This is one way to build your house

Perspectives

For the Scripture Use conference, we wanted to provide the participants with the nicest food we could give them. One morning for breakfast, someone baked over 100 cinnamon rolls! Later that day, I was talking to one of the Papua New Guinean participants and she told me that one guy told her that he thought the breakfast was too sweet and she said to him, "You're supposed to be a missionary! Just eat it!" Perspectives can be so different . . . we tried to honor them with our best breakfast, but maybe they would rather have had boiled potatoes!

We all have different things on our list of "weird food I have had to eat as a missionary". For some people, that list might include grubs and sheep hearts. For others, it might include cinnamon rolls.

Surveyors should not operate cranes

People often say to me, "Oh, I could never do what you do!" Hmmmm . . . that may or may not be true, but when I think about what so many of my friends here do, I think the exact same thing about their jobs. Sharlene is the principal of the elementary school here . . . I would be a truly terrible principal. Joy and Liz go out to a village, play with kids all day, tell them about Jesus and invent educational games and puzzles for them . . . more power to them! Jamie is a pilot . . . any of you who have been around when my nonexistent sense of direction was being exercised will be deeply thankful that I don't try to fly you anywhere. Vico, Chad and Paul fix people's computers . . . the fact that I am one of their most faithful customers should tell you something right there! Donna and Esther teach high school . . . something I can't even imagine doing. Give me a backpack, a mosquito net, and a blank wordlist, and I'm good to go. But if I had to fly a plane, teach teenagers, deal with computers, or run a school . . . well, I would tremble, and you should too. I guess I just think it's cool that we all have such different jobs that are all so necessary . . . and I think it's cool that so many of us love our own jobs but can't imagine doing anyone else's. That's the body of Christ.

(Briefly thought about becoming a crane operator and promptly decided against it.)

Beautifully complicated people

During the New Britain survey, there were four villages in particular that we really weren't sure how to classify. They've previously been classified as one language, but some people seemed to think maybe there were actually two separate languages. Well, just last night I finished comparing the word lists, and two of the villages are very similar to each other, and the other two are very similar to each other, but the similarity between the two groups is kind of on the border. You know, similar enough that you could maybe sort of almost consider them to be part of the same language, but different enought that there are definitely . . . well . . . differences. So how do we decide? Today I'm going to look at some other factors that we always consider, but that are especially important in borderline cases like this. Do the people who speak those languages consider them to be two separate languages or the same language? Can they understand the language spoken in the other two villages? Are there significant grammatical differences? Do people in the area see themselves as having the same cultural heritage, or are there significant cultural differences between the two groups?

In some ways it would be easier if there was some kind of scientific formula that you could run a bunch of words through and it would tell you definitively how many different languages there were. But life really wouldn't be as interesting, would it, if human beings and the languages we speak could be reduced to a scientific formula?

Cooking for the bishop

There are lots of churches in PNG, even in language areas that don't yet have the Bible in their own language. These churches use the English Bible (which most people don't understand) or the Tok Pisin Bible (which is often vague and hard to understand, even for people who are fluent in Tok Pisin). Often, by the time the New Testament is translated into the local language, the churches in the area have been using English or Tok Pisin in their services for so many years that it has become a deeply entrenched habit. They almost start to think of those languages as "church languages", and it can be really hard for them to get used to using the Bible in their own language during church. Sometimes church leaders aren't quite sure how to incorporate their own language into church services, even when people understand it so much better than the "church languages".

That's why we're hosting a "Tok Ples Scripture Use Conference" in Ukarumpa this week. ("Tok ples" is the Tok Pisin way to say "local language".) We invited denominational leaders, pastors, and presidents of Bible colleges and seminaries from all around the country to come and discuss how they can encourage Papua New Guinean church leaders to use the Bible in their local language to reach people's hearts.

For the past two nights, I got to help cook dinner for these people. I quite enjoyed pouring 10 cups of soy sauce and 7 cups of oil onto sweet potatoes and chicken for 95 people, serving pumpkin to a bishop, and making a massive carrot cake involving 22 eggs and 16 cups of grated carrots.

Is there always room for one more?

True or false: This dump truck (on its way to market) is full.

