Literacy And Livelihoods For 445 Women In Nepal

I'm coming out of hiatus to blog about something that involves the Language Development Centre in Kathmandu. As some of you know, I visited the centre last year to find out more about their work and to also get ideas about developing minority language education / literacy programmes in Nepal and NE India. Lauren and I are also hoping to work with them in the near future to assist in running workshops to develop literacy materials for a minority language spoken in Nepal.

They have had great success with the adult literacy programmes and multilingual education in schools. (For those of you who think that children should just learn in the majority language of the country / English, imagine if you only spoke English at home and had to go a school where Mandarin was the language of instruction for everything, and you didn't have much exposure to Mandarin outside school.) Through such education programmes, they've also helped to liberate girls who would've otherwise been sold into slavery, taught mothers what to do when their babies get sick and have diarrhoea and given people the necessary literacy skills to do tasks that most of us take for granted.

The following is an email from a friend who's doing work for the centre:

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Dear Aussie linguist friends,


I want to let you know about a fundraising initiative that Language Development Center Nepal is doing. I hope you'll take a look, since this can make a big difference for helping LDC become self-sufficient without SIL or other religious support. And let your friends who are interested in supporting language diversity know - often it's hard to know what to do to support endangered languages, other than doing linguistic work yourself, but this is one such way.


Language Development Center Nepal, is working to get a permanent spot on Global Giving, a website where people (like you!) can donate to support LDC's work in literacy and improved livelihoods: http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/literacy-and-livelihoods-for-445-women-in-nepal/


We have been selected by the GlobalGiving Foundation to participate in its Open Challenge, a fundraising opportunity for nonprofit organizations working around the world. In order to succeed in GlobalGiving’s Open Challenge, LDC must raise $4,000 from 50 donors by April 30th. If we meet this threshold, we will be given a permanent spot on GlobalGiving’s website, where we have the potential to benefit from corporate relationships, exposure to a new donor network, and access to dozens of online fundraising tools. In addition, we could earn as much as $3,000 in financial prizes for raising the most money.


Not only will I personally be thrilled if we raise money and get a permanent spot on GlobalGiving, it will make a big difference in the lives of people who really could use some help - but in a way that respects their dignity and allows them to create lasting change in their own lives. I know money is tight, but since we need to get donations from at least 50 individuals to get a permanent spot on the website, just $10 makes a big difference. Please take a moment to check it out at: http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/literacy-and-livelihoods-for-445-women-in-nepal/.


Also, we need your help spreading the word. Please share this with your friends and family, including through facebook - there's a prize from Global Giving for the project that gets the most facebook shares.


Thanks for thinking about this! I know everyone wants your money, but I will personally vouch for this being an awesome organization doing great work!


Best,


Miranda

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So please visit the site.
Share it on Facebook.
Tweet about it.
And donate what you can.

Closing this chapter

I've made it back to Melbourne, in more or less one piece. Got back on Tuesday and have spent the past few days catching up with friends and sorting out the apartment. To be honest, I'm already looking forward to going back to India. But there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done in the meantime.

Friends have been asking me what I've been doing over in Nepal and India. Though I'd love to condense it all into a 30 second speech that I can repeat over and over again, it's just not going to happen. I tell them I'm looking at minority language education (MLE), especially teaching kids to read and write in their home language, not a foreign language. I also look at language documentation projects for minority / endangered languages, including recording traditional songs and stories, as well as dictionary making.

The push for MLE is particularly strong now, given that more and more parents are sending their kids to schools where a dominant language like English (or Nepali in Nepal) is the main / only medium of instruction. Most people think it would be better to do this, so that the kids will have better English and thus be able to get a better job, and it does sound good in theory. The reality is that children who go to such schools with very little exposure to the dominant language like English at home find school frustrating and quite traumatic. Imagine being dumped in a foreign environment for a few hours a day (this is not an immersion programme) and forced to learn everything from how to read and write to how to count in a foreign language. Children either slog it out and memorise things without understanding them (so there's little cognitive development) or worse, just drop out of school altogether.

