What does a literacy class in a minority language of Papua New Guinea look like?
After learning to speak the Kovol language the missionary team is now teaching reading and writing in the Kovol language. What does a day of class look like?
Arriving back into Kovol after our break feels like returning home. Our break was fantastically refreshing and we really enjoyed it. As good as our break was arrival back at our bush home feels like coming back to where we belong. The Kovol community greeted us warmly, but at the same time our arrival was run of the mill, normal life which meant we weren’t overwhelmed with attention.
The first of hopefully a few 30s videos giving a glimpse of missionary life.
Hulumo was one of our landowners. Over 15years ago, Kovol people have heard that the neighboring peoplegroup had some missionaries and who have translated Gods word into their language and thought them to read and to write. Hulumo said he send a whole chicken to the missionaries begging for missionaries come to his place. We came… but he…
Being as isolated as we are taking breaks is a really important habit. After 3 months in Kovol our time came for a 2 week break out at our support centre outside Goroka.
Something we’ve been wanting to encourage living here is more playing between our children and the Kovol children. There have been a few hurdles that have made playing together with Kovol kids hard for our own children.
Bible translation is a challenging task. It’s not just a case of finding the right words to translate the words in the original.
I asked one of the LLMs (Large language model), to translate Genesis 3:1-6 for me to see what it came up with. It had access to our Kovol lexicon and grammatical notes. It came up with this for Genesis 3:1 (translated back into English):
“The wild Satan python was big big bad. This python God will make, that all the wild animals skin was big bad. Python here to the woman I will speak he said “Did God say which garden trees all i will not count them?” he said.”
Genesis 3:1 LLM version
Writing evangelistic Kovol Bible lessons is a huge task. The Gospel has never been presented in the Kovol language before. Where do you start? Well, we start at the beginning. Our lessons start in Genesis 1 and tell the story of the Bible to the end. We aim to pick up the big themes of the Bible and use its narrative to teach them. Doing so has several advantages. Firstly in an oral culture like we find ourselves in stories are important. The Kovol people are used to hearing and retelling stories and using them to make points. Teaching chronologically allows us to do just that.
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.
The first literacy class has started! Take a look at the video below to see what it looks like as we take these first 12 students through our program teaching reading and writing in the Kovol language.