To be ready for it we needed to gather 13 two to three-minute-long recordings of Kovol speech in different genres, which we’ve transcribed to use for the ALW. Since we’re going to be digging deep into these texts the transcription needs to be spot on and I’ve been preparing by making sure all my texts are triple-checked, playing each one sentence by sentence and checking I’ve written it right.
Life has been a bit weird this week, but the feeling of life just carrying on is there. Most significant was the death and funeral of a Kovol newborn. It’s so strange how such a tragic, permanent and sad event is both life-changing, but things carry on as normal.
Did you know that there is such a thing as mountain crabs? Part of homeschooling for Oscar was learning about trips to the seaside and he found rock pools and crabs really interesting. It turns out that the jungles around Kovol have their own crabs and so to tie in we arranged a little hunt.
Do you ever get the feeling that everyone knows about something apart from you? It’s a common occurrence for us learning a new culture and language and I’ve lost track of the number of times a crowd of people have gathered seemingly from out of nowhere.
We’ve learned that the Kovol language isn’t particularly descriptive. I guess it’s because no one ever has to describe what a banana looks like, anyone you’d talk to in the Kovol language knows what one looks like. That’s my theory anyway.
As we look forward to teaching lessons we’re thinking about how we go about introducing new concepts. How do we describe new things? How do we introduce unfamiliar settings? When describing something where does detail need to be put and where can it be glossed over?
We live on a mountain ridge. If we want to go out, our options are visiting people in their houses or going to their gardens. Most of the time the people are in their gardens. The way to their gardens is going downhill on steep trails, which are worse in Read more…
We’ve been advised to finish off our Grammar write-up before then so we don’t start identifying things we see as significant to the paragraph that are actually just sentence-level things we didn’t know about.
I’ve been feeling a bit dissatisfied then this week, feeling like making some changes for the upcoming months that will be healthy. Thinking through the feelings I wondered If I was homesick. Would life be better at home? Thinking through things I discovered that no, I don’t want to go home.
We made it back into Kovol, and what a ride 🙂 We ended up being a full week delayed because of weather and helicopter maintenance issues, but NTM Aviation managed to cram a lot of backlogged flying together and got us in.
Getting used to living out of a suitcase is part of missionary life. We have our plans, but there are lots of ways those plans fall down! This week we’ve had to postpone our flight back into Kovol two times, each time we were in the midst of packing and being ready to go!
The plan had been 1. Hansen family fly in on Wednesday, 2. We fly in on a 2nd flight on Wednesday, 3. Philip’s Dad flys in for a visit on Thursday.