Working hard

We have a lot to cover since my last update. Apparently regular updates are not a thing this time. Sorry.

After reconnecting with the head of sociolinguistic research in Waga (while I was there), he gave me the contact info for a linguistics student, Alimatou Konaté, doing her Master's who has experience doing interviews and has sociolinguistic interests. He helps her with some of her education costs. This arrangement has worked out very well. She is a very good interviewer and her transcriptions and translations of interviews (done in Jula) are top notch. I am very happy with how this has worked out, professionally speaking.

More than that, she is an impressive human all around. When she was younger, she often had to take care of her siblings. This is not terribly uncommon here, but it is not expected of men in the same way that it is expected of women. This obviously gives women less time to pursue their own interests (in a society where women are already afforded few opportunities outside of rigid gender norms). Burkina Faso is also very economically disadvantaged. In doing that she made sure her (older) brothers knew how to take care of themselves including chores like cooking which are traditionally seen as a woman's job. That is, she saw the opportunity to delegate and equalize tasks among her siblings and did so. Her brothers are (now) super proud of her. She got a degree in linguistics while taking on household duties of a wife and mother. She somehow manages to do so while doing her master's and additionally taking care of her now elderly parents. 

She started her own organization that helps (generally, young) women who do not have the means to make a living (read: no family support), by teaching them marketable skills in the current economy. She was a founding member and still manages projects and consults for said women's advancement organization while studying in Waga. The website linked gives a link to a larger organisation under which she put her creation. They promised to help but have yet to do so. She needs help to run the organization, make her own website, and put it in the hands of someone who won't steal from her.

Needless to say, I am 1,000 % blown away.

I will see what I can do to help support her education and/or work with the organization that helps women, but it is unclear to me exactly what I can do within the confines of my own grant. I do not see an immediate method of giving her financial support, but I will investigate this further.

As for the work we did, I put together a pilot sociolinguistic interview script before she arrived. We edited it together along with my consultant and then went to KV for a few days. It was great to see everyone again! Holy crap did Bakary's daughter grow! I did not get pictures this time because … well… I don't know, but I will (hopefully).

To start our work, I did a couple of the interviews myself in French with her right there so she could see how I do it and could translate things for folks who were not quite as good at French as her. Also, my not being a native speaker of French myself was likely a factor in confusion about questions. After a couple such interviews she took over doing them in Jula for the rest of the interviewees (who my primary consultant arranged for us). Most of the remaining interviewees spoke basically no French or only some French, but not enough to answer questions like "What does being Vigue mean to you?"

We had to deal with quite a bit of rain while in the village. This made timing the interviews tricky as the sound of rainfall, especially on metal roof can render recordings virtually useless. We still managed to get several solid interviews from both men and women in a rather wide age range. These pilot recordings should allow us to design a solid interview guide for the work I hope to do for my dissertation!

My other work training my consultant to collect, transcribe, and translate texts for me (in my absence over the next two years) is also progressing. He is becoming very diligent about making sure that he puts everything he can in the transcript and noting where there are apparent speech errors, false starts, superfluous repetitions, etc. My understanding of Viemõ tone has not progressed as I would like, but I still have some time. I seemed to have an easier time with Bissa tone this past year in my university's Field Methods series. I am not exactly certain how to interpret my difficulties. While my new associate transcribes interviews and my primary consultant works on text training, I am getting organized for more elicitation, especially regarding the ongoing question of a noun class system. I am stubborn and I will win (it's not actually possible to "win" against language).

I did get sick recently, but thankfully it did not take me out for too long. It wasn't malaria either, so those fucking moustiques can suck it (actually, no). 

Picking up steam toward the end of Ramadan

Apparently it has been like a week since I last updated. I totally meant to do that.

The past week has been fairly uneventful. Living in Bobo is the same as it was. The water goes out randomly. The power goes out randomly. My workflow somewhat depends what I can do (what I can plug in or if my laptop is fully charged) any given morning. As they say here: Ça va aller. I forgot how easy it is to slip into resignation when you are at the mercy of others.

I started going to the gym with Zaky again. I don't remember it getting this hot here before when working out. It was also slightly muggy inside the gym. By slightly muggy, I mean that I am pretty sure everything was soggy. Salvador Dali would have been inspired. I can't recall if I actually worked out or not; the heat may have affected my memory. I am fairly certain that I did not actually lift any weights intentionally. They just sort of stuck to me as I crawled around among the gym equipment. Forget Dali, I am pretty sure Jackson Pollock is the correct reference. I don't know if I have made myself clear yet... it was sticky and dripping in there. It felt like what I imagine a dinosaur's panties would be like.

