A Seder in Six Parts

Happy Passover and Easter week!

During this Lenten season Sarah and I decided to host a 6-part Seder at our house. For the past 6 Friday nights we have had a house full of ex-pats sharing in a half-hour portion of a Messianic Seder followed by soup, bread, and fellowship.

The first week Sarah made soup and I made about 11 loaves of Challah in various braided forms.

After that, every week we had different families bringing bread and soup. It was a delightful range of flavors.

We had a chart on the wall with most of the parts of the Seder written out in Hebrew. Each week we would review what we had done the previous week and the kids would suggest pictures that represented what we had talked about.

At the end of the 6 weeks our chart looked like this:

We used the same candles every week and on the final night, in almost perfect unison, we reached the end of our Seder and the candles reached the end of their wicks and went out.

It was such a blessing getting to share the Lenten season and 6 Seder meals with others as we prepared ourselves for Easter.

Out in Kwaya-land

Last week I had the chance to go out to a local village in the Kwaya language region to test some reading/writing rules. I've been involved in a number of testing workshops like this before, but this was the first time that I planned and led such a workshop. It was exciting and challenging. Oh, and I think it was also successful.

By some good chance the head of communications for our branch was in town and came out with me on the first day of the workshop. So, I have tons of pictures and video from that day! There were even enough that I could make this almost time-lapse type video of where the workshop was held!

He also took this video of the building where our meeting was held.

It was definitely nice having a media guy on the trip with us!

Oh, and it was also really good to work through some of the orthography issues.

My Normal: Michango

Michango (mee-CHA-ngoh) means contributions, in Swahili.

The other day a friend brought me this mchango card (mchango is the singular of michango). She explained that her relatives (who I have yet to meet), knowing that she works with a number of ex-pats, asked her to pass these around at the office so that some of us could have the opportunity to contribute an amount towards the wedding.

I've been told that Tanzanian culture is less direct than American culture. I think that might be an over simplification.

I think it must be that Tanzanian culture is direct in some areas in which I am used to subtlety and subtle in areas where I am used to directness. I'm sure that I'm shockingly direct to many Tanzanians, and I'm also sure that some aspects of Tanzanian culture are shockingly direct to me.

One of the interesting things about these mchango cards for weddings is that they are not an invitation to attend the wedding. An invitation may come later.

Bwana Afya

Bwana Afya (BWAH-nah AH-fyah), aka Marabou Stork, is a very large and rather ugly bird that we have here in East Africa.

They have received the local nickname "Bwana Afya" because they are generally found on trash piles. Bwana Afya means "Mr. Health". This probably sounds like an odd name for a bird known for living with the trash, but the idea is that it eats all the trash and therefore is cleaning up the area and reducing disease for the people.

Beware though, it may happen that you are walking along and get hit from above by a projectile that goes "splat" on your head/shoulder/bag/arm.* Upon looking up you may see that there are several marabou storks flying high above. I guess it is to be expected that that "splat" would be proportional to their body size.

*not a hypothetical situation in my case.

Recording a Word-List

One of the projects that we are working on here in Musoma is recording a word-list consisting of 1700 words. We are doing this for each of the languages with which we are working.

This word-list recording project consists of hiring a speaker of the language to help us clean up our database of these 1700 words. We then record each of those words. If it is a noun, we record both the singular and the plural version.

I have a nifty program on my computer that will split up a large sound file into the individual words. I just have to record the timing of when one word ends and it goes through and chops it all up. Sometimes I record the timing poorly and parts of a word need to be cut from one file and pasted to another. So, my computer desktop looks like this for a while after recording a word-list:

Including all the prep-work and clean-up after recording, it took me about 2 weeks to clean up and record the Kwaya 1700 word-list. Now, we have a very clean database that could more easily be turned into a dictionary. We also have a clean and clear recording of each of these words for anyone in the office (especially non-native speakers) to use for research or pronunciation help!