Research has shown in places like the Philippines that students who go to schools which implement MLE for the first few years of a child's education and slowly transition to English as the medium of instruction (after introducing it as a subject) actually end up doing better in both their home language and in English. Of course the success of such programmes depends on other factors, including the teachers and the actual curriculum, but it's not hard to imagine the opposite, where kids get frustrated at school when they can't understand much of what's happening.

This brings me back to a point that my friend Linda brought up while we were in Tezpur for the NEILS conference. It was about how sometimes linguists appear to be telling people to preserve their own language, even if the speakers don't see any economic advantage. And I agree, I don't see why linguists should have a say in it. I know people who regret the loss / decline of their language a generation or two later - I belong to one such group, but I'm actually not that sentimental about language loss. Sure, we're losing 'windows' into different worlds, but you can't tell someone to keep speaking a language they don't see value in just so they can keep the language alive for the sake of keeping it alive. I suspect, the fear is the loss of linguistic data which is the driving force behind many a linguist (including one I met up with in Singapore earlier this week who completely disgusted me with the way he treated his language consultant).

While I am not for telling speakers what to speak, I do believe that if there is evidence to show that teaching kids in their home language actually helps significantly with their schooling, I am all for presenting the evidence and advocating to schools and parents that this is what they should be doing.

Now this sounds a lot less impressive than it really is, considering that I'm not trained in producing educational materials for primary school children. But I do know people who work with communities to develop minority language materials for schools in NE India and will be looking at the opportunities to collaborate with them and run workshops in Nagaland to produce said materials.

There's a lot more that needs to be said about this, but I'll be revisiting this stuff later this year. For the time being I'd like to thank everyone who's been keeping up with my updates. The blog will return from hiatus sometime in late 2011.

As a final note, a linguistics professor once said that she had been asked whether she spoke to the language she worked on. She didn't, so the next question was how she could study something she didn't speak. Her response was that a physicist can study the motion of a ball - its speed and trajectory, but it doesn't mean the physicist can play basketball.

That was her metaphor. I'd like to extend that by saying that yes, physicists don't necessarily play basketball. But physicists would never tell basketball players how to play ball, so why do linguists tell speakers what to do with their language? In basketball we have coaches who understand the physics (they don't dedicate their whole lives to observe how particles move) and also have experience with the game. Similarly, we need people like that to bridge the gap between theoretical linguistics and actual language development programmes.

NEILS 6 - Last Day

I've been asked to write this year's conference report for the Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area (LTBA) journal, so I probably do want to make some more notes while the impressions are still fresh in my mind. I don't think the Vice-Chancellor's opening speech I mentioned in my last post will make it into the report.

The past three days have been really inspiring. Sure, the quality of the papers hasn't always been the most desirable, but I got to meet a number of native speakers working on their own languages, as well as people who are doing really exciting things in minority language education (MLE). People who are interested in linguistic theory to various degrees, but who certainly haven't forgotten that people are the ones who use language.



It's heartening to see so many local students in attendance, even if most of them are doing courses in EFL training and the only reason many of them come up to talk to you is to ask to take a photo with you. (They just want photos with the foreign visitors.) I even had a few people take photos 'with me' without even asking.



Of course, there are advantages to being one of the 'foreign scholars' (and therefore more 'senior'). This morning I was sitting at a talk and suddenly choked on my saliva, resulting in a extended bout of coughing. Within minutes, one of the volunteers had come up to me with a bottle of water!

I really shouldn't get used to such service.

With any luck, I'll be at NEILS 7 next year with a whole lot of exciting work to present.

NEILS 6 - Day One

Today was the first day of the 6th annual North East Indian Linguistics Society (NEILS) conference taking place this year at Tezpur University just out of the town of Tezpur, Assam. It's a great place for people for linguists and language workers and teachers working in the region to come and meet.

Now, the last time I came for NEILS it was held in Shillong, Meghalaya. It was a bit of a last minute trip and I'd only decided to attend at the last moment (I actually ended up spending half that conference at Cherrapunjee near the Bangladeshi border, hiking down to see the Khasi root bridges made by 'training' ficus trees to grow their roots across rivers. It was a trip I had planned to do anyway, but it just so happened that someone else from the conference was going there at the time.)

