Weekend Survey

Dirty faces after the long ride

We had a bit of an adventure this weekend. On Saturday four of us took off on our crappy Chinese motorcycles (I say that with the deepest affection) for a three day cross country language survey. The country director of our organization is paying us a quick visit and we decided to take advantage of his experience to get a better picture of the linguistic situation in this area. The plan was to do some basic linguistic survey to assess what languages are spoken by whom around here and how we can reach the most people when we begin our language projects in the near future. People here have formed communities around small isolated mountains and when asked what language they speak they tend to answer with the name of the mountain, the name of a larger language family or even the name of ancient pre-colonial kingdoms. All of that is really cool, but it makes it nearly impossible for someone from the outside to know how many languages we are really talking about, especially when many groups that seem very different claim to understand each other, or groups very close to each other claim not to. I won't bore you with the details, but from a social linguist's point of view, it is a complicated, exciting, intimidating, beautiful mess of a situation to try and understand.

Because it was only a three day excursion, the trip was a l0t of fun. (Any longer and it would have moved from "fun" to categorically unpleasant.) Bryan and I were on one bike while our director and a guide were on the other. We just took a change of clothes and mosquito nets but our little Senkes still groaned in protest (much like their riders) at every ditch and pothole. We rode through miles of tall yellow grass and scrubby forests and occasionally had to cross rivers of sand. When we reached a village we had come to survey we would meet with whomever the community leaders thought appropriate, usually on rope beds under a tree, and talk for a couple of hours.

It's hard for me to know what all to say about this little trip. There were so many things that were fascinating to me about the people and places we went but I am completely at a loss to describe or explain them. Nothing dramatic happened on our adventure and there were no life changing encounters with people. The whole things was just so much fun to me. I think I felt like it was one of the first times I was really getting into what we have come here to do. We have spent so much time just trying to establish ourselves so we can actually live here that it felt really good to be out doing a bit more of what we came for. It's hard to explain. If felt good though. (Even though my bum is still a little sore.)