Writing about WW2

As preparation for the Kovol literacy class, I am busy producing practice reading materials. The number 1 reason literacy graduates don’t cement their skills and make literacy a part of their lives is lack of practice. Some estimate that students require at least 600 hours of reading practice to really become literate. Without it, graduates may slip back into illiteracy.

This presents a huge challenge for our future literacy program – there are no reading materials in the Kovol language! If we don’t have confident readers our future Bible translation will remain on a shelf as an artefact of “the time white people lived here”. A treasured possession, but not something that is read and used.

Our literacy consultant team requires that we produce at least 20 reading books before we start our literacy program. We are also recommended to add 2 new books to the library every year. That of course, barely begins to provide the 600 hours of reading our students need! It’s where we’re starting though.

This week I translated a book written by a PNG author. He tells a story his grandparents told of World War 2. Papua New Guinea was a battleground in World War 2. Armies, navies and airforces all clashed on the island. During my orientation to PNG back in 2016 we visited a nearby village to go and see a Japanese airfield now swallowed up again by jungle. Rusting airframes just sit there. In the village itself, I saw an old anti-aircraft cannon being used to secure a washing line. The UK also has a WW2 history, but most of the action happened in France and Germany. What is left is carefully curated in museums. It’s a different experience to come to PNG and find that history here is just part of the landscape.

The Kovol people have heard of the big war. They have a story about an aircraft crashing in the mountains here and white people being on board, but I think that may have been after the war.

Nevertheless translating this literacy book has provided all kinds of new ground. There’s new vocabulary for gun, bomb, Japan and fighter aircraft. I handled that in a few ways. Gun ended up being “hem holoogul” (strong bow), bomb was”bom”, Japan was the same and fighter plane was “balus enninnot” (the tok pisin word for plane and the adjective aggressive). If there is Kovol concept that fits I can use that, if not then I look to Tok Pisin and if there is nothing there I have to invent a phrase or sentence to describe things.

The vocabulary is one problem. The next problem I had was that the book had an introduction describing the date of WW2 and which places in PNG saw fighting. This is a genre of language that doesn’t exist in Kovol. Information-dense non-fiction material isn’t something we see a lot of examples of. Our goal is to translate as naturally as possible, but we’re also doing brand new things with the language. We’re taking brand new concepts, with brand new vocabulary and then putting it together in short dense sentences. Some of the animal books I’ve been translating are similar. We have paragraphs saying things like “This animal does this. This animal eats that. This animal has this” and I’ve never heard anyone talking like that. At most people would give 1 fact about an animal if we had asked about that, or if it was part of a narrative story.

After the introduction, though, the book moves more into a simple narrative. It’s one where a PNG national is at the top of a tree and sees a Japanese plane coming. Thinking that the plane is coming to deliver cargo to him he waves at it, only for it to turn its guns on him and kill him. It then bombs his village and people flee into the swamp and hide until the war is over. It’s reported to be a true story passed down from the war.

As part of working on the story with a helper, I showed him images and YouTube clips from the war. It is hard to believe this was all happening so long ago! It is also hard to comprehend the scale of the war. We watched a video clip of 40 aircraft flying in formation dropping paratroopers over PNG. It’s easy to imagine how the “cargo cult” mentality developed in PNG as subsistence farmers witnessed Australia and Japan fighting with what must have seemed infinite resources.

I’ve ticked another book off the list and now it’s time to move on to another. I have a 20-page book on “The Story of Transportation” to translate now. Again there are vocabulary challenges as Kovol refers to pretty much any vehicle as a nim endee “a log”. So what am I going to call submarines, aircraft carriers, hot air balloons, horse-drawn carriages and rick-shaws? I’ll think up something I’m sure.

I don’t know a word for pushing. I need to talk about how wind pushed ships, but I only know a verb for pulling. I keep learning and getting pushed every week!

In other news, we had a bonfire on Saturday evening for Guy Fawkes. Oscar has been following a UK curriculum and so learned about it in school and wanted to do it. We made a Guy out of bamboo and burned him. There happened to be no Kovol people around for the event so I didn’t have to explain what we were doing. It’s a funny thing to do after all, isn’t it?