So today was my first time presenting at NEILS - I gave a talk on verb nominalisation in Sumi and how monosyllabic, disyllabic and sesquisyllabic verbs behave differently with regards to such nominalisation. I got some pretty good feedback. It's also always nice to present on the first day of a conference. It means you can relax for the rest of the conference and actually focus on what everyone else is talking about. In my case, it also meant having only one sleepless night.

It was quite an invigorating day for me, given that I got through the paper with no major hiccups. Outside the talks, I also had a few meetings with other participants regarding developing minority language educational materials. The sort of work being done is something I found truly inspiring. It just made want to head back to Nagaland and get a team together to do this sort of work now.

Of course there were a few really painful, though quite amusing moments. The first was when the vice-chancellor of the university, who knew nothing about linguistics, gave his ridiculously long welcome speech at the opening ceremony in the morning. All the while trying to sound like he knew what he was on about. He kept referring to 'the linguistics' and I couldn't tell if he meant 'linguistics' as a discipline or if he just got the wrong word for 'linguists'. For some reason he assumed that the majority of participants came from Nagaland, which was odd because there's only one Naga participant here (unless you also count me, as an adopted Naga). Then he went on for a bit about Nagamese and how to his ears it's like Assamese but 'without the Naga influence' (or something like that). There were a few terrible anecdotes he shared, before he mentioned the fact that he had spent 4 years in Germany and learnt that there are German words like tschüss which aren't found in the dictionary because they're 'slang words used by the young people'! (see Wiktionary entry here)

It's moments like these when I'm glad I'm just a nobody at these conferences and not sitting on the stage having to contain myself in front of the whole crowd.

The second incident happened when a presenter was asked how old the language she was working on was.

Given that languages are constantly changing, the question of a language's age seems quite absurd. I was told later that the Indian government takes the 'age' of a language very seriously, as it is one of the criteria used to judge where a language should be considered a 'Modern Indian Language'. Scott DeLancey clarified that what they really mean is 'How long has the language been written / had a written script?' The belief is that a language is only 'born' when it is codified in some written form.

That means that many languages here are still in their infancy, while most are still unborn!

Language Development Centre

A few days ago I arranged to meet Reg Naylor, a British expatriate who's been doing development work in Nepal for years (courtesy of a contact of my friend Sara's). I caught a taxi out to the Summit Hotel in Patan where Reg kindly picked me up in a blue jeep and drove us to the Language Development Centre office, also in Patan.



As some of you may know, I'm looking at potential topics for a PhD in Linguistics. One of the main reasons I'm in Nepal is to look at ways of combining my linguistic training with development work. Of course, the aims of the two don't always overlap. Having finished the MA, I felt quite disillusioned that the work I had produced didn't seem to serve any other purpose apart from adding to a growing body of knowledge accessible only by a group of specialists. I don't think see anything wrong with people who aspire to do this sort of research, but I personally need to see my research produce something a little more concrete, and if I were to dive straight into a PhD in Linguistics, I think I would come out feeling the same lack of fulfillment as when I completed the Masters.

So I went to the LDC in the hopes of finding out more about the kind of projects they're involved in / have been involved in here in Nepal. It's been two days and I'm still processing some of what I've learnt. Reg had so many stories from projects he's been involved with, including dealing with the army, befriending Maoists, and most importantly empowering communities (and especially women) through mother tongue literacy programmes. He himself is not a linguist, and much of the work he's done does not necessarily require one to be a specialist. He is not sentimental about language death, believing that if speakers shift to another language they are generally able to create a new identity in that language. What he's interested in is development and improving lives. If developing a minority language helps in that process (and in most cases it does), then that's the strategy he'll take.


Reg, looking a little like Ian McKellan in this photo.

Over the next few days I'll try and post some of the stories he shared with me about how developing minority language literacy has improved the living standards of the communities the organisation has worked with.