Busy times these days. Five days a week to Puda, with a general effort to keep my bike vertical. Analyze old stories, collect a few new stretches of natural-ish speech in Nyang'i (such as it is), and shamelessly elicit wordlist forms, as much on semantically coherent lines as possible. More emphasis on lexemes, less arguing about how /mut/, /nai/, /co/, /danaco/, /pe/ and four or five other particles don't all mean /nai/--'then' is an alright translation.
This week Komol suddenly started correcting me when i get the ATR values of vowels wrong (this is roughly the difference between the vowel in "sit" and the vowel in "seat" in English, but harder for my mzungu ears to perceive). That's kind of important, particularly since i just wrote a fifty page theoretical paper about ATR, but have been utterly abominable at doing anything practical with it. 24 hours, Komol started whistling the tones of words, too. Another kind of really important development. Maybe i won't fail at field linguistics after all (on my third trip to Africa under the pretense of field linguistics...)
Things have happened in the past three weeks. i went to Gulu, where i took no photos, ate alllll of the Indian and Ethiopian foods, and drank iced mochas. i've been to Puda probably ten times since i got back. i went for a long walk in a downpour. i helped peel and roast coffee beans (fresh coffee!). i hung out with a bunch of Nyang'i folks who were moving the frame of the roof of a hut from one compound to another. Children and eagles in Geremech. i made eye contact with the president of Uganda, shortly after getting a thumbs up from a member of parliament. i spent a few evenings sitting by a fire drinking cold beer with my new friends Jille and Elk.
i didn't have much time to post photos on the interwebs. i'm going to try to make more time for that, though.
The first picture. Yes.
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