i am amused by fires near gold hill because i lived near gold hill once. then there was a fire near gold hill, and basically everything that i owned was destroyed. sometimes i still go and make fire near gold hill, though.
months ago i played bocce and drank nice things at my friend Ben's place. Melanie and Elle made delightful faces.
Melanie's friend Casey came to boulder. we went to gold hill and made fire. we hiked around on the flatirons. these were things that were good.
^^my mind during march^^
march is not a month that has lots of blog posts.
march is also not the most productive month of work.
but march is twelve hours and nineteen minutes from being over (even less time by the time i get this posted), and that's alright with me.
i took a trip to nakaale to visit Bob and Martha Wright, some folks doing really cool work with construction and water well-drilling and linguistics, and included a side trip to mbale to get a visa extension. the day of traveling from nakaale to mbale involved a weird spike-y fever, nearly passing out in a coffee shop about five minutes after feeling basically alright, a malaria test (negative), and then 16 hours of sleep. during the entirety of this time, the contents of my shampoo bottle were coating everything in my backpack, including my motherboard. rip, computer. although i have a pretty great extended warranty for it that will bring it back up to fine condition at no cost to me as soon as i get home--thanks lenovo, and particularly thanks parents and brother for getting said warranty for me. so my trip to mbale eventually included a side trip to jinja, where johnny and jen long took great care of me while i bought a new computer (which has performed admirably).
i planned to leave jinja late on a wednesday afternoon and be in karenga within 24 hours. obstacle 1: homeland bus line's kampala office phone was disconnected sometime recently, so i couldn't call to reserve tickets. i called my friend Jille, who makes this trip often, to ask if he had any suggestions. he got in touch with his friend Steph, who bought my ticket for me on tuesday, ensuring that i had a seat (not only a seat, but probably the best seat on the bus--thanks Jille and Steph!). the only complication was that i would have to meet up with her somewhere in kampala to get the ticket. this was no problem--i caught a mid-afternoon bus to kampala (buses between jinja and kampala are running pretty much constantly), got off just before town, and took a motorcycle taxi to our meeting place, where i paid her back for and received the ticket. i got on the bus at just after 9pm and arrived in kitgum at around 6am. by 815am every corner of the bus had been emptied and there was no sign of my backpack. it turns out that the backpack had been left in kampala, but it did arrive the next morning. so i spent the day mostly asleep in kitgum. it's hot there and apparently i was at least moderately tired. i arrived back in karenga early on friday afternoon.
since then i've done a little bit of work, but it was a fairly slow week. on tuesday i drove to puda village and brought Komol to karenga for a few days. this took place immediately after the most intense 48 hour stretch of rain that we've had since i got here nearly three months ago. suffice it to say that by the time i arrived back in karenga, i was quite muddy from horizontal motorcycle experiences. i had Komol get off and walk through the worst parts, because likelihood of injury in motorbike crashes was not listed among the risks of the project in my irb protocol. nobody was injured (i've learned lately that it's rather easy to lay a motorcycle over on a dirt road at low speed without noteworthy injury, although this is not a lesson that i set out or desired to learn). my right leg has lots of yellow bruisy spots though. it's a champ.
having Komol here wasn't horribly successful. i got some video and audio recordings of marginally interesting interactions between him and the other semi-speaker who lives here in town, but i found that they really don't interact very much when i'm there observing. their attention is directed at me at all times, they rarely address each other, and discourse mainly consisted of Komol saying things and then Ilukol (who has a much more limited grasp of the language) repeating them. i might try to get them together one more time when i have had time to put together a rather coherent program of conversation for them, but i think that very little of the data that i collected was significantly different from or more informative than anything that i already have.
i'm finding that i really need to micromanage the data-collecting process. after i had collected fifteen or twenty minutes of text (which took me perhaps a day when i was here two years ago--although significantly longer to analyze that much text), it was no good to offer a topic or prompt and to request commentary on it, or to ask for a story on a given topic. no matter what prompts i offer, quickly the stories make use of the same vocabulary and the same grammatical structures, all of which comes from a rather constrained set. he has difficulty pushing himself to use more nuanced or specialized or infrequent words when he has freedom to produce whatever he likes within a given topic, but responds more comfortably to direct prompts--asking for translations of karamojong words, for instance. philosophically, i don't like that very much. but i've found that working in such a situation--with an essentially extinct language--philosophy takes a backseat to pragmatic considerations. so i've been consulting with a couple of lengthy wordlists that were written for African languages, and focusing mostly on a 1600 item list in which the words are grouped on a semantic basis--body parts together, kinship terms together, etc. in order to maintain a modicum of non-directly elicited data, i have komol create a sentence including each word that i elicit. when he has a hard time doing this (it's really a rather difficult skill), i ask him a question that is likely to include the word in question in the answer.
a true reference grammar of nyang'i is out of the question. perhaps one could have been produced 20 or 30 years ago--maybe the oldest speakers could have remembered enough grammar for a good go at it even 10 years ago--but there's simply not enough existent now for such a work. however, the nyang'i lexicon provides an important data source for the expansion of our fledgling linguistic account of the (pre)history of the kuliak/robic language family and, at a broader level, the (pre)history of the entire region. some particularly meaningful data for such an endeavor will come in the form of place names and specialized agricultural vocabulary--the names of mountains and rivers and valleys and funny-looking rocks, the names of various life-stages of plants, the names of foods that people used to eat during times of famine, and things of that sort. so that will be information that i will work particularly hard to get in my remaining two months here, in addition to the broader knowledge provided by the 1600 item wordlist.
