Getting Organized

I love, love, love Mondays. They are my actual favorite day of the week unlike Thursday which is what I like to say is my favorite day. 

This Monday was particularly wonderful because it involved so many of my favorite things: a schedule, a to-do list, heaps of productivity, new notebooks, and a tale of female bravery overcoming a horrible situation. 

Warama shares many of these favorite things and yesterday when I went for a visit and to pay him for his outstanding transcription work, he showed me a blackboard on which he had drafted a potential daily schedule, beginning at 8 am with morning prayer, including breaks at 10:00, 12:30, and 3:00, and ending at 4:30. I loved the idea and so started a fresh moleskine notebook with lists of all the tasks that need doing, followed by five daily schedules for the coming week. In the schedules is room for to-do lists and notes. So in the morning, a time for planning the day is penned in after “opening prayer” where all language workers can write in the tasks they hope to complete for the day and when. It’s brilliant. At the end of the day we write up all the tasks that were completed and those that have to be moved until tomorrow. And as new tasks arise, they get added to the lists in front. It’s an extremely gratifying system. 

Today Warama finished writing a story that he’s been working on for a while. Tonny transcribed one recording and helped me gloss another. And I was able to type two transcriptions aligned with a recording, type up Warama’s story, gloss a full text, translate part of another, do a data dump/backup of all the recordings from the weekend, AND go to Wareka Duiya’s house to record her telling how she escaped from a 12 year long abusive marriage to finally return to Limol. 

I’ve been starting plenty of notebooks lately. Over the weekend I started a speaker information notebook for writing down all the important social information about every person that we’ve recorded so far (more than 100 people!). I also started a new electronic anthropology notebook for observational notes and cultural information. And then this evening I started a new grammar notebookin which I’m writing exploratory questions and hypotheses about Ende grammar, inspired by my readings of other grammars. Finally today I read a paper and a half on vowel harmony, the theoretical conversation of which seems so absurdly difficult to grasp compared to my current problems of trying to describe the language.

Anyway, it’s 10:00 pm. Way past bedtime especially since I promised to get up early to chop the grass at the school yard to help with the community work this week! Have to finish cutting by 7 so that I can get to work by 8. 

Until next time,
Kate

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