednesday: drive to Sumbawanga (about 5 hours on a bumpy road)
Thursday: get an internal flight with MAF from Sumbawanga to Dar (we had no desire to make the 28 hour trip all the way to Dar by car again if at all possible)
Friday: get the BA flight from Dar to London Heathrow: the only direct flight between Tanzania and England - we decided that layovers with children are best avoided if possible

The Reality:
Tuesday: Call MAF to check whether they had space for us*. Sadly, they did not. We had various back up plans, such as UN joiner flights from Mpanda and proper flights from Sumbawanga (a lot more expensive than MAF but still better than the car ride). Unfortunately, all of these were also full so Olly arrived back at home at around 10:30am to tell me we had to leave immediately in order to drive all the way to Dar to get our flight. We knew there was a chance this could happen so I'd actually already done most of the packing over the weekend. This meant, although we had a slight mad dash around the house getting all the last minute stuff, it wasn't nearly as stressful as it could have been. We left at 11:30 to drive to Sumbawanga. Silver Lining? We realised that not flying meant we didn't have to worry about internal flights' luggage allowances for on the way back so we could max out our BA 7 x 23kg bags - woop, woop!

Wednesday: Drove to Mbeya. 9 hours from Sumbawanga on a bumpy road. Silver Lining? We got to see our friends who live in Mbeya on the way through :) Plus, on the way back it meant we could stock up on a couple of things that you can't get in Mpanda but are available in Mbeya.

Thursday: Drove to Dar. 13 hours on a paved road. Paved = traffic police. Still, we only got stopped twice and fined once. I can't even remember what it was for now. Probably speeding in a 30 zone (easy to do when you know you have such a long trip. And when the 30 refers to km, not miles).

Friday: This is where the journey got more stressful. We went to the airport, checked in and boarded the plane with no problems. Taxied down the runway. The plane paused, then we were informed that they just needed to check something. Time passed. The plane returned to the gate so the engineer could come and take a look. More time passed. After four hours, we were told that they'd decided it was wiser not to fly without a new part and we needed to disembark, collect our luggage from baggage reclaim and go to speak to the BA ground staff about what would happen next. We duly obeyed and eventually got sent to a (very nice) hotel in Dar to await further information. Fortunately, they did also give us a number so, when the information was not forthcoming, Olly was able to  call and find out what was going on. More time passed. We ate some nice food at the very nice hotel. I had a bath (such a luxury after 2 months of bucket showers). Eventually we discovered that they were flying in the necessary spare part the next day and we would hopefully get to leave on Saturday evening. It was nice to know for sure that we'd be there overnight so we could relax a bit without worrying that at any moment they would be calling to tell us to get to the airport ASAP.

Saturday: We waited for news of when we would depart. We ate more nice food. We tried to find out what was happening. 4:45pm we finally spoke to someone on the phone who told us that the plane wasn't fixed and he booked us on a KLM flight that evening, changing in Amsterdam and arriving at Heathrow Sunday morning. Joy! By that time we were just fairly happy to be able to go, although quite disappointed that we did have to have a layover. The flight was SO FULL. We didn't get a skycot for Theo that we would have had on the BA flight, but the staff were super nice to us, and he did actually sleep most of the way on Olly's lap, for which we were extremely thankful - it could have been beastly. Silver lining? We were upgraded on the Amsterdam-London leg, which meant we could spend the layover in the BA business class lounge. It was amazing! Free drinks and snacks and a lovely, clean room for Theo to crawl around in.

So, in the end it could have been a lot worse. And because we're paranoid and I wanted to spend some time with Bethany before the wedding, the delay didn't cause us to miss it. It was pretty stressful at times, and it did mean we had less time in England than originally planned but we survived and even arrived smiling to have a lovely (albeit short) time in England. And the journey back was a breeze :)

***

*MAF do a wonderful thing called 'joiner lists' where they tell missionaries such as ourselves what flights have been scheduled/chartered and you can put your name on the list to join it if there's going to be space. They'll confirm whether or not they have room two days before the flight. It's an ace service and generally works quite well for cheap internal travel. So it's not their fault our journey panned out the way it did and we're still super grateful that they offer the joiner service. 

House-helping

I'm often met with surprise when people hear that I have a house help even though I'm at home all day so I thought I'd write a post about why we have one and what she actually does...

Mama Adelaida comes to our house every Monday, Wednesday and Friday - her official working hours are 9-1, although she is consistently 15-30minutes early! While she is here she does our laundry, including Theo's nappies (reason enough to hire someone, if you ask me), then our washing up then sweeps and mops the floors as well as any other jobs I need her to do if she has time.

reusable nappies - reason enough to hire a house help!

It might sound extremely lazy for me to have a house help when I'm at home all day, and in England I certainly wouldn't need one. However, here all of these jobs take a lot longer than in the UK! For example, in England, how long does laundry take? Maybe 5 minutes to put it on then 15 minutes a couple of hours later to take it out of the machine and hang it up to dry? We don't have a washing machine so Mama Adelaida washes all our clothes and Theo's nappies by hand before hanging them out to dry - this takes her at least an hour and a half to two hours, longer if Theo has been through more nappies than usual! The same goes for washing up and cleaning the floors - no dishwasher (or running water at the moment - it all needs to be brought in from our water buckets outside) or hoover! It's also very dusty at the moment and our windows don't currently have glass in them (the fundi* is actually rectifying this as I write - yay!), so it's important to mop as well as sweep, especially as Theo becomes more active and rarely stays on his playmat for long! Having a house help will become more and more important too - Theo will hopefully gain siblings at some point, who will take up even more of my time and once they start to reach school age I'll also need to start homeschooling. On top of that, I'd really like to do some part time Scripture Use for the Katavi project at some point, so it's actually quite likely that Mama Adelaida will become full-time in the future, adding things like cooking to her tasks as my workload increases.

Aside from my not having enough time to do all the housework as well as looking after Theo, it's very important from a cultural perspective to have employees. As we are comparatively rich, it would be seen as extremely selfish of us not to contribute to society in this way. It's also good for me to have a chance to practice my Swahili a little, as well as hopefully serving as a way in to relationships with other Tanzanians.

Now that we've been here a couple of months, I am getting used to having a house help - it is odd; as a Brit, I'm not used to having someone else in my house doing 'my' work and it takes some getting used to! It's also odd having someone in your house not as a guest - I have to fight against a natural instinct to 'host' and just allow her to get on with her work while I get on with my things on my 'to do' list. Even as I write this, it feels a bit wrong that she's doing my laundry while I type away on my computer! It's also odd from a perspective of child-raising – I’m very aware that the way we do things with Theo is very different to the way Tanzanians raise their children, although I don't know all the specific ways in which we differ. For example, Theo thrives on a good schedule of feeding and naps so I try to keep him to a pretty strict routine, even when he would rather play than nap because I know he will just get overtired and upset later in the day. This is a bit difficult when there's someone else in the house and, to the best of my knowledge, Tanzanian mothers don't leave their children to cry - even knowing that Theo will only shout for a few minutes before falling asleep, it's difficult to know where to strike the balance between being culturally appropriate and still  doing what I feel is best for him.

We're very lucky in that Mama Adelaida is fabulous! She's super nice and really good at her job - I guess having 7 children makes you a whizz at home-making regardless of country of origin. We've never had to tell her how to do something twice  and she always does her work better than I expect -what more could we possibly ask for? 

*fundi is the general Swahili term for a skilled tradesman. It can be more specific, so fundi bomba is a plumber, fundi cherehani is a tailor. Fundi by itself can refer to any trade.