Touch typing

Literacy class has been running for 3 full weeks now and we are heading into week 4. Nearly all of the students are making steady progress. The literacy class runs from 1:30 to 4 pm most days and teachers need to be there early. Most of my afternoons are now busy with literacy teaching, but I haven’t found that too troublesome. The biggest problem has actually been that all my regular translation helpers are in the class.

Spending afternoons in class those helpers now spend their mornings at home doing their other tasks and I haven’t been seeing them around so much. I had a great routine going where helpers would come and we would work on things in the mornings. It seems it’s time for a change.

I did actually see this problem coming and was wondering about intentionally not selecting one of my regular translation helpers so they would be available to continue translation work. The downside of this would be potentially shaming them by not including them with all the others.

It has turned out to be a great time to develop new translation helpers, and I’ve had a little something extra to get things started. Well over a year ago Carol visited us and at the time I asked if she could get her hands on a 2nd hand laptop to bring with her to use in Kovol. She got her hands on an old Lenovo ThinkPad a proper business laptop built to last. It feels great to type on! Just recently I’ve loaded this laptop up with touch typing software and one day I went out to invite people from our village to “do computer work with me.”

I’m spending a lot of time in my office under the house. The idea was to have guys sit alongside me touch typing while I worked on whatever I was doing. The result has been better than expected. Two of the guys are addicted to improving their touch typing score and they’ve been coming every single working day. The program has them typing out a set of lines, requiring them to reach a certain speed and accuracy. If they reach the right speed they progress to the next level which adds more characters. One of them is up to lesson 4 already and is typing with all his fingers.

Initially, the guys were scared of pressing the wrong button and breaking the computer. As the days have gone by they have grown in confidence. The long term goal is for these guys to learn to type, become literate and then be taught in word processing. All the materials I’ve been creating in the Kovol language have been checked paragraph by paragraph by reading them out loud and orally correcting them. I’m looking forward to the day when I can leave someone with a document and leave them to it. The current checking process is directed by me. I really want to see what happens when I give people all the time they need to make any changes they want to make. What sort of things will they think need to change? That is a long way off – but first steps are hopefully being taken.

I’ve found I’ve been able to focus very well crammed in my corner with sometimes up to 8 guys packed in on the benches alongside me. It’s a bit of a cramped, smelly workspace – but none of us mind 😀 I’m able to mostly ignore them now once I’ve turned the laptop on. I focus in on my own work on my own laptop and the space next to me becomes a hot seat as person after person rotates in to have a go at typing. When someone new decides to try it I set up a new profile for them quickly and then the guys further ahead give the rest of the instructions to get them going.

I taught the first guys to put their fingers on f and j, hit the space bar with their thumbs, where the backspace key was and where the return key was. The Kovol guys explain this to each other in a far smoother way than I ever did. It’s a joy to see it taking on a life of its own.

The real magic is that I now always have helpers on hand when I’m working on things. Last week I was translating the first of our Bible lessons into Kovol. Whenever I finished a paragraph I was able to read it out loud and check it straight away. It feels quicker than the previous pattern of drafting big chunks and then checking in one long session.

Upstairs in my house I have an office chair and a second monitor. It’s much more comfortable, and the kettle is nearby for a cup of tea. Working downstairs in my dingy little office with a mud floor would seem like a step down, but having smiling excited people around me all morning is actually a big step up. Around 9am every day I’ve got these guys sitting under the house waiting to start work.

The two guys who have been attending daily have turned out to be very helpful translation helpers and they now have Genesis 4, 6 and 7 under their belts as the main mother tongue translators. A mother tongue translator is the one I read my draft to and then get an audio recording of them retelling it in more natural Kovol. Neither of these guys were doing this work before, although I had used them for comprehension checking.

It’s so refreshing to be able to share what feels like my life and my work. Translation, lesson development, literacy book creation and literacy program work are all on the computer. Before it was always my world. I told them about the work I did on the computer and they seemed impressed, but it was separate. This new dynamic feels a lot more like sharing a world together. They get to watch me translate and write on my own computer and they work on their computer and it seems clear – they are on the road to joining the work I’m doing.