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.
Today I put in more than 8 hours of language learning time! Thanks to Steve for looking after Oscar 🙂
I started off looking at the sunrise this morning, which I intended to do on my own, but a dog saw me and started barking, so people got up and came to me wondering what stranger was sitting on the field in the middle of the night… They thought it was weird for me to look at the sun coming up. But I learned some interesting language from it. And the sunrise was so pretty!
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.
This week was an exciting change of pace. It was the first time in 8 weeks we’ve had a helicopter land here so we could see other faces 🙂 Two CLA (culture and language learning) consultants stayed with us for 2 days to both check our language ability and answer questions we have about the language learning process.
A short video update from the Stanley’s showing some clips of life in Kovol and talking about the challenges of life in the bush.
The best way to learn language is to engage all of your senses and experience what you’re learning about. You’re much more likely to remember the names of things and names of actions if you learn it as you’re doing it. Not only that you’re much more likely to get language that makes sense because you hear it used in context (if you ask your language helper nicely I’m sure he’d agree that yes you could say that you plural were holding a new, clean, red, small bowl in the past tense – but no one would say that!). Hence our language learning style emphasizes being out and about far more than labouring at a desk.