Lunar eclipse

Last night, we had front row seats to an amazing lunar eclipse! We sat around campfires at the community hall to watch the moon. We started an hour early because my timing was off but at exactly 9:48 the first hint of a shadow emerged front the lower right of the moon. When the moon is full, it’s possible to walk around the village at night without a light, just soaking in the moonlight and trailing a moon shadow behind you. As the shadow started to creep up the moon, the face of the moon was clearly visible, like a serene old woman. Language abounded as people chatted about the moon. I caught a fresh Wagiba-ism “If you keep looking at the moon like that, one of your eyes will fly up there!” This is something she said her grandparents would say when they were around. I guess there were some dreamy moon gazers in Old Limol 🌝. The shadow moved quite quickly and soon the moon was half, then a quarter, then a sliver, then just a dull yellow glow behind a dark mask. We walked home crowded into a flashlight glow to find our way.

The lunar eclipse came at a perfect time. A huge super blue moon at the end of a crazy month. The past few weeks have been dramatic and I’ve considered calling quits a number of times. A young boy named Paul died last week from a poisonous snake bite. Apparently his father loosened my snake bandage against my and the nurse in Upiara's orders. A real tragedy. The village has been in upset since and all plans for building the health post and school houses have been postponed while the three villages of Limol, Malam, and Kinkin prepare for this Saturday’s funeral feast. Another source of heartache has been the beating of a woman named Kevaleato. Her husband, now with new wife, threw a sharpened stick at her back and then beat her with it. I think her shoulder blade is broken and possibly some ribs and maybe even part of her spine. I did my best to immobilize the injury and have been giving her morphine for relief. Unfortunately no one in the village wants to take her to Upiara for a medical evacuation to Daru, despite my emotional pleas. And so she’ll suffer here and finish my morphine while the husband goes on with his life. Anger and sadness have defined many hours of the past few weeks. 

January was all about building up, organizing, and analyzing the current corpus. I’m happy to say that with all the transcription and translation and glossing we did, we now have over 80,000 words in the corpus and 14+ hours transcribed! I’m very proud of all our work. I hope to get to 100,000 words by the end of this trip. 

February is all about getting more conversational data into the corpus. I’ll run and transcribe a few more picture tasks and try to transcribe and translate all the conversation recordings we already have. Following this, it will be time for another intense look at the verbs then some more exploration of the Pahoturi River languages. I’m excited for where we’re going. So I guess I should get up and get ready!

Big hugs,

Kate