Watch the video to find out!

IN

Our survey office is in this building. It's called LCORE (Language Collaboration, Opportunities, Resources and Encouragement) and it has lots of offices where lots of brilliant linguists work.
We have all been to university, and our jobs often involve solving difficult cultural or linguistic problems. People in LCORE can help you analyze a tonal grammar, identify an uncommon sound, evaluate language vitality, understand a puzzling cultural practice, or use the latest linguistic computer software. Just don't ask us to turn on an electric kettle, because apparently we all skipped that class during our linguistic training.

Our old electric kettle was easy to use. When you pushed the little switch down it turned on, and the little switch flipped back up once the water had boiled. But one tragic day, that kettle broke and we had to get a new one. The first time I tried to use the new one I was dismayed to find that pushing the little switch down did not work. Every time I pushed it down it would immediatley flip right back up. So I began standing there and holding the switch down while the water heated up . . . a bit dull when no one's around, but not that bad if there are people to chat with while you are thus bound to the kettle. One day, as I stood there with my finger on the switch, I asked Anonymous Colleague One if she knew how to turn the kettle on without holding the switch down the whole time. "No," she replied, "The guy who does the yard work showed me one day but I've forgotten." Anonymous Colleagues Two and Three, who were also present, remarked that they had never been able to figure it out either, but that surely there must be a way.

Thankfully, during my switch-holding ritual the next day, the lady who cleans the building happened to walk by and she shared the secret with me: you have to push the switch in! Not down! This discovery totally revoltionized my office life. As in the days of the old kettle, I could now push the switch in and do all sorts of things while the water boiled. And don't worry, I have been faithful to share this nugget of wisdom with the rest of my anonymous colleagues. Just the other day I was chatting with Anonymous Colleauge Four, and in the middle of our conversation he put his finger on the switch and stood there holding it down as we talked. I showed him the technique of pushing the switch in rather that down, and he was amazed and delighted. And yesterday Anonymous Colleague Five pushed the switch down and didn't even notice that it flipped right back up. Today I need to share the magic word with her: in!

So many words!

I'm in the middle of a massive New Britain word list comparison! I've finally finished the extremely tedious work of typing them all up and getting them into the right format for the comparison, and now I'm in the fun part: actually figuring out which words are similar. I took fourteen wordlists during the survey, and I have four more lists from neighbouring languages, and there may be four more to add later on. I'm pretty excited about it . . . eighteen word lists from up to nine different languages! We visited fourteen villages during the survey, and those villages may end up being grouped in as few as three or as many as five different languages . . . this comparison will be one of the things that helps me figure that out! It's all very messy and complicated and interesting and hard and delightful.

New Britian photos

Have a look at some pictures from our New Britain survey! Here's the link:

Picasa Web Albums - PNG Survey - New Britain

Due to circumstances . . .

I'm sure you're familiar with those very professional sounding sentences that we often put in survey reports and other very professional documents: "Due to uncontrollable circumstances, no data was collected in Bubalbok Village." Have you ever wondered what the uncontrollable circumstances were? Professional documents might be a lot more interesting to read if we told the stories behind the uncontrollable circumstances . . .

Due to the arrival of a dump truck, the surveyor did not finish eliciting the word list in Gibidai village, because the entire village climbed into the dump truck and went to market.

Due to the distraction of having a bird relieve itself on the surveyor's clip board, the words for "mother" and "father" were inadvertently not elicited in Koumaio village.

Due to the fact that the people rowing the boat refused to stop rowing, the survey team did not visit Atolok village because the rowers rowed right past it and would not stop.

Due to the unfortunate landing of an exceedingly large bug on the surveyor's hand just as she was marking a GPS point, this point may be marked several metres away from where she was actually standing, because the GPS device may have travelled several metres through the air during the process of removing the exceedingly large bug.

Christmas Eve

Having grown up in the northern part of the US, it never quite feels like Christmas to me when it's warm and sunny outside! Look at all those people wearing T-shirts! But we had a lovely Christmas Eve dinner of cheese fondue (a tradition in my family), using a very high tech fondue pot involving a wok stand and a votive candle. Good friends and good food . . .