my life has been largely tied up in logistical concerns for three and a half weeks. i'm just now getting back into a routine of work and recovery, and that routine will be very important for making this trip a success. it's easier to deal with ideas when i'm in that routine, as my mind isn't concerned with mere pragmatics of getting me and things from this place to that place, or of having a functioning computer for the remainder of my trip. at the very least i wrote a lengthy email containing some basic observations about local epistemology last night. that's the sort of thing that happens when a german buddhist, two dutch atheists, an american christian, and a ugandan christian talk about metaphysics around a fire. things get weird. things get weird.
i don't have photoshop, but i have started taking all of my photos in RAW+JPG mode, so i still have access to things. so here are some photos of kids by a muddy puddle, Jille finishing a really awesome loop around the summit of kamukoi (a local mountain, name katibong in origin, currently untranslated. the mountain in the background is lowakuj (or loakuj), which basically means "the God place", and which gets translated as "God made it this way", or sometimes "God's corral") which loop i proceeded to run two days later (making me tired), and kamukoi at night with a tree in front of it. hooray. oh, and also i've been blowing up instagram lately, so check that out--even if you don't have an instagram, you can see the photos online at instagram.com/samuel_beer .
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.
working simultaneously in three languages (English, Karamojong, and Nyang'i) can be frustrating. It was particularly so yesterday. sometimes it feels virtually impossible to communicate exactly what i'm asking about--am i trying to figure out the basic meaning of a given word? or how the meaning of the word is relevant to the broader context of the story? or what the role of a whole clause is in the story? i felt like i was spinning my wheels for a lot of the day yesterday. i didn't come out of the meeting with any sort of feeling of discovery. i had put in my time for the day, done what i could, and it was time to clock out.
after paying my consultant and my Kjong translator, i walked out to my bike. my translator followed along--"could you give me a lift? just to the junction--not the one at Pire, but just a bit bit to that side."
i was eager to get going, but i figured that if i was going to exert social energy and time, it might as well be on something that would benefit somebody i'm working with rather than on disappointing them, so i agreed. a mile and a half or two miles outside of Lobalangit trading center, my bike sputtered and died.
i had checked the gas level before i left--i had apparently just misjudged. so my bike and i sat in the shade of a tree (kukuzu had!) while Simon ran back to Lobalangit to get enough gas to get me back to Karenga, where i have plenty stored up.
i was frustrated by a day of work that had felt not particularly profitable, by some miscommunications, and by having had a plan that involved eating lunch at a semi-normal time fall through. but i had a few hours to kill, so i got my camera out and shot everything in sight. bicyclists riding by. lizards on trees. goats in the road. kids walking away. local huts. a few local villagers even excitedly came out to the road to be photographed (i'll mostly save them for humansofkaramoja.tumblr.com, though).
Lobalangit had sold out of petrol the day before, so Simon sent a motorcyclist to Karenga (over 10 miles away) to buy gas there, and bring it back to me. suffice it to say that that ended up being rather expensive gas for me (but it was the only real option, so it's not like Simon did anything wrong or anything). the place i ended up taking Simon ended up being forty minutes out of my way.
finally, at a little after 4:30, i was back on familiar road. i came around a bend to the top of one of the two extremely steep hills on the eastern slope of the Nyangea Mountains. an NGO truck was flying around the curve at the bottom of the hill, about to start up, so i nosed my bike off to the left side of the road. the truck passed, and i tried to ease the bike, still in neutral, back to the middle of the road to begin the rather exhilarating descent. it was in a little bit of a rut. the front tire bit at the wall of the rut, slid back, bit again, and then the weight shifted and i was lying in the dirt with my bike on top of me.
it felt microcosmic. clearly i was stuck in a rut.
i wiggled out from under the bike, stood it up, and started walking it down the hill, one hand firmly on the brake, in search of a better spot to pull it out of the rut. at every effort, it threatened to go over again. i ended up walking it down the middle of the rut for the entire length of the hill.
sometimes there's just a rut. usually i can force my way out of it, but sometimes, there's just no choice but to ride out the rut until the bottom of the hill. maybe my work has been in a bit of a rut in the past week or so, but i made reservations at a hotel in Gulu this weekend. i'm gonna eat Ethiopian food and Indian food and drink fancy coffee. so whether or not i actually make it out of the rut in the next two days of work, the bottom of this hill is in sight and it looks nice.
My motorbike arrived last Wednesday. On Thursday i taught myself to ride it, and on Friday i started going to Komol's village, 12ish miles away on rough dirt roads with steep hills and gaping potholes. Perhaps not surprisingly, i love the commute. here's a shot of my motorbike in shade with a brightly lit background--the perfect setting for you to be unable to see detail in the bike or the background at its best.
My life mostly consists of eating basically the same things every day (which is fine since they're decent things to eat), responding to "MZUNGU BYE BYE!" shouted at my by children, driving to and from Puda village just outside of Lobalangit to sit in a dark hut with an old man named Komol and a young man named Simon Billa who does a fine job of translating between English and Kjong for me (perhaps his most noteworthy asset is that he gets a notebook and pen out also, in order to provide a way to feed his own interest in Nyang'i), going for jogs because that is good for your body and mind (and mine too), looking for/at things that are awesome and taking photos of them, and reading allll of the books.
Here are some children staring into the work-hut. And here is Komol looking pensive in said hut.
i went for a long walk with my camera on Saturday. There were some big fires just southwest of town that i ended up walking towards. Many of the fires seem to have been set intentionally--children ran around catching rats that were fleeing from the blaze, and then made small fires wherever they happened to be to roast and eat the rats. Here's a small collection from that excursion:
i stopped on my drive home today to take a few shots of smoke from a fire in the valley next to the road. While i was there, the lorry that i have occasionally ridden to and from Kitgum passed, complete with the man from my first Humans of Karamoja photo. It's been a while since i posted a pan, so i thought i'd take a shot of it as it passed.