The past week Bakary and I have worked mostly on text stuff. We moved much further in an interview text that we didn't get to finish before I left last time. In doing so, I did manage to figure out a chunk of the 20+ verb suffixes I have in my data. Don't laugh at me, but many were actually just object anaphoric reference but it wasn't clear to me because 1) the noun suffixes are still a mystery (sort of) and 2) it is also possible to just not use them apparently, so the inconsistency was challenging. Transitivity might be a difficult monster in this language.

Yesterday we (Bakary and I) celebrated the end of Ramadan with Zaky's family. I am fairly certain I drank more than I needed to, but I survived. I got hang out with Cecilia again although she does not remember me from last year and is still shy around me. She did warm up a bit though, after I gave her a coin. Hmmmm.

Speaking of coins, I know a new phrase that I expect will bankrupt me at some point. In Jula it is samen samen. It seems to mean "give me money, because Ramadan." It is generally used by children at adults and adults give them coins. I am told that if I were in KV, everyone would say it. I weep for my wallet next trip as I plan to be there for two Ramadans.

I met with the missionaries (I haven't asked their permission to use their names) again to chat about variation in Viemõ and their work mapping Vigue territory. It is a little early to be able to talk about variation or Vigue perceptions of variation, but that will be coming. Someday. Before I write my dissertation. Hopefully. As a side note, I had wanted to do Preston style perceptual dialectology this trip, but I did not even consider whether or not people know how to read or have ever seen maps. Yay western privilege. So, I doubt that idea will happen.

BF journal: 6/26/2016 – 6/30/2016

            Over the past few days most of the kinks that inevitably came up while trying to get everything squared away for my project. We did what we could to get everything we needed to ensure that my operation here runs smoothly.

            It is nice to have Bakary around again. He is a character. Those who are reading this who know him will be happy to know that he still gets higher and higher pitched the more excited he gets. It being our first week back together I don’t have much righteous indignation to report though. Il faut regarder. Bakary and I made some plans for our workflow and when we might go to KV. The initial idea is to go next week but the end of Ramadan poses some complications. We are planning to go the following week.

            Monday was very productive. Bakary and I were excited to start again. I got a solid five hours of elicitation. My head wanted to explode, but it was totally worth it. I am here with the intention of making progress on the tone system (at least in nouns) and getting a clearer picture of the noun classifiers and whether or not they actually count as a noun class/gender system.

            I have also been introduced (over the phone) to a woman who will come assist with my other goal of commencing very general sociolinguistic-y interviews. I will conduct some in French and she will do some in Jula as my skills in Jula are less than adequate.

            I have also discovered my new favorite Jula word in the process of hearing about the ethnic tensions regarding the mayor in KV.

(1)        mɔgɔ-kɛlɛn-fanga-tigi

            person-one-power-owner

            ‘dictator’

The story according to Bakary is that the previous mayor (a Mossi) did everything behind closed doors so it was never clear what he did with the money he was charged with dispensing. I heard a different story from the missionaries I met (I think I mentioned them in my last post) who are planning to start working on Viemõ this winter. They have been doing some digging into the past history of villages and working on mapping them all out. We met at a Lebanese restaurant and had a pleasant conversation. They seem super interested in collaboration but I had to be more hesitant. This isn’t just because I am an atheist but I would not be allowed to share data without permission. I am also absolutely ethically forbidden (on both a personal and institutional level) to influence religious practices of any human subject (in this case: the Vigue).

            My work with Bakary was not quite as impressive the past couple days. Yesterday, my door broke two hours into our session (during a pee break) and that required immediate attention. We also had to deal with getting regular internet access. It took quite a while and Zaky had to wait at Onatel for like three hours this morning. I need to find a way to make it up to him. It is very important for me to be able to get into sociopolitical arguments with my friends on facebook every now and then (I am only sort of joking). The change in temperature/climate caught up with me and caused me to get a cold later that day.

            Today was less busy but also not quite as productive regarding elicitation. The cold hit me hard and after about two and a half hours I could barely stay awake. I took the longest nap in the universe and I do seem to feel better, but it is not over yet. I hope it is by morning as I do feel bad about missing time during this short 2 month trip. My desire to train my consultant to transcribe and translate texts is going smoothly though. He needs to get used to the system I made up for him, but he really seems to enjoy it. I hope he can manage to send me some during this next year. It will also be good for him since I can pay him for those texts out of research funding.

            I am also beginning to see that sorting out this noun suffix system might require more than one consultant. I am getting very inconsistent results that are hard to interpret and I wonder if group discussion (between Vigue) of lexical items with modifiers might be more fruitful.

            We went through a bunch of stuff people left behind last year. I found a book I was missing and some canned air! I also found a copy of a book about African languages (the Heine and Nurse one) that I have been meaning to purchase. I am not sure anyone should own this copy though because it smells like… old.

