"Learning Gmz.One Small Furry Animal at a Time"

Although it has made for long tiring days, this past week, Travis has enjoyed being a part of a literacy workshop involving the Gmz, Shenasha and Berta languages. The workshop is one in which our Canadian colleague (pictured above) is working with the mother tongue teachers of these three languages to produce a mother tongue literacy primer for those who already have some experience reading English. In developing this primer, she needs a lot of data from these languages and a lot of time checking over the drafts with them. Because of our interest in Gmz, and the fact that Gmz people are usually the ones needing the most help in workshops like this, we were asked if we wanted to come and help with the Gmz guys. It’s a good thing too, the Shenasha and Bertha projects were able to send three teachers each whereas only one Gmz man was able to come to Addis for this conference (Komander, pictured above). So armed with a Gmz word list and the old primer, I was able to help find words that demonstrated the letters needed for the primer. After being in language school every morning, I often wanted to go home and rest in the afternoons, but each day I was able to pull up a chair next to Komander (the Gmz teacher), I really enjoyed the work. And each day served as a reminder of the importance of learning Amharic. You see, each of these teachers supposedly knows English since they are college graduates and all schooling after 5^th grade is in English. However, just because they can get through an English school doesn’t mean that they are proficient or confident in English. So 90% of the time, Komander and the other teachers would speak to me in Amharic and I was often surprised by the success they had in getting their point across to me. It does serve as a motivation to keep learning Amharic, realizing that 90% of my future work could be dependent on a language I knew nothing about 7 months ago!

 

People ask me if I am picking up any Gmz language along the way, to which I reply, “yea, “uhnga” is the word for chipmunk.” There were several of these small furry animals that Komander wanted to use in the primer but it was always fun to try to make sure we knew what kind of animal it was. Does it climb trees? Does it have a tail? What kind? What does it eat? Finally, we used a picture database to discover chipmunk if the best rendering for “uhnga.” Now, are there any chipmunks mentioned in Scripture? If so, we’re well on our way to translating the Bible!