I have now been in Musoma for one week. Today is my fifth day in the office...and my first day helping in a literacy workshop. Writers from the language groups Kiikoma and Kiikizu have arrived. The writers are working on writing stories in their languages, and I get to help teach them! On Wednesday, I am leading a section of the workshop on sentence length and paragraph breaks...in Swahili. This may be an example of “those who can’t do...teach”, but I am praying that God will help me through that lesson, both to loosen my tongue to speak Swahili well, and to help me be a good teacher.
One of the purposes of this workshop is to help develop literature in the cluster languages, this week being Kiikoma and Kiikizu. Considering how difficult it is to read and understand the Bible, even in your native tongue, it is highly important to have some simpler literature that can act as stepping stones to reading the Bible, hence these workshops.
In other work, I am reading about the linguistic features of the cluster languages so that I am aware of potential difficulties I may come across. I am also going to start reading about the language Kikwaya because, that is the first language that I will be working with!! We are trying to finalize the orthography (alphabet) for the Kikwaya language, and problems have been encountered. My job will be to help develop a working orthography for the Wakwaya (speakers of Kikwaya). As time goes on and I become more at home here, other languages will likely be added to my plate.
I am going to try and be more informative about my life here in Musoma and will try and post more short blog entries, with more pictures! Here are a couple from a trip I took last week to the land of the Wazanaki. We are helping put together calendars with the months, and days of the weeks written in the indigenous languages of the area. This way these words are preserved and speakers of these languages can see their language written, and get used to reading it, instead of having to wait for the entire New Testament to be finished. Here are some of the pictures we took...
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| 'Rope sellers at the market' |
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| 'Zanaki-land' |
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| 'Mwalimu Nyerere's house - the first president of Tanzania' |
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| 'Traditional Zanaki food storage rooms' |
