Getting excited about literacy
Literacy feels a long, LONG way away, but I’m getting pretty excited about it nonetheless 🙂
Literacy feels a long, LONG way away, but I’m getting pretty excited about it nonetheless 🙂
Into month 6 of language learning and I’m starting to see that progress is settling down to a steady speed. Steady progress is still progress though 🙂 Figuring out grammatical rules, putting clauses and attempting to express thoughts is much more difficult than pointing things and saying its name after all.
Kinship and family is a much bigger deal here than it is back home. Concepts of clan and tribe have deep, deep meaning and it can be fairly hard to understand as an outsider. When I think of family I think of nuclear family – mum, dad and children, but here family is much bigger. So when it comes to learning about all the different terms that are used it’s no surprise that this is a huge challenge! Earlier on we learnt some basics – “ina” (mum), “inda” (dad), “undum” (child) and “mo” (wantok – person of the same language)
After working so hard to get into the tribe; all the training, all the preparation and the months of slogging away at building a house in the jungle you’d expect us to be excited to return to Kovol right?
I have to be honest that I wasn’t feeling very positive about returning to the bush, despite loving what we do and not wanting to change it. Being out on break is nice, slogging away at language learning is tough, tough, tough.
Having lived for a year or two in Goroka in some ways its back to life as it was before, but the time to just sit back and not do much has been great. Lots of naps, a few movies, lots of books and lots of trampoline time for Oscar.
Check out one of the ways the Kovol put food on their tables out here in the jungle:
We left Kovol a week ago for a break, flying out to our mission centre in Goroka. We’ve learned to add an extra week to our trips out – there are always errands to run and work to do. Now our 2 week break starts. Even just being out in Read more…
Since we’re all settled in now we thought, why not go for a tour of our house?
It’s been a tough week for our community with back to back “hevis”. There have been a number of injuries, a serious sickness and a death in a nearby village and we’ve had a week of being involved medically more than normal.
A huge advantage of getting out on the trail is that new things come up constantly. On today’s hike I paid attention to what the kids were foraging for while we were walking along. While we hike kids are constantly in the bushes either side of the trail looking for different things. One thing they got their hands on was the curly shoot of a particular tree.
They gathered a bunch of them and played a game similar to conkers that we play in England.