The death adder

I went over to Kavaluku and borrowed his machete thinking that I’d cut the snake’s head off just in case it still had some life in it! I raised the machete and swung and struck true, catching it full force on its skull. At that point, I realised it was very much a live snake as it thrashed around! I find it amazing that I didn’t miss my mark, my aim is usually terrible!

Garden trip

Gerdine is quite busy most of the time looking after Oscar, Alice and Millie. We don’t have any baby sitters on hand and so one of us is always busy with them. When I’m spending my day learning language that leaves Gerdine trying to get home-school done with Oscar while simultaneously looking after two 2-year-olds! It’s no surprise then that her language ability hasn’t improved as much as my own. What’s great though is that she’s found the motivation again and wants to push to achieve the next level in speaking ability in the Kovol language for our next check.

Cloudy weather

Unfortunately however just as the helicopter was approaching on Friday clouds came over and covered our ridge top meaning the helicopter was unable to land. We heard it circling around looking for a way in, but it never found one. It had to return home and our language evaluation was cancelled. We don’t have a new date lined up yet, but whenever it will be it will be after the Hansen family leave.

Gospel to the dying

On Wednesday evening our team met and concluded that the only thing we could really do for her was to visit her and share the Gospel with her. We had no knowledge or medicines that would help and using a helicopter to move her out to town wasn’t really an option.

We have special visitors this week!

For the blog this week I decided to have a sit and chat with them. Over coffee for an hour I put my voice recorder on record and asked them their impressions. I’ve taken the liberty of summarising and writing their answers, so what you’re reading is my own summary of what they said – I’m sure they’ll correct me if I got something wrong!

Dealing with sickness

I’ve been working through a batch of 7 different interviews asking Kovol friends questions like “why do we get sick?”, “what’s the vocabulary for blindess?”, “how does someone become crazy?”, “what should you do if a venomous snake bites you?” and “what should you do to look after your brother if he’s really sick?” among other questions.

Journey back to Kovol

We’ve been out in Goroka for several weeks, and it’s also been several weeks since we posted a blog. We decided to film the journey in as a way to get started blogging again and to give an impression of what it’s like arriving back in the bush.

Helping with school

Usually, when we come out to Goroka it’s break time, and so Oscar has been having a harder time being motivated for school. Gerdine’s been feeling a bit stretched so I’ve stepped in to help out with a day of homeschooling here and there. Friday was our first day and topics of schooling included evergreen and deciduous trees. I’m not very good at identifying familiar English trees, never mind Papua New Guinea trees but we think we identified some evergreen and deciduous trees around Sobega. Although come to think of it what happens to deciduous trees when it’s summer all year round? Are the broad-leaved trees that have waxy leaves evergreen or deciduous? We’ll just move on quickly, I’m not sure! 😀

Preparing for the football tournament

I have to admit to feeling quite unsatisfied with discourse analysis. I’m spending day after day charting texts and producing a write-up. I think I have write-up fatigue. Our phonemic and grammar write-ups are done, the cultural summaries write-up is in progress and now the discourse analysis write-up. I feehere’s a lot that can be done outl so useless when people come and visit and I’m sat charting texts and writing them up. “I’m working on a write-up” I tell them, and I feel so guilty to tell them that after 2 years of full-time working on their language, I’m still writing reports and it seems we’re no closer to starting a literacy class.

Forming discourse hypotheses

As a language learner, I need thinking time. So sometimes I’ll say that one single action happened and I’ll finish the sentence, no chaining, as I think on how I’ll say the next thing. That definitely seems to be a pattern I need to break though if the thing following is a “and then this happened”. Not chaining seems to signal that what I’m saying amplifies, or is equivalent to what I said last. I’m adding information to the last sentence, not moving on. It probably comes across as incredibly unnatural when I end a chain and then talk about something new. The content is obviously intended to be one event after another, but the pattern I’m speaking with suggests the 2nd event more fully describes the 1st.