Ever been filmed for 72h non-stop?

Tucker arrived back in Tangbaya with George, a Sierra Leonean
professional camera-man who works for the TV here in Freetown and has
shot for international productions multiple times, including one with
a female producer who brought along actor Michael Douglas. George is
very nice and well educated. He grew up in a Krio family and started
filming at 16. He's taken a few workshops to improve his technique,
most if not all delivered by international people , here in Sierra
Leone and in Uganda (he traveled far for that one!), but beyond that
training, he has a gift for filming! Tucker hired him to make up for
Bart's absence (he couldn't travel from the US because he broke 2
ribs), with the purpose to video document the Mani culture (and
language) and to video document the process of language documentation.

Some of the aspects George has made sure to film in order to document
the Mani culture are everyday activities, natural conversation in
Mani, specific traditional activities such as making palm oil,
producing salt ("salt-cooking") or drying fish. Everyday activities
ranged from pounding rice or peppers and cooking to carrying water or
other goods on someone's head, to
manually demolishing a traditional house to rebuild it with sand-made
bricks, to climbing up a palm tree to cut down bunches of palm nuts.
Natural speech by Mani speakers included conversation among
themselves or speaking to the camera. George also filmed me talking
with Mani speakers.

Yes, I really meant the title of this blogpost. I've been filmed for
72h almost non-stop because the second side of this short video
documentation project is to document the language documentation
itself, so I'm one of the main character on that end. My Mani name is
Mbom. George filmed Mbom here Mbom there. Mbom greeting villagers,
Mbom laughing with the women, Mbom teaching in school, Mbom
transcribing speech at the computer with a speaker, Mbom taking photos
of everything, Mbom and Tucker talking, Mbom serving food, Mbom
waiting around, Mbom crossing a river over a fallen tree trunk, Mbom
climbing into a boat, Mbom learning Mani as I walked along with our
host. It's actually not too bad :) You get used to it quickly and
learn to be sort of natural around it (lol), you learn to avoid
looking at the camera or away from it (lol+), and if you are me, you
make sure to wash your face a ton of times a day to make sure you
won't look sweaty in the film :)

Approaching the end

February 14 1012

It's Tuesday. I'm leaving Saturday. Tucker is leaving two weeks later
or sooner. The solar panels and wifi station are still elsewhere -the
inverter and the wifi station somewhere unknown, supposedly on the way
to Freetown from the US. Tucker has been gone almost two weeks now,
waiting for the equipment to arrive. So I've pretty much been on my
own in the field, working with the kids in school and with other
villagers at the house, transcribing songs and stories recorded in
2005-2009.

Transcribing a few minutes of a recording can take hours. Different
languages will pose more or less issues during transcription,
particularly in relation to the transcribers own mother tongue and
acquired languages, which shape the way he or she can hear the sounds
of other languages. Mani tonal system is quite simple and there are
hardly any tonal minimal pairs, so I stopped writing down tones a long
time ago, so I no longer worry about it. I find that, in general,
transcribing spoken utterances can be particularly hard when speakers
drop and assimilate sounds, and in Mani that often happens involving
nasal sounds, which the language has a lot of! Ranging from nasalized
vowels to n, m, ŋ, ny, there is variation in pronunciation among
speakers, although each speaker is usually quite consistent. For
example, one of the adults I've been working with quite consistently
says [nya] for the third person plural pronoun, while a younger
speaker collaborating always says [ŋa]. The hard part comes when
several sounds of a word like hun drop to become a single sound like
[ŋ] as a result of lenition, a very common language process that
happens when a word becomes very frequent. In the case of hun 'to
come', a full verb has become something like an auxiliary, in which
function it is highly used and speakers have generally stopped
pronouncing it fully.

(I need to go to school now)

School day 7

February 7 2012

We had a great class today. When I was approaching school I found all
the students playing outside. They all seemed to be active, either
playing soccer (the boys, who were playing two separate simultaneous
games) or something like the game we call "Matar" ('to kil') in
Catalan, whereby two teams separated by a line are supposed to throw a
ball to each of the members of the opposite team to kill them; when
someone is killed, they go behind the opposite team's field to catch
any missed balls and kill the opponents back. I thought it must be
physical education class or else some of the kids might decide to sit
and chat or play a greater variety of games. As I walked by most
children greeted me, as usual.

