Drops in a Bucket
Many aspects of this trip are different than the three that came before. First, I’m traveling alone, which has its pros and cons. I’m looking forward to being more immersed in the community without my Western culture anchors that have kept me afloat the last two years. But I also know that these trips have a huge emotional and physical toll and I will miss the comfort, advice, and laughter that my friends brought me.
Second, this will be my longest trip yet. I don’t have tickets to come out yet, but I expect to leave at the beginning of June, which will hopefully come after the annual yam harvest. That’s at least five months in the village! Enough time I hope to become conversationally fluent and to have a solid start on an Ende grammar.
A is worried about me on both accounts, but I’m not too worried really. I’m worried I might run out of something I need, like medicine or hard disk space, toilet paper or toothpaste, soap or pens or bandaids. But some things I’m not worried about running out of: like grammatical questions, words for the dictionary, or stories to record. I’m looking forward to seeing all my friends, to befriending my and Grace’s puppies, to employing my basic first aid skills to keep minor infections and sicknesses at bay.
I went overboard on my shopping this year and I’m bringing in two full bags of gifts and supplies. I’ll buy more in Daru still but I’m still worried that I’m not bringing enough. If you look at the percentage of my income that I’m spending on these supplies, it would seem that I’m being very generous. And the types of supplies that I’m bringing are intended to be sustainable, practical, and useful to most of the village. But when I arrive in Limol I feel disappointed in myself that I couldn’t or didn’t bring more. There is so much need in the village and I feel like my contributions are just drops in a very large bucket. I shouldn’t worry too much though, my friends in Limol love me and appreciate everything I can do. And I know I’m doing the right thing. Kind words from Penny help me understand that. But it’s hard to live amongst so much suffering and need that can so straightforwardly be solved with enough money.
I’m passing the time in the airport adding more words, definitions and example sentences to the Ende dictionary and reading my new kindle - a splurge I took after my old kindle got crushed on the way in to Limol last year. I’m reading quite a few books at a time:
- The Power by Naomi Alderman (with Elizabeth)
- My Love Must Wait by Ernestine Hill (with Andrey)
- A Grammar is Kuuk Thaayorre by Alice Gaby and the Kuuk Thaayorre community
- Vowel Harmony in Esimbi by Cristin Kalinowski
I’m also kicking myself and listing so many questions that I have to wait to arrive in Limol to ask over the satellite phone. I’m struggling with the best way to gloss the Ende texts. One issue has to do with nominal phrasal suffixes. Right now they are written as two words, but they could be written as one. What to do? The second issue is how best to gloss verbal inflectional affixes. A given affix may have five or six different meanings depending on the context and other affixes in use. Do I gloss the affix with only the meaning currently being expressed? Or with all the possible meanings it could have? Sometimes this is simple (dual or plural object for example) but sometimes it’s complicated (second and third non singular or third dual object in recent past or future tenses; in venitive contexts, could also be 3rd non dual object if verb root is of type A). In the first example it seems misleading to label it as a dual object marker when it could also mark plural objects. But the second example is too cumbersome to apply the same level of informativity.
After all that typing, it’s still not time to board. My flight to Daru has been delayed two hours, which gives me more time to read and think. Excited to be departing soon!
Kate
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