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.