The King of Gmz

Monday morning, after about an hour and a half of asking around, we finally landed in a classroom at the regional Teacher’s Training College here in Gilgel Beles. In filed the 40 Gmz students who had been called to this unique training, joined by a few interested professors at the college. After all, it isn’t very often that a foreigner shows up on campus to teach, especially not on a subject like the Gmz language.

A bit intimidated by the sea of unfamiliar faces, all with wide eyes fixed on me, I had managed to suffer the morning delay by staying close to my friends, the Gmz Bible translators I had invited to come along to help me. You see, these guys have survived 3+ years of working with me, and together we had “trial-and-error”-ed our way through many of the Gmz spelling rules that were the topic of this two-week training. Knowing the dynamic of multiple dialects of Gmz represented in the classroom, I knew that I would need to lean heavily on these friends to help relate whatever new words we encountered into the framework of what I already knew. For it is very difficult to spell in Gmz without knowing the complete meaning of a given word. Together we would give it our best, but not without much fear and trembling.

Our fears only increased when we began the meeting with introductions. Every attendee in turn was asked to stand up and give their name, place and position of work. I tried to listen carefully, but struggled to understand the various dialects being rattled off at natural speed. What I did understand, however, brought very little comfort to my fears. About 30 of the participants were classroom teachers, specifically teaching the subject of Gmz literacy. Others had another role which was seemingly difficult to define, “Hello, my name is…I am the Gmz language expert for the district of…” – “Hello, my name is…I am the leader of the Gmz language for the district of…” and “Hello my name is…I am the judge of the Gmz language for the district of…” Finally toward the end, a tall young man stood up and said with a completely straight face “Hello, my name is…I am the king of the Gmz language for the district of…” Trust me when I tell you, the use of the title “king” in this context was hilarious and the whole room burst into laughter. And so for the rest of the two-week workshop, this young man was known only by the name “King of the Gmz language.” No matter how they tried to express the role of expert, leader, judge, or king, these guys are the ones that the education bureau has officially appointed to be the final authority of developing the Gmz language in each of the 11 districts (or counties) where the Gmz people live. It turned out all 11 “experts” had been invited and all had now taken their seats in my classroom! What was I in for?

After all, here I was: a foreigner, an obvious outsider, a mere student of the language, now asked to be the teacher. My tongue still refuses to make some of the sounds correctly, my mouth cares nothing of speaking in correct tones, and my mind can’t keep up with producing sentence after sentence in spoken speech, what gives me the right to stand up in front of this group of real language experts? “Well, I’m not alone,” I comforted myself with the thought, “I have the three Gmz translators here with me in the front row.” But, really who are they? In a culture that looks at degrees and positions as much more important than experience, these three are the very bottom of the food chain assembled in this room. I can waive my linguistics degrees in their faces, but that will never make me Gmz, able to speak with authority into every issue in every dialect. I would need to approach my teaching primarily as a student. Likewise, the translators; they can waive their three years experience learning along with me, but that doesn’t make them anywhere equal to the officially appointed experts now sitting before us. They would need to approach their role with humility, but also with gentle confidence resting on the reason behind each rule.

One evening, Eric, our summer intern asked me a question that set my mind to thinking, he said, “How does it feel to be looked at as the expert in the Gmz language?” In some ways, he is right, I am seen as the expert. I’ve studied the language as an outsider, asking ridiculous questions that no insider would even think to ask, and thus coming to know the “stomach” (ie. inside) of the language better than most mother-tongue speakers. But, in other ways, I am very much still the student, needing the humility to let their mother-tongue gut feelings lead us to our conclusions unless I can give ample and convincing reasons to do otherwise.

And so we led the two-week spelling rule and writer’s workshop, full of discussion, arguments, and Q&A. I came away learning a ton about the various dialects of Gmz and even more convinced that our spelling rules are sound and applicable across the board. The teachers and district experts walked away with much deeper understanding of the stomach of their language and hopefully a clear way forward in writing it. The Gmz translators, caught somewhere in the middle of student and teacher, walked away with a unique perspective, having glimpsed just a bit of the magnitude of what we are a part of. Their Gmz language is being written and thus shaped in a way that it never has been. Workshops and trainings like this are moving the language along toward the standardization needed for the unity that they all want.

Though this is not our primary role here in Ethiopia, we definitely see helping and encouraging high quality literacy efforts among the Gmz as an essential counterpart to meeting our ultimate goal of providing Gmz people with access to God’s Word. These classroom teachers and bureau officials are important partners with us, for they are training the first generation of literates who will very soon read Gmz Scripture for all to hear.