Getting situated

(June 21 & 22, 2016)

The voyage was interesting and long. It probably took about 30 hours to go from the West Coast to the capital city of Burkina Faso. During the flights I met a Burkinabè who lives in Eugene and it turns out we have mutual acquaintances. I sat next to a whip smart Swedish woman and another Burkinabeè who absolutely loves living in the Bronx. He is confusingly rather republican, despite being Muslim.

After the series of flights, I arrived safely in Ouagadougou (Waga, from here on out, because vowels). My arrival was slightly more eventful than I anticipated. For a while, it seemed that my suitcase with all my research and my work computer were lost. Eventually it was found, but poor Zaky (the assistant/chauffeur for members of our project here) waited for me outside without any means to contact me for quite some time.

Somehow Waga always manages to be hotter and windier than I remember, every time I go there. We arrived at our hotel and after a brief rest and a shower we went to grab a drink and something to eat. I had not slept the entire flight, but apparently that did not stop me. It was fun to drink and catch up with Zaky (I tried my best to keep pace with him, but that was futile effort). I also can apparently still eat a whole chicken: I guess I was hungry. Upon returning to the hotel, I fell asleep almost immediately.

The next day (June 23, 2016) was fun and exhausting. I essentially took care of everything in one day (I do not recommend this). I met a couple Zaky's younger brothers and they helped me find a good phone (and one for my primary Viemõ speaker, in order to better communicate while we are separated). My new Bronx republican Burkinabè happened to be buying a phone at the same time I was at a kiosk across the street. Waga is huge but… lucky me.

After that, we had another round of chicken and beers. I guess that's our thing. At some point I presume that I will eat vegetables and fruit again. I got money exchanged and met with head of sociolinguistic research in Waga. He gave me a contact who seems to be willing to assist with sociolinguistic interviews with folks who do not speak French (still my contact language).

I also learned that there has been some unrest with the appointment of a new Mayor in Karangasso-Vigue (henceforth, KV). There are some ethnic tensions that have flared up between the Vigue and the Mossi. Bakary has since told me that everything has calmed down and there are security personnel there.

On the 24^th of June we travelled to Bobo Dioulasso. The bus ride took a while because they are cracking down on unregistered vehicles, so we stopped at a number of checkpoints. The countryside became greener as we moved south toward Bobo. Rocks and dusty fields became towns and brush until the familiar greenery surrounding my home away from home greeted us on the outskirts of Bobo. It rained a lot and it was a refreshing change from the blow-dryer in my face (a.k.a. Waga). It is always a little greener and cooler in Bobo.

I am in a different house this time. Jeff and Zaky found a better arrangement. It is in almost the same neighborhood and the layout is similar. The furniture is newer and the place costs less. I couldn't happier with that situation. I am still getting everything in order, but I hope to be able to do real work soon (probably Monday).

Today, the 25^th, my time was spent was mostly just taking care of buying various things I need and fully moving in. Bakary and Valentine showed up today and it was very nice to catch up with them. The house was a lot less empty today and that was nice. Everyone seemed happy and grateful that I will be here this summer and Kate will follow in September. The collective excited energy of the team being back together was infectious. I plan to visit KV next week after I have had a chance to get a good workflow going again and arrange things with the person who is supposed to assist with sociolinguistic interviews in Jula.

As of the time I am writing this, I have just about finished, minus a few odds and ends. I don't have internet access yet, but I walked to a nearby hotel and paid to use their wifi so that I could update this blog. You all collectively owe me four bucks. 

Burkina round two

As many of you reading this know, I am heading to Burkina Faso again tomorrow. This will be a much shorter trip and I have a considerable amount of work to do. This may not be saying much since one can always do more.

My agenda this time is to start the basic groundwork for future sociolinguistic studies and to simply get more data. I am especially interested in data which can help me more adequately characterize the noun class/classifier system. I would also love to have a better handle on the tone system.

I will meet a missionary who intends to work on Viemõ as well. Her end goals are obviously different than my own, but there will be a lot of overlap as we are learning. It will be nice to have someone I can talk to in English about Viemõ.

Side Note: I am not sure whether or not I will continue to spell the language the way you have just seen. This will depend on what I will find when I have more data with nasal vowels.

Jeff is due to join me in Bobo Dioulasso in July for a short while and it will be nice to see him again. I think I owe him many drinks!

The packing is going, but I keep waffling back and forth between my desire to take as little as possible (for merely a two month trip) but also be prepared for anything. This is more challenging than I recall. As you can see, I am making amazing progress.

It will be very nice to see Bakary (my primary Vigue contact) again and say hello to everyone in his family. I hope the village chief and historian are there still...

That's all for now, more to follow when I arrive.