As I walked into the tiny school building I saw just a couple of very
young kids hanging out in the middle room, while teacher Ali with
another couple of small kids in the more advanced levels' premises.
After exchanging greetings, he called everybody inside and some kid
played a bell to contribute to the call. None of the other teachers
showed up today (only one other was present yesterday for half of the
morning) so Ali was alone with all 6 levels students, which, I
guessed, explained why the kids were playing instead of being taught
in class.

I noticed all my students but one were absent too, so I asked about
it. Ali answered, quite frustrated, that he didn't know where most of
them were and that he had sent some back to collect the camera
provided by our project, which they are using taking 24h shifts, and
which wasn't returned to school today. I started working with the one
student who was present. When Ali returned to our classroom I
explained I saw one in the village, fixing a fishing net. I asked him
whether he was going to school today and he said he couldn't because
he was going fishing. Ali was upset now, so I sympathized with him
saying that if the kids came home this evening, I wouldn't allow them
to play with the computers because they haven't been coming to school.
I think that often times kids don't attend school because they have to
do work for the family, but from this teachers' annoyance, I'm open to
believe that that might just be a bit of an excuse.

The little boy had done his homework (yay!) and we were soon done
reviewing it. I then asked him to write one more sentence on the
computer. He was smiling, all excited, since it was the first time he
had ever typed on a keyboard. I switched the virtual keyboard from EN
US to Mani and showed him how to type ɛ and ɔ. He managed perfectly
fine. Oh, I forgot to tell him about the space bar in the beginning,
so all the words in his sentence were stuck together: my bad. Then 3
more kids came. One had done his homework, two hadn't, so I made them
write their sentences right there. I went back and forth helping them
all with each their own thing and it worked perfectly well. As soon I
as was done reviewing their sentences, each kid joined the one with
the laptop.

When the last one finished fixing his sentence, I asked for everyone's
attention and integrated the Mani learning with some language concepts
introduced by the teacher at some earlier point in time, as I could
see it written on the blackboard: proper nouns vs common nouns. I
reviewed the concept with the students and asked them to provide me
examples of common nouns in Mani. I had them all come out to the
board, write a noun, correct it with the help of the others if the
initial spelling was incorrect, and finally spell it aloud for
everyone to repeat letter by letter and the full word pronunciation.
Once I'd been there for about an hour, I showed them how to save the
file so we can go back to it later. I thanked them for the very good
class we had today and let them know that they are very welcome to
come to my place to play with the computers this afternoon.

Music

February 6 2012

Hum... okay... I know that different types of music have different
moments, and I usually choose what to play depending on my current
mood, or the mood I want to be in –sometimes I play something in
particular just because I feel like listening to that without giving
it any thought. Sometimes the environment I want to play music in
restricts the type of music I can or want to play. For example, at
when I'm at work or studying, I play instrumental music. When I was
studying for exams on my first year of college, I played hard core and
punk to cover the noise of other people talking in the study rooms. I
played it loud and didn't pay attention to the lyrics, which wasn't
too hard to do since my spoken English comprehension at the time was
just alright.

Since I got to Tangbaya I played music in rare occasions, because
electricity here is precious. The first few nights, when I went to bed
earlier than most kids and youth and needed to cover their noise to
fall asleep, I listened to Ea! I have to admit it was a great surprise
to me that Ea!'s music fit the circumstances of the location I am at
:) I actually loved it. John Lennon didn't do the trick both because
the recordings I have are of poor quality and because the noise of the
kids went through. Air was good for night time. Leonard Cohen put me
to sleep right away. Belle and Sebastian awesome both in the morning
and later on to cover people chatter around me when I needed to. I was
very happy to bring along Mikel Laboa and Toumani diabate & friends.
Frank Zappa's music, though, seems to be totally out of place here,
and that's what made me think of writing this post.

[ADD LINKS]

Early morning

February 3 2012

6:30, almost time to get up. I fight against the coziness of my bed,
wrapped in the double bed-sized flat sheet I use both to sleep on and
to cover myself when it cools down in the early hours. A few minutes
later, after stretching and rubbing my eyes, I perceive the thin light
that wants to come through the imperfect closure of the door and its
frame. Outside, the mist is thicker than the previous days and large
drops of dew fall repeatedly here and there performing a perfect
break-of-the-day symphony. It's too cold to take a full shower with
cold water, so I aim to wash off the sleep limiting this early morning
hygienic routine to washing my face and upper body alone. Surely the
air temperature is no lower than 18-20º, but when you're used to
permanent over 30 humid Celsius, that is cold :) Before I start
splashing water I notice a huge spider web holding between an unused
kitchen thatch and the palm tree fronted-fence that gives our rooms
some privacy. I run back to the room to grab my camera and take a few
shots... and that will be the most unexpected event of the day :)

PS mmm, I've written this to the music of Belle and Sebastian and it
feels so good to take a break from the ongoing sounds by villagers! I
should stop the music now to save some power, for I'm running out of
petrol to charge my laptop and all the other equipment we have.

Our living situation in Tangbaya

January 31 2012

Our situation in Tangbaya is really very good. Our guests and
villagers are extremely nice. Tucker and I are always 'escorted' by
the Chairman of the community school and his brother Ali, one of the
teachers there. Used to always having someone around in West-Africa
(something I found a bit hard to get used to during the first project
back in 2004), their presence not only makes me feel welcomed and
accompanied, but it is also helpful because they speak Krio and a bit
of English. The women in the household we're staying in are all wives
of a men who is now away in Freetown. They are lovely in our
interaction and also help us with house chores, since we're busy
working with our computers and teaching kids in school.

The house looks quite occidental from the outside, as if made with
bricks, then plastered and painted. However, the bricks are made of
mud, the walls are short and end unevenly and there is no ceiling, but
a tin roof that covers the whole single-floor building and amplifies
any noise made within. Most of the floor inside is made of hard dirt,
not wood, porcelain or anything like that. The room I occupy has tiles
on less than one third of it's surface, the rest is still dirt. The
majority of the dirt part is covered by the bed, which is about queen
size and too short for me, while the couple feet of dirt I step on on
regular basis is partially covered by a thin cloth that in all
likelyhood used to be used knotted around a woman's waist as a long
skirt.

Outside, there are three smaller constructions sheltered by thatch
rather than tin. They are open on the sides, without walls, so the
roofs come far down to prevent water from coming in during the rainy
season. These kinds of constructions are typically kitchens and often
times there are as many as wives in a household. Right now during the
dry season, though, these particular women prefer to cook in a common
area outside, in the shade of the mango trees that surround the
compound.

Besides the school chairman and teacher, lots of people come see us
daily, just to greet us or because they are curious about these white
people and their computers. There are neighbors, there are chiefs,
there are brothers and nephews and wives or children of X and Y. Today
several people came to greet us and let us know they're leaving town
for a few days, one of them M'bom, my homonym (M'bom is the Mani name
I was given in Moribaya in 2005).

Learning how to write in Mani

January 30 2012

Today was our first day teaching in school. By the time we left the
house, it was sunny and the breeze hadn't picked up. I felt tired just
after taking a few steps outside the shady area where our work table
is located. When we got to the tiny building used for schooling, the
kids where singing the national anthem, standing packed in each of the
three small rooms. There the teacher's sister (the teacher traveled
to Freetown on Thursday, assuring she'd be coming back on Saturday).
Then we saw Ali and he asked the students to re-arrange a bit so we
could sit too.

We worked with the 6th grade students, the most advanced of the
school, since they would be the only ones likely to know how to read
and write a bit already. It turns out they hardly understand English,
so Tucker and I mostly spoke in English and the Chairman and the
teacher repeated in Mani afterwards. While my Mani is good enough to
hold an informal conversation, I find it very hard to teach those kids
by speaking in Mani, both because Mani doesn't have the linguistics
terms I want to use and because of my limited practice of embedding
relatives in commands.

We went through the whole Mani alphabet and practiced spelling. We
used the Mani books published as a result of the first Mani
Documentation Project, which was both helpful for our teaching purpose
and useful to obtain some feedback on the adequacy of the examples
given in the book.

At the end of the session I showed them a small digital camera that
one of them would be responsible for for 24h. The person in charge of
it would rotate every day and they could use it as they wished. I only
showed them how to take photos, view them and delete them. They would
eventually figure out how to take videos and maybe change settings or
